Power and Fear in Park City

undance equals power, and for a good reason: get your movie into the lineup, and you have an excellent chance of securing distribution in the US, a better chance by far than at any other festival. This means that it’s the supreme gateway, and despite or because of this fact, Sundance’s audiences are among the most conservative and rearguard in the international festival world. A fine gauge of this is the treatment accorded , which unexpectedly ended up in the Park City line-up. From the moment the selection was announced, it was an outlier: while Pedro Costa’s masterpiece was a natural for Locarno’s Golden Leopard competition (even better, a perfect Golden Leopard winner) and easily secured a spot in the New York Film Festival’s main slate, Sundance pushed it to the far edges of its program. Here was a stark example of how the festival universe pits North America against the rest of the world: what’s mainstream at major European and New York festivals suddenly is deemed fringe in the Utah mountains, where the programmers can’t risk slotting a title in a centrepiece, high-profile platform, as they know their audiences will bolt. Even ensconced in the pseu-do-avant-garde section of New Frontier—where viewers supposedly know that they’re in for something fairly adventurous—the Sundance walkouts for were like none the movie experienced in most