Bruins celebrate long-standing Sundance involvement

During the Sundance Film Festival, when often more than one
party rocks Park City in the same night, UCLA held an afternoon
party that mixed festivity with modesty.

And while most festival parties require patience for waiting in
lines and proper visas to get in, there was no security officer or
ticket collector Wednesday afternoon at the UCLA party site,
Café Terigo, located on Park City’s ultra-cute and
historic Main Street.

During the two-hour reception, attendees savored a generous
share of Coppola wine and enjoyed warm pieces of
chicken-pesto-artichoke pizza and cold sliced salmon, accompanied
with veggies and other snacks.

When professor Robert Rosen, dean of the UCLA School of Theater,
Film, Television and Digital Media, stood on a chair inside the
café to address an eager audience, the list of UCLA faculty,
students and alumni featured in Sundance was long and impressive.
He remarked that although UCLA alumnus Francis Ford Coppola
(executive producer of Sundance entry “Legend of
Suriyothal”) could not extend his stay until the party, his
shipment of wine at least made his presence felt.

“The commitment of UCLA dating way back into the
’50s has been to be at the cutting edge of independent
filmmaking,” Rosen said in an interview afterwards.
“And the Sundance Film Festival has been at the cutting edge
of filmmaking. So there is a marriage made in heaven.”

Attending professors included Geoffrey Gilmore, a UCLA alumnus
and current faculty member in the producing program, and UCLA
production professor Gyula Gazdag, who has been the artistic
director of the Filmmaking Lab for six years at the Sundance
Institute.

Besides the professors, other alumni showed up. Alumnus Ed
Solomon’s directorial debut, “Levity,” edited by
the Oscar-winning alumnus Pietro Scalia, opened the festival
Thursday after welcoming speeches by Geoffrey Gilmore and Robert
Redford.

The Sundance-UCLA connection even extends to a Sundance
collection at the UCLA Film and Television Archive devoted to films
shown at Sundance.

“One of the things that we realized was that independent
films often slip between the cracks,” Rosen said.
“There were films where the only existing material was in
some filmmaker’s basement or possibly the trunk of their car.
So we created a program to acquire and to preserve independent
films. We do all the restoration and preservation; Sundance has
been very much involved in helping to acquire those
films.”

Some students had been at Sundance before. Abigail
Severance’s five-minute experimental film screened in the
Frontier Program last year while her 17-minute “Come
Nightfall” competes in the shorts program this year.

“Definitely being in the competition attracts more
attention to me from production companies and venders,”
Severance said. “I have gotten a lot more interest from those
people than I did last year because of the validation of being in
the main part of the festival.”

For some, the party didn’t stop after the UCLA shindig.
Severance invited some to her own party Wednesday night at the Park
City condo where she is staying before returning to her classes at
UCLA.