Shall We dance 

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• Courtesy Photo
• Slamdance co-founder Peter Baxtersays streaming creates new ways for niche films to find an audience.

Virtual Realities
Slamdance looks beyond the pandemic to the advantages of streaming cinema for low-budget filmmakers.

BY SCOTT RENSHAW

Peter Baxter—co-founder and president of the Slamdance Film Festival—doesn't love the idea of an all-virtual film festival, either. Like Sundance, Slamdance held its 2021 festival entirely in a virtual space and, like Sundance, there were initial plans for an in-person Park City festival in 2022, which was then cancelled due to the omicron variant COVID spike.

Yet while Baxter acknowledges the sense of community generated by a live festival, it's also clear that he sees the developments necessitated by the pandemic as ones that low-budget independent filmmakers can benefit from.

"We're really, of course, disappointed that we can't be in Park City this January," Baxter says. "We were excited to be getting back together with our filmmakers. ... But while we can be disappointed about not doing that, we can be positive about the opportunities in front of us right now in a new landscape, which has to do with a 100-year-old business model, and I think the pandemic has just accelerated that change."

Over the course of its now-27-year history, Slamdance has existed largely in Sundance's shadow, with a mission born out of recognizing the kinds of films that Sundance couldn't serve, and a tradition of holding the in-person festival at the same time as Sundance to help connect filmmakers with industry folks who would already be in town. There was, however, the reality that micro-budget films rarely get the opportunity to break into the mainstream of theatrical exhibition. And that has meant re-thinking, and embracing, alternate distribution methods.

"We want to find the biggest audience possible for our filmmakers, and for their talents to be recognized," Baxter says. "We've retained the pragmatic viewpoint that yes, we'll have Slamdance films that will blow up, and that people will write about, but there are few like that. And what about the rest? How do you do more for the rest of your program to reach a wider audience?"

For Baxter, that notion of reaching a wider audience was in part inspired by the experience of the virtual 2021 Slamdance. He notes that more than 20,000 individual festival passes were sold last year—for only $10 to access the entire festival program—representing 75 countries. "We found new audience members for Slamdance films in all kinds of places in the world," he says, "and those people would not be normally traveling to Park City, so they were discovering our types of filmmakers and programming for the first time."

Creating the platform itself was, of course, a stressful experience. And the decision to move the Slamdance festival dates later and away from an overlap with Sundance was in part a unique opportunity to carve out a distinctive space, but also a practical matter of allowing the small festival team the necessary time to get the platform up and running. "It wasn't straightforward, but it was fun, and we had a good experience with it," Baxter says. "It allowed us to focus on something here at a time when it was very stressful, to immerse ourselves in something that occupied us. ... It was like getting chucked in at the deep end, and learning how to swim quickly."

The result of learning how to swim in the streaming world—in a way that broke even and allowed Slamdance to provide all its filmmakers with a small amount of compensation—has now inspired the creation of a year-round streaming platform hosted at slamdance.com. The notion of a year-round "film festival" showcasing low-budget indie filmmaking is part of what Baxter calls the "evolution of the film festival," one that allows greater accessibility for audiences and a wider audience for the filmmakers.

"We hope it really will contribute to re-evaluating the world of independent film," Baxter says. "To me, it's tended to be exclusive since I've been around, tended to limit itself in terms of accessibility. It can be expensive to go to film festivals, few of them get wide releases, and then how do you find them?"

Even in the world of mainstream Hollywood filmmaking, 2021 was a rough year, one that inspired complicated questions about the long-term future of the theatrical experience. Baxter has no interest in seeing that go away, but for decades now he has been part of a filmmaking world where the theatrical experience wasn't likely to be in the cards anyway. From a limited-time virtual festival, Slamdance has recognized the opportunity to bring more filmmaking voices out into the world.

"I want to see film on the big screen, I'm looking forward to that, and that's not going to change," Baxter says. "But I also want to see films that I can't see on the big screen, the kind of films we're passionate about. ... I hope there's a growing audience for following that kind of creativity. Art isn't about likes and analytics. It transcends all that."

Slamdance Film Festival
On demand Jan. 27 – Feb. 6
$10 full festival passes
slamdance.com

• Miramax Films
• Reservoir Dogs

The Class of '92
A look back at the festival year that made "Sundance" a brand name.

You could inspire a lively debate among film enthusiasts by asking when Sundance, the film festival, turned into Sundance, the brand. It could have been as early as 1989, when sex, lies and videotape emerged to become a minor hit and an Oscar nominee. Maybe it was 1994, the year of Clerks and Hoop Dreams. Maybe it was 1996, the year of the bidding wars for Shine and The Spitfire Grill. There's no clean delineation, no magic switch that was flipped to turn an insular mountain gathering into the place to find the Next Big Thing.

It's hard to deny, however, the impact of what became known as "The Class of '92." It wasn't necessarily about launching a bunch of superstars—really, only Quentin Tarantino (who debuted Reservoir Dogs at Sundance in 1992) might reasonably earn that distinction. Instead, it was more about a collective sense that different kinds of stories, and different kinds of storytellers, were going to get a chance to be seen and heard. And it all happened 30 years ago this month.

Reservoir Dogs was certainly the talk of the festival while it was going on, though it ended up winning none of the competition awards. Tarantino griped in subsequent years that it was because the jury thought that "Hollywood's knocking on your door, you don't need us." Yet there was still a connection that developed between QT and some of the festival's other alums, including Alexandre Rockwell (whose In the Soup won that year's Jury Prize) and Allison Anders (Gas Food Lodging). Those three, along with 1993 Sundance alum Robert Rodriguez, would join forces for the 1995 short-film compilation Four Rooms, cementing the sense that they were sort of a "Brat Pack" of American indie cinema.

That was also the year when a Sundance panel heralded the emergence of a "New Queer Cinema," represented in the festival lineup by Gregg Araki's The Living End, Tom Kalin's Swoon and Christopher Munch's The Hours and Times (the latter of which speculated on a gay romance between John Lennon and Beatles manager Brian Epstein). It marked the first time that queer filmmakers started taking control of their own stories, in ways that were sometimes outrageous, sometimes subtle, but never closeted.

Even the documentary lineup had its breakout creators. While Errol Morris had already made an impression a couple years earlier with The Thin Blue Line, his profile of Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time, became one of the festival's hottest titles. The 1992 slate also introduced Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky with Brother's Keeper; the filmmaking team would go on to follow a controversial murder trial for nearly 20 years in the three Paradise Lost films.

Every Sundance year presents a new opportunity for individual breakouts, whether in front of the camera or behind it. It takes a special year like 1992, however, for there to be a sense that entire paradigms had shifted. Perhaps more than any specific career the festival has launched, Sundance's 1992 edition launched the idea of what the festival could be in the larger film culture—when being a "Sundance movie" started to mean something that even people who'd never been to the festival understood.