The Sundance Film Festival and The Road to Damascus

Published in

Literally Literary

7 min readJan 26, 2018

Sundance changes everything.

And I don’t just mean that in the sense that getting into Sundance can change an artist’s career, or that it can make a little movie into a big one like it did with Roger & Me and Reservoir Dogs.

I mean Sundance changes everything.

Park City transforms from a roadside ski lodge into a bustling 24/7 shopping mall drenched with corporate logos and complete with movie theaters, coffee shops, and night clubs.

Celebrities who were once as unapproachable as Kim Jong Un become regular people. I shook hands with Usher on a crowded staircase, used a urinal next to Simon Helberg from The Big Bang Theory, and saw Jack Black and Jonah Hill having a tickle fight.

Public transportation options once thought of as a nuisance become a privileged luxury. Catching the right bus at the right time can feel like divine intervention.

Also people’s standard for what constitutes a meal disappears entirely and they all hoard complementary snack items or shell out cash for shrink-wrapped sandwiches all to try and make it through just one more screening.

It seems almost an unspoken assumption that no one, not the staff, audience, artists, or even Old Man Redford himself, is going to get anywhere near a decent amount of sleep during the festival.

Perhaps that’s why there’s so much coffee everywhere.

But the most notable thing that Sundance changes, in my opinion, is people’s attitudes regarding the movies themselves.

There’s something about the experience of making the trek to Park City that creates a change in the audience.

It’s a pilgrimage.

Most of the attendees don’t live in Utah, so they have to carve out a section of time from their normal life and decide, in advance, to drop everything and come to Sundance.

Which immediately changes things.

It’s not as though they’re picking something on Netflix or going out to a movie with friends.

It’s enormously complicated.

Arrangements have to be made months in advance for flights, transportation, lodging, tickets, and a dozen other things.

All of which can easily cost many thousands of dollars.

And most people who come to Sundance are leaving behind very lavish living situations and coveted material possessions for which they have labored their whole lives.

They drive, fly, or otherwise traverse many hundreds of miles high up into the mountains of Utah, of all places, to reach a sleepy ski town that doesn’t even have a Wal-Mart.

Now obviously this is somewhat intentional on the part of Old Man Redford. He wants it to have this effect on people because it makes the whole experience special.

It’s separate.

Holy.

But I don’t think he quite got what he wanted.

Instead of taking the fat cats out of Hollywood and onto sacred ground reserved for only the most committed artists and audiences, the fat cats brought Hollywood with them.

You can see the thin veneer of tinsel town on the full make up faces of abnormally beautiful women walking down the deep snow street in high heels and faux fur coats.

The store fronts that used to be dominated by local shops and artist galleries are now dotted with hashtag start ups and name brand sponsors.

It’s like the old story about money changers in the temple, except Jesus isn’t here to drive them out.

Which is just as well I suppose.

I don’t think Jesus could handle Acura, Chase, Lyft, and Amazon.

Not all by himself anyway.

But the worst toxic by-product of Sundance is that it creates one of the most self congratulatory echo chambers of pretentious bullshit I’ve ever seen.

The audience is purged of causal movie fans looking for a good time, and replaced with liberal crusaders seeking a new weapon for their social justice wars.

The question and answer sessions are riddled with eye-rolling drivel about how important this movie is for this group or that issue.

It seems like everyone cares less about how well the stories are told than they do about which stories are being told.

In other words, it is the unstated objective of the programming committee, and the tacit will of the audience, that stories sympathetic to their political agenda be prioritized over high quality films that have no direct political motivation.

Which is, in every conceivable sense, detestable perversion.

But despite all of it’s strange transformations, ugly consequences, and imperfect motivations, I love it.

I love the Sundance Film Festival.

Movies are indispensably precious to me and Sundance is one of the few places in the world where there is nothing to do but watch movies, and talk about movies.

In three days, I saw the world premieres of two documentaries, five short films, four virtual reality shorts, and eight feature films.

I love the little things too.

I love the free socks, and water bottles, and chocolate.

I love planning our next move and trying to get a good spot on the wait list for movies we want to see.

I love going into theaters packed with rich famous people all trying to impress each other and taking out my box of chocolate Teddy Grahams, or Resse’s cups, or Spree chewy candies and eating like I’m at home.

No one else ever has chocolate Teddy Grahams, but no one else ever enjoys themselves as much as I do either.

I love it.

Last year I went with my friend Kelvin. We had no tickets, and no plans, but we saw five movies in three days and had so much fun we decided to come back every year for as long as we are able.

This year, Kelvin invited his friend Marika (Muh-rye-kuh) and they drove down from Portland together.

For reasons that are complicated and irrelevant, this meant that I ended up at the Salt Lake City Airport from midnight until 9am when they arrived to pick me up.

I slept a couple of uncomfortable hours on the floor by baggage carousel four. I kept waking up every so often because my legs were numb and my back ached.

After our first busy day at the festival, we drove back to our hotel in Salt Lake City and listened to an episode of Malcom Gladwell’s podcast Revisionist History called “The Road to Damascus.”

Gladwell told a story about a C.I.A. informant whose identity was betrayed by the C.I.A. and the New York Times and, as a result, was killed.

The informant had been a terrorist and had had a change of heart and come to the C.I.A. seeking redemption. He wanted to atone and be forgiven, and instead he was betrayed and killed.

Gladwell then told the story of Saul of Tarsus on The Road to Damascus. Saul had been on a journey to continue his crusade of persecution against Christians, when he saw the heavens opened and Jesus appeared to Saul in all his glory and Saul had a change of heart.

Saul of Tarsus was forgiven and redeemed and became The Apostle Paul.

That night, I wrote in my notebook that I was shocked to hear a secular podcast telling this Christian story, and I remarked that this story of redemption and forgiveness has been eroded from modern moral sentiment in American Society.

We don’t believe that people can change anymore and we quickly condemn individuals to the worst stereotypes of the groups to which they belong.

Cops are racists. Men are pigs. Terrorists are evil. Etc.

We reached our room at The Airport Inn Hotel and I showered for the first time in almost two days.

Marika had her own bed, Kelvin and I split a queen.

But at least I didn’t have to sleep on the floor.

The second to last film I saw, just before leaving the festival, was Burden.

Burden is the true story of Mike Burden, a leading member of the KKK in a South Carolina town who helped open the first KKK museum and gift shop.

But Mike met a woman and left the Klan to be with her and help raise her son, so the Klan leaders turned on him and got him fired and evicted.

A black pastor, whose uncle had been hanged by the Klan and who Mike himself once very nearly shot, took Mike and his new family in and gave them food, shelter, and helped Mike find a new job.

In return, Mike sold the pastor the deed to the KKK’s museum and gift shop, and the pastor closed it down.

Burden is an American story of redemption and forgiveness.

About a man who’d had a change of heart.

And a pastor who showed him the love of Christ.

The director said he’d been trying to make the movie for the last twenty years.

Said it felt like he’d come to the end of a long pilgrimage.

One of the actresses said it was divine intervention.

Another one said it was a miracle.

Like being born again.