Guest Post: The View on the Ground at Sundance by Kerri Yost

Winter's Bone

This year Sundance is telling us to “rebel”, re-start the revolution, to re-think what independent filmmaking is. Their animated bumpers before the films are persuasive propoganda and it’s embedded in all the panels and new director John Cooper’s conversations.  As female filmmakers, I say we take this advice.  Sundance is noted for highlighting filmmakers who are ignored in the mainstream media. For giving new directors a chance to break in with their smaller films that would be ignored in the larger Hollywood film industry.  For finding original voices.  Well, for the most part, that’s us.  I’m hear at Sundance mostly for programming for the Citizen Jane Film Festival, a film festival in Columbia, Missouri that celebrates films by female filmmakers.  And I am excited that some of the best work at Sundance this year comes from original female voices, with the biggest buzz circulating around Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone.

Granik is no stranger to Sundance.  She took the Dramatic Directing Award for her first feature-length film Down to the Bone back in 2004, and this year she is one of the few lucky filmmakers to have multiple distributors interested in her work.  Winter’s Bone is a unique coming of age story set in the Missouri Ozark mountains and told through the experiences of 17-year old Ree Dolly (in a breakout performance by Jennifer Lawrence).  While Ree’s meth-cooking father is running from the law, Ree is left to tend to her younger siblings and mentally ill mother.  We are soon swallowed into Ree’s world through her journey to find her missing father, who has put the family house up for bond after being arrested.  Based on the award-winning novel by Daniel Woodrell and shot completely on location in the Missouri Ozarks, this “country noir” has a sense of place rarely seen.   Granik immersed herself in the Ozarks, starting with writer Woodrell’s own neighborhood and befriending locals to develop locations, find many of her actors, get a sense of the local dialect, and find musicians that we see and hear throughout the film.  Her collaborative nature and attention to detail ultimately creates a reality that is both naturalistic and at times mythical.  Granik captures the close-knit sense of family kin and codes of law, as well as the devastation the meth epidemic has had on families in that region, much like the rest of rural America.  But what is most obvious from both Down to the Bone and Winter’s Bone is Granik’s ability to bring out the best in actors.  Much like Down to the Bone brought Vera Farmiga attention and awards, I suspect Winter’s Bone will garner much deserved attention for young Jennifer Lawrence and John Hawkes, who plays Ree’s uncle who goes from sinister to sympathetic with very few words.  Hopefully the buzz and attention for Winter’s Bone will last beyond the festival circuit.

Perhaps no film follows the Sundance slogan of “renewed rebellion” more than Katie Aselton’s directing debut The Freebie.  Festival regulars know Aselton as actress in many a mumblecore film and the wife of one of the pioneers of the mumblecore movement, Mark Duplass (The Puffy Chair).  Like many other actresses, Aselton wasn’t getting the roles she wanted, so she took the advice from her husband and decided to write and direct her own film to solve this problem.   And along with writing, directing, and co-producing, Aselton is also in nearly every frame of the film.  

The Freebie

The Freebie is playing in Sundance’s NEXT program, a new section that highlights very low budget films.  But Aselton’s film is proof that budget isn’t an indicator of a film’s merit.  Her film is also proof that many of these low-budget mumble-core films are getting better and better.  The Freebie is a film about exactly what the title suggests — a one night stand — but it surprises you with its candid intimacy.  While most films about romance start with the couple meeting and end with the couple marrying, this one starts years into a marriage when things have changed and the extraordinary has become the ordinary.  Sex is replaced by crossword puzzles and passion is replaced by companionship.  What is their solution to this stall in their otherwise perfect relationship?  A no-strings-attached freebie.  Believing that their uniquely honest and trusting relationship can withstand the pitfalls of sex with a stranger, wife Annie and husband Darren (played by Dax Shepard) soon realize they can never put the genie back into the bottle.  At first Annie and Darren seem like every 30-something hipster couple from their friends to their house to the montage of their typical weekend habits, but Aselton takes this preconception and gets under the surface through the endless intimate conversations she has with her husband.  Strangely, they don’t seem to have jobs and there is virtually no scene that ventures from the domestic, but then again, does it matter?  We can almost guess their jobs, how they met, the rest of it.  But Aselton does keep us guessing in other ways, wisely leaving the ending open for interpretation.   For women, it is refreshing to see marriage, sex, and intimacy seen from a female’s point of view.  And this viewpoint helps chip away at the stereotypes we usually see in films about relationships.  For instance, it’s perhaps surprising to see what Annie is looking for in a one night stand (raw emotionless sex) ) vs. her husband (a young girl who has a crush on him.)  Based on some conversations I’ve had with my 30-40 something friends who have been in long term relationships, I don’t think that will be surprising to any women.  Aselton has created the kind of film that keeps people talking long after it is over.

What I find exciting about both Debra Granik and Katie Aselton’s work is that in many ways they are rebelling against the current environment for female filmmakers.  Granik is inspiring because she managed to come to Sundance and achieve the same level of success with another film only 6 years after she won her directing award here.  For some reason, the big breakout female directors (in narrative) don’t seem to return for quite sometime, typically a decade, or not at all.  But not Granik.  I find this particularly inspiring for other female filmmakers.  And Aselton is inspiring because rather than wait for her chance in the industry, she created it.  She’s a reminder that the tools are all there.  So, rather than lament the lack of female filmmakers in the industry, or the lack of support, let’s rebel and do it ourselves.

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Kerri Yost is a filmmakers and Chair of the Department of Digitial Film and Media at Stephens College in Columbia, MO.  She is the founder and director of the Citizen Jane Film Festival.  

Tagged as: Debra Granik, Jennifer Lawrence, Katie Aselton, Sundance, Vera Farmiga