“We are sad it’s the last Sundance in Park City,but we will see what Colorado is all about,” Judd Apatow said at Thursday’s opening night premiere of the documentary “Paralyzed by Hope: The Maria Bamford Story.”
the director vocalized the uneasy feeling that many festival-goers were experiencing as they headed up the mountain one last time before Sundance departs for Boulder in 2027.The festival has been under financial pressure as COVID forced its organizers to cancel two in-person editions — and as the indie film business it celebrates struggles to draw crowds. Colorado is offering tax breaks and financial incentives, but it’s hard to leave the place that filmmakers have called home for more then 40 years.
Yet Sundance rolled out the red carpet for filmmakers like Apatow and stars including Chris Pine, Jenny Slate and Riz Ahmed. It was a packed first day of programming with Pine and Slate hitting the Eccles, the festival’s largest venue, for the afternoon premiere of “Carousel,” a lyrical drama about a divorced doctor who reconnects with his high school girlfriend after she returns to their hometown. Ahmed was on hand for his new Amazon series “Bait,” in which he plays an actor whose star rises when he auditions to play James Bond, while observational humorist John Wilson touched down in Sundance to debut his new documentary “The history of Concrete.”
Despite the challenges that have been roiling the industry, Pine insisted he’s optimistic about the future of arthouse films and feels strongly that independent cinema “is still alive and kicking.”
“People want to go see cinema. Whether or not it looks anything like 20 years ago or 30 years ago, it doesn’t really matter,” he told Variety on the red carpet prior to the “Carousel” premiere. “We may have some diminishment in terms of cinema being the center of the zeitgeist, but my god, people still want to see it.”
One of the opening night’s most warmly received offerings, comedic drama “Ha-chan, Shake Your Booty!,” entered the festival with a relatively low profile. However, the story of a widow (Rinko Kikuchi) whose love of dancing helps her break out of a deep depression struck a chord with the evening crowd at the Eccles, who leapt to their feet as the credits rolled. The film’s director and co-writer Josef Kubota Wladyka said “Ha-chan” was intended as a tribute to his 80-year-old mother,who was in the audience as he basked in the applause.
“My mom has been through a lot of tribulations in her life,” Wladyka said. “She had to raise three boys on her own, and the one thing that she always fell back on to help her get through the hard times was dancing. So we wanted to create this
