Park City Heads West: Slamdance Invades L.A.
Thirty years after its inception, the infamous bastard cousin of the glamorous Robert Redford-founded Park City, Utah film festival migrated to Los Angeles. As a film lover who has wanted to attend the film festival (both Slamdance and its brethren who shall not be mentioned by name), I was elated to snag a press pass a week before the festival began in February. I counted the days before my cup runneth over with celluloid (whether it was digital in origin didn’t matter).
I downloaded the program to my iPhone a few days prior and was immediately struck by one thing: The vast amount of movies that I was now expected to see. How was I to decide? These were all new films—so there was no buzz, no pre-publicity; not even film-obsessed friends who could make recommendations.
I was faced with the ultimate tyranny of choice courtesy of the Slamdance website:
“This year’s lineup consists of 146 films—21 of which are World Premiere features—hailing from over 20 countries including Australia, Canada, China, Germany, Greece, Jamaica, Japan, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Russia, South Korea, Taiwan, Uganda, and the UK (United Kingdom) among others. The 2025 programming was selected from nearly 10,000 submissions, 1,795 of which were features. As in previous years, all films selected in the Narrative Features and Documentary Features competition categories are directorial debuts without U.S. distribution, with budgets of less than $1 million.“
Anticipation built as the inaugural Los Angeles imported Slamdance Festival loomed. Unfortunately, a combination of the Opening Night film Out of Plain Sight being sold out and an ear infection forced me to miss the first event at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood, but the PR people kindly provided me with a digital screener. I watched it at the exact same time and date as the World Premiere, to maintain the excitement of attending a film festival—while nursing a cold compress and calibrating my recently purchased sound bar.
Out of Plain Sight (Daniel Straub, Rosanna Xia, United States) was a sobering documentary produced by the L.A. Times (based on a series of articles in the newspaper) about the 500,000 barrels of DDT that had been legally dumped off the shore of the Los Angeles between the 1950s and 1970s, This was done before we learned that DDT had the pesky byproduct, poisoning humans and animals in addition to the insects that it was designed to kill. Fifty years later, the poison is wreaking havoc with marine life, causing cancer in sea lions, and creating toxins in the fish that are caught and devoured by local fishermen. There was no happy ending to the story, but it was a compelling and well made work.
This first exposure to the festival was sobering experience; a recurring theme in the documentary arena. Feeling slightly better later that night, I perused the program, and for some inexplicable reason, chose another documentary as my first in person experience.
The next morning, I drove to the appropriately named Quixote Studios (formerly known as Sunset Studios) in West Hollywood. Navigating the joy of street parking in WeHo, I arrived barely in time for the first film, Disposable Humanity (Cameron S. Mitchell, Austria/Germany), a powerful film that told the unknown (at least to me) tale of Aktion T4, a German program that resulted in the deaths of over 300,000 disabled people.
To the uninitiated, Aktion 14 can only be described as the Nazi’s pre-Holocaust “test run” in Eastern Europe in the late 1930s, where they experimented on disabled people living in institutions (mostly against their will, and in one harrowing case, against the wishes of a loving husband). German scientists performed experiments on which poisons and gases were most efficient in the murder of these innocent people.
The documentary was quite impactful as well as powerful as it focused on one particular U.S. family (the filmmaker and his family) and their journey via train to the facilities where the genocide took place. While the modern day Germans attempted to honor the dead by building a museum (in one of the institutes where the murders took place) as a tribute to the countless lives lost, they ironically built it on the second floor of the building—making it inaccessible to the very people they were trying to honor. The irony was not lost on the disabled visitors.
After the screening, I wandered in a daze around the former Sunset West Studio (a small studio consisting of three sound stages, office spaces, a coffee bar and a generous outdoor area for myriad events to simulate what things must have been life in the Park City environs). I wasn’t ready for another bleak and depressing work (quite yet), so I wandered into DIG (DIGITAL, INTERACTIVE, GAMING).
My first exposure to DIG was The Tent (UK, USA / Director: Rory Mitchell), an AR experimental short that was intriguing and worth checking out, even though it didn’t stick the landing or have as much impact as it likely intended. Other experiences include the fun VR experience Meditating Like A Dolphin (USA / Director: Michel Pascal) and its opposite, the decidedly and purposefully lo-fi Wildlife Management (USA / Director: Dan Hale), which utilizes a 19th Century praxinoscope to tell its visual tale.
Hoping for a break from documentaries, I somehow chose a narrative film entitled Foul Evil Deeds for my next cinematic adventure that night. True to its title, the film is anthology of darkly comic horror tales based upon real events written and directed by Richard Hunter. Bleak, depressing, and very British, this was a surprisingly refreshing palate cleanser. Shot on the Sony Vx1000 video and the epitome of a slow burn (especially in its first half), it had the aesthetic of a gray and low-res BBC series from the 90s mixed with a subtle and powerful punch reminiscent of the boom of anthology films of the same era. Imagine if Richard Linklater’s Slacker took a dark, bleak, and menacing turn and you’ll start to get an idea of this unique work. If I am so inspired, I might write up a detailed review of this intriguing experiment that contained one of the most quietly bleak endings of any film I’ve seen in recent memory.
The next day tragedy befell. Not another documentary with dark and impossible to shake real-life elements, but an ear infection that had spread and, as it had been diagnosed at the Urgent Care as antibiotic resistant, I was forced to miss the next day of in-person screenings.
After my visit to the doctor, I removed the physical program from my jacket. (I’m not too proud to admit that I prefer paper documents—from menus to scripts to festival programs—despite the negative impact to the environment. Does the fact that I save everything help? No, it merely proves that I’m on the path to being a hoarder. God help me.)
The tyranny of choice aspect hit me again. Only 144 films left to see.
I had some choices to make. I desperately needed something light and thought that the shorts might provide a palate cleanser of sorts. It was a gamble, but I love cinema, and I knew that there was no “wrong answer.” To be fair, in the end, I wound up missing most of the award-winning films (although I did catch most of them in the weeks following the festival, save the Documentary Feature Grand Jury Winner American Theatre, the one that got away that I hope gets some form of theatrical distribution as I need to see it on the big screen. To be fair, Disposable Humanity won the Grand Jury Award—Unstoppable Honorable Mention prize, so I didn’t completely miss the boat.
Although I only made it back to the festival for one more day thanks to the pesky bacteria that sent me to the doctor’s office three times in five days, I managed to see some wonderful films, including Portal to Hell, the Experimental Shorts Grand Jury Prize Winner Your Mailbox is Full (Allie Viti, United States), My Omaha (Nick Beaulieu, United States), and The Sea Inside Her (Alyx Duncan, New Zealand).
On my second and final in person visit to the festival, I ran into one of the co-founders of Slamdance, the ever garrulous Dan Mirvish (whose recent film about the missing 18 1/2 minutes of the Nixon Watergate tapes —shockingly entitled 18 1/2 was featured in a previous article, along with hyper-articulate filmmaker Heidi van Lier, whose 1999 feature, Chi Girl, was the winner of the Slamdance Jury Prize—beating last year’s Oscar winning director Christopher Nolan, in the process. Unfortunately, I felt compelled to limit my conversations despite the doctor informing me I wasn’t contagious. Passing along an infectious disease to award-winning filmmakers was not exactly how I want to be known in the film community.
I was truly saddened to miss the workshops on screenwriting (SLAM Script Shot Day) and camera tech (Panasonic’s LUMIX, which also had one of the theaters named after it) and especially Market Monday. Not to mention intriguing bands on both Friday and Saturday night; a questionable food truck and, most importantly, fascinating conversation with film-centric arts.
In the end, my early decisionmaking meant that I skipped the majority of the award-winning films as well as the award ceremony, but I did see some extraordinary and innovative works. As some of the digital screeners are still active, I’m slowly navigating my way through the most enticing of the options.
If the editors at Pipeline Artist indulge me, I might be inclined to follow up with a sequel of sorts, focusing on the films I missed on the big screen as well as the short films of note. If not, next year beckons if the publicists at Slamdance are kind enough to issue me another press pass.
Long live film festivals and the film medium itself. Experts say that celluloid film kept in salt mines can last hundreds of years. Meaning it might outlast my ear infection.
Post Script/Post Mortem/Post Festival with Heidi van Lien.
I followed up with the "I Am Destroyer of All Christopher Nolans circa 1999" director Heidi van Lier via text after the festival. I thought Pipeline Readers might be interested in her thoughts on the Slamdance’s migration to Los Angeles and as well as the festival itself.
Scott: What did you think when you first heard that the festival was headed to L.A.?
Heidi van Lier: Having been involved with Slamdance in various ways off and on since I won the Grand Jury Prize in 1999, and having been on the jury for narrative features, episodic, and breakouts in 2024, and this year helping program narrative competition features, I was actually thrilled to hear the fest would be moving to Los Angeles. I also have worked with Film Independent and the Los Angeles Film Festival when it was around and had been missing an L.A. festival scene, which I believed Slamdance was poised to recapture, and triumphantly managed to pull-off this year.
I have also believed for many years that Slamdance is a uniquely and truly indie curator of filmmakers with singular voices, four-time Oscar winner Sean Baker being one of them. I’m so happy to see how far-reaching the success of these filmmakers has gone already. I believe the move to L.A. will only continue to enhance this pathway for first-time filmmakers and their crews and casts … and I’m proud to be at least somewhat involved.
Scott: How do you think of the experience at Quixote Studios? Any surprises …
HVL: There are always growing pains, but I do think those exist annually with the changing of the market as well. The Park City model as a whole had seemed to be dying a slow audience death as, post-pandemic, the need to be IRL had been ripped out from under us. I found it inspiring and heartwarming that the audiences seemed to instantly be revived on a new campus in a new city.
There was a reunion vibe of sorts from the Slamdances of two decades ago. I saw faces I hadn’t seen in years and the same through-line of support for the indie rite of passage persists and was even elevated this year. The crowd of festival-attendees was fresh and thrilled to be in the indie conversation for maybe the first time, igniting inspiration and hope … on top of sales and press and representation and job offers for the filmmakers, as always.
Scott: How about the film selection? Did the change of venue alter things—from your perspective as both a programmer and an audience member?
HVL: We had less limitations in our selection process in some ways due to the move to Los Angeles. In past years, we’ve lost films to Sundance for logical conflict reasons, this year that limitation has been seemingly eradicated. I’m sure there might be reasons a film couldn’t play at both festivals that I’m not aware of, but for the most part this wasn’t a part of the programming discussions like it had been in years past. I found this to be kind of a fun new prospect that actually made things easier on us.
Scott: Final question—do you have a film you want to champion from this year‘s festival?
HVL: I actually had six films that I loved in competition this year, that has never happened. Generally I’d be happy if I loved one of the films, but that’s just because the programming team is a large democratic group of varied opinions and tastes, and, as such, it is always hard to find common ground and love on more than one film of thousands, everyone has a different favorite that they’re wanting to fight to get into the fest.
I’m still shocked how many of the films I loved this year. I won’t name the names of those films just because I feel the selection was so strong across the board, and I don’t want to leave anyone out, but I will say that I was very happy with the films that won awards, and I can’t wait to see what all those filmmakers make next.
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*Feature photo by Scott Sanford Tobis
