As one of the world’s largest indie film festivals gets underway in Park City, Utah, this week, Colorado filmmakers are feeling the momentum of the state’s growing prestige in the international documentary scene.
Part industry feeding frenzy, part cultural crystal-ball, the 32nd annual Sundance Film Festival has become arguably the best place in the world to debut a documentary, gathering press and distribution deals along the way.
And while there is a relatively modest amount of documentaries produced or filmed in Colorado screening at Sundance this year — amid the more than 1,700 submissions (about half from America, and half international) — the state’s savvy, scrappy filmmakers, based in large part out of Boulder, are learning how to work the system.
“There was a period when (2012’s) ‘Chasing Ice’ first came out when I was going to festivals and jokingly asking people if they were based in New York, L.A. or Boulder,” said Exposure Labs founder Jeff Orlowski, whose new film “Chasing Coral” is one of the documentaries in competition at Sundance. “Our film scene is on that same par. We’ve got really great talent and exciting films coming out of Denver and Boulder.”
Orlowski’s film, which looks at the devastating effects of climate change on the world’s coral reefs, is an ambitious work that hopes to provide irrefutable evidence of humanity’s impact on its environment. Filmed in 30 different countries, with scuba diver-submitted footage from nearly two dozen more, it is essentially a film about filmmaking, said Caroline Libresco, a senior programmer at Sundance.
“All the Colorado documentaries are linked creatively, in a sense, in that they’re looking at how the moving image tells us something about our world,” Libresco said. ” ’78/52′ is a study of the famous, powerful scene from ‘Psycho’ by Alfred Hitchock that breaks down how the symbolic language was telling us something about America on the brink of change in 1959. ‘Chasing Coral,’ and to some extent ‘Chasing Ice’ before it, shows Jeff Orlowski’s approach in making the camera a character in providing evidence of climate change. And in ‘Casting JonBenét,’ we see the role that subjectivity plays in our interpretation of public events.”
“Casting JonBenét,” produced by Colorado-based Mitch Dickman and Listen Productions, looks at the still-unsolved death of 6-year-old beauty queen JonBenét Ramsey. And like the Alexandre O. Philippe-directed “78/52,” it was incentivized by the Colorado Film Office through its 20 percent rebate program, with “Casting JonBenét” receiving $50,000 and “78/52” receiving $41,200. (“Chasing Coral” and “Casting JonBenét” also received funding from the Sundance Institute).
Having these documentaries in Sundance is “a big deal,” as Colorado film commissioner Donald Zuckerman told the state’s Economic Development Commission in December. Last year, the festival was attended by more than 46,000 people and generated $143.3 million in economic impact for Utah, according to Sundance. Having a strong Colorado showing at this year’s installment, which runs Jan. 19-29, proves the increasing power of regional players.
“It really just reinforces the fact that you don’t have to live on one of the coasts to put out great documentary films,” said Patrick Hackett, president of the Colorado Film and Video Association, which represents the state’s vendors, production crews and rental houses.
Hackett cited recent examples such as the work of Oscar-winning director Daniel Junge (“Being Evel”); the premiere and sale of “Rolling Papers” at South by Southwest in 2015 (full disclosure: the movie covers The Denver Post’s Cannabist website and includes a short appearance by this reporter); the Oscar-nominated documentary “The Cove” by Boulder’s Louie Psihoyos, and others.
“It’s a smaller, tight-knit group, but it’s not exclusive,” Hackett said. “All these people could have packed up and left for L.A. or New York City a long time ago, but they know that they don’t need to.”
Another Boulder-based Sundance alum, Danielle Renfrew Behrens of Superlative Films (“Queen of Versailles,” “Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck”), will also debut a film she produced called “Columbus” next week as part of Sundance’s Next programming. The drama was directed by Korean-American director Kobonada and stars John Cho (“Star Trek” and the “Harold and Kumar” films).
Netflix has already purchased the worldwide rights to “Casting JonBenét” and plans to begin streaming this spring after its Sundance bow, according to Rolling Stone. The prospects for “Chasing Coral” and “78/52” are similarly bright, said Sundance’s Libresco.
“The stakes are pretty high and the pool is large,” said Libresco, who has been programming for Sundance for the last 16 years. “But I do sense that there must be a really strong creative community in the Boulder documentary scene right now.”
It helps that the Colorado Office of Film, Television & Media awarded more than $2 million in incentives in 2016 to 17 projects, which generated an estimated $17.6 million in economic activity and $1.2 million in state and local tax revenues, according to the Colorado Office of Economic Development & International Trade. Many of them were narrative features, such as the forthcoming Robert Redford/Jane Fonda film “Our Souls at Night” (also on Netflix), but the documentary scene continued to hold its own.
“The growth is there, and it’s only going to continue as we become more and more of a film-friendly state,” said “Chasing Coral” director Orlowski. “The more we get really thorough resources established and the more quality that there is, it’s just going to continue to help with all productions across the board. The talent pool has finally gotten to that tipping point where people are moving here to work with our producers, directors and editors.”
