Texas Sundance entries have Dallas pedigrees
BY JOE O’CONNELL
Special to The Dallas Morning News
Austin
gets the Texas indie-film buzz, but the Lone Star State contingent at the
upcoming Sundance Film Festival is full of North Texans.
Yen
Tan worked in marketing for Neiman-Marcus in Dallas until he trekked to the
Capital City in 2010 with a plan to make a living as the go-to graphics guy for
indie film poster art. His third feature film Pit Stop, the parallel stories of two blue-collar gay men in
small-town Texas, premieres at Sundance later this month. Tan co-wrote the
script with Dallas’ David Lowery, whose feature Ain’t Them Bodies
Saints is in dramatic competition at
Sundance.
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| 12-year-old Elise Gardner, star of Spark poses for a film blogger as her mother Mary Catherine watches. |
Tan
said he quietly flew under the radar in the North Texas film scene with Lowery
and Fort Worth’s James Johnston, a Pit Stop
producer, before decamping to Austin.
Indie film proves a small Texas
world with Austin-based Kelly Williams—yet another Pit Stop producer—programming Fort Worth’s Lone Star
International Film Festival while keeping his hand in seemingly every
independent movie of note, including Kat Candler’s latest Sundance short Black
Metal about a rocker/dad who must deal with
the guilt when a killer’s actions are linked to a love of the rocker’s music.
“We’ve all grown up together,”
Williams said following a press screening in Austin of Pit Stop clips, Candler’s film and two shorts set to premiere
at Sundance satellite festival Slamdance. Williams, Tan and Candler and many
others share space at an Austin film production site where relationships bloom
and ideas tumble back and forth.
“It’s so incestuous,” said Candler
whose short Hellion played at Sundance
in 2012 and is being expanded into a full feature. “There’s not a
competitiveness about the community, yet everyone’s voice remains unique to
them.”
Part of it is the shoestring nature
of independent film that require the wearing of many hats to make a living.
Candler’s two Sundance shorts were crowd-funded with donations through Web site
IndieGoGo. Both star Jonny Mars, arguably the most intriguing actor in Texas
indie film. The former Dallas resident also produced Black Metal and directed the 2012 documentary America’s
Parking Lot about rabid Dallas Cowboys
fans.
Andrew Irvine is Candler’s teaching
assistant in the University of Texas Radio-Television-Film program. His frank and
funny short Hearts of Napalm, about a
young couple’s sexual miscommunication, will screen at Slamdance. Irvine, 30,
is seeing a dream forged as a Plano teenager come to fruition.
“I’m old enough now to realize that
since this is the first time it will probably never be this good again,” he
said of his upcoming Park City adventure.
UT film student Annie Silverstein,
whose background is solidly in the documentary form, will see her fictional
short Spark screen at Slamdance as well. It’s a touching story of a boy left to
deal with the daughter of his father’s love interest and some tempting
fireworks.
“Sometimes using fiction you can
say things that are more true than in a documentary,” said Silverstein who
founded a program that taught Native American youth to use film to tell their
stories.
“I’ve lived in many different
cities before, and I’ve never felt so accepted so quickly,” she said of Austin.
“I feel lucky. That’s not normal in artistic communities where anxieties and
egos can get in the way.”
These filmmakers mark a second
Texas indie film wave. The first will also be represented this year at Sundance
with Richard Linklater premiering Before Midnight and Robert Rodriguez screening his 1993 debut El
Mariachi. Austin’s latest “it” film
director Jeff Nichols’ Mud
starring Matthew McConaughey also is slated, along with works by newish Austin
transplants Andrew Bujalski (Computer Chess) and David Gordon Green (Prince Avalanche with Paul Rudd).
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