Wesley has already written about the mesmerizing Hurricane Katrina documentary "Trouble the Water," but having caught up with this festival favorite this afternoon, I'm finding it hard to dismiss. One thing struck me right off: Since "Trouble" avails itself so heavily of the amateur video-camera footage of 9th Ward resident Kimberly Rivers, the movie functions as a real-life "Cloverfield" -- a monster-movie where the monster is weather. Which makes George W. Bush, FEMA head Mike Brown, and a soulless post-hurricane bureaucracy the equivalent of those arachnoid mini-monsters that jump on people and rip their hearts out.

"Trouble the Water" also makes the rather startling claim that disaster can make you a better person. Rivers' husband, Scott, allows as how he was just another drugged-up neighborhood loser and probably would have ended up "in jail or underground" if the hurricane hadn't forced him to forge bonds with the people around him (including a local rival and now close friend). By the end of the movie he's seen doing construction work with a boss who's clearly a mentor; Kimberly, too, has a bigger, richer sense of herself for her heroic behavior during an unimaginable time. Amidst all the damage it wrought, who knew Katrina could also blast a person's horizons open?

I also finally saw "Ballast," an unnaturally quiet drama set in the Mississippi Delta region that has some of the most respectful word of mouth in the entire festival. For good reason: Lance Hammer's mysterious tale of three survivors of a fourth man's suicide is an astonishingly controlled piece of filmmaking, with shots that evoke classic landscape photography and performances that are so real as to seem invisible. The movie has a slow arc toward redemption but nothing in it seems forced or remotely Hollywood; everything's rooted in the low skies and endless spaces of the setting. Daringly, Hammer doesn't use a musical score of any sort, and the silence is both oppressive and ultimately liberating. Here's some video of the director explaining why he decided to dispense with music.

The Patti Smith documentary, "Patti Smith: Dream of Life," was ten years in the making and had a lot of input from the singer, so it's not terribly surprising that the final result plays a lot like a Patti Smith song: oblique, impassioned, dancing on the edge of mindboggling pretentiousness, and often exhilirating. I'm a fan so I quite liked it, but I can't say the same for the two older women next to me, who sighed heavily as this impressionistic journey -- as far from the standard talking-head bio-doc as you can get -- rolled toward the two-hour mark.

"Secrecy," from Harvard film-prof godhead Robb Moss and Harvard science-history brainiac Peter Galison, attracted a very particular crowd: articulate, knowledgable, and borderline paranoid. The film's a balanced polemic (no, that's not a paradox) about our government's rapidly growing fetish for hiding information from its citizens; you can actually feel the movie focusing your understanding of the issues as you watch. The post-film discussion was heady and occasionally emotional; here's some video of Moss explaining why the Valerie Plame scandal was not included in the mix.

Overall, my early Sundance gloom -- see yesterday's Globe article -- has dispelled, as I've seen some very good movies and people seem excited about them for the right reasons. Or, as Robb Moss said to me after the "Secrecy" screening, "When you?re at Sundance it seems like it?s the whole world, and the metric of the whole world is whether you sell something. But most things don?t sell, and really what Sundance is fantastic about is putting your film in play." With the onus of the Big Buy mostly gone from the picture, audiences seem more than happy to play.

Here's a video of "Baghead" director Mark Duplass describing the filmmaking methods he and his brother Jay employ when making one of their studiously offhanded low-fi movies. What's interesting is that the new film is more tightly structured than previous work like "The Puffy Chair" -- mercy, it even has a plot -- and that the loosy-goosey approach outlined here definitely shows signs of strain. You try letting four equally important characters improvise while deciding which one to train the camera on.

The Sundance math goes like this: 75% of your time is spent watching movies. 10% is spent going from one movie to the next on a shuttle bus that looks like this:

The other 5% is spent sleeping. We eat during screenings.

Every year the IFFR places several directors in the spotlight, by tagging them as ‘Filmmaker in Focus’. This year the honor goes to three directors, knowing American director Robert Breer, Russian Svetlana Proskurina and the Japanese director Kobayashi Masahiro. These directors have extensive oeuvres that deserve more international promotion.

The first official day of the festival is filled with four films. I started with the Brazilian Tiger nominee Still Urangutans, followed with my first Kobayashi film ever, Bootleg Film. Then there was the musical/documentary of Talking Heads frontman, True Stories. Last on the list was the documentary The Reinactors about the impersonators on Hollywood Blvd. who try to make a living by having their pictures taken with tourists. (more…)

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It's late, I'm whipped, and the fun starts all over again tomorrow at 8:30 a.m., so here's a brief precis of my day's screening.

"Where in the World is Osama bin Laden?" -- Okay, that was Wednesday night, actually. This is director-provocateur Morgan Spurlock's follow-up to "Supersize Me," and it's hard not to label it sophomore slump. Spurlock -- a sort of younger, bouncier Michael Moore -- takes off on a tour of Middle East hotspots, ostensibly to search for Osama and collect the reward (and save the world for his unborn child). The film's real agenda is to show us that average Muslims are much like you and I when it comes to wishing for an end to violence. Fine and okey-dokey, but such idealism has to be focused if it wants to avoid seeming merely naive, and "Where in the World" is literally all over the map. Plus, I wearied of the director's "Global Politics for Dummies" schtick long before he did. There are some laughs and a few insights, but mostly I found myself wanting a good policy wonk to put things in perspective.

"Baghead" -- The first Mumblecore slasher film? Well, sorta, but not really. Mark and Jay Duplass ("The Puffy Chair") come through with a hilarious little tale about four struggling L.A. actors who go to a cabin in the woods to write a script and either invent a vicious killer with a paper bag over his head or actually will him into being. The bros' comic instinct for the ways people delude themselves is getting sharper and sharper and, against all odds, "Baghead" delivers some real scares.

"Puujee" -- I know I'll probably never talk you into seeing this beautifully spare documentary about a six-year-old Mongolian girl rancher (in photo above) -- if it even gets released in this country -- but it took me to the far side of the planet and left me both enchanted and emotionally wrung dry.

"Man on Wire" -- Being the story of Philippe Petit, the French aerialist and wirewalker who snuck into Manhattan's World Trade Center in 1974 and crossed from one tower to another on a thin cable. Eight times. Using interviews with Petit and all the members of his team, the movie's a eulogy for the twin towers and proof that daredevilry can be poetry. An unexpectedly affecting experience.

ADVISORY, Jan. 24, 2008 (PRIME NEWSWIRE) --

NEW YORK, Jan. 24, 2008 (PRIME NEWSWIRE) -- Travelzoo (Nasdaq:TZOO), a global Internet media company, today revealed the top 5 most romantic ways to pop the question this Valentine's Day.

Finally saw one that blew my doors off last night: "Young@Heart," British filmmaker Stephen Walker traveled to Northampton, Mass., to film the Young@Heart Chorus, a vocal choir whose average age is 80 and whose choice of material includes songs by The Clash, James Brown, Sonic Youth, and a lot of Talking Heads.

Watching two very old-timers give The Godfather of Soul?s ?I Feel Good? their all is a very special experience indeed, and the movie works like a charm at the cutesy-grandpa level. As ?Young@Heart? progresses, though, and some of the choir members fall by the wayside, the real toughness and clarity of the subjects renders the film immensely moving. These geriatrics have no illusions about where they are and where they?re going ? soon ? and their response is to find new meaning in Coldplay?s ?Fix Me? and bellow the Clash?s ?Should I Stay or Should I Go? against the dying of the light. It?s a lesson not lost on everyone at this festival.

Here's some video of choir director Bob Cilman addressing the audience after the screening. (If I'd had my finger on the trigger faster I would have captured 85-year-old Dora Morrow doing her best James Brown impression. What can I say -- I'm a critic, not a cameraman.)

Rob Meyer is a Newton boy who lives in New York now, but his short film, "Aquarium," is shot partly at the New England Aquarium and it definitely captures the surreal, blandly dysfunctional vibe of the western suburbs. The opens with a scene that had the audience dead set against the film and then slowly works its way back into our good graces, with funny, dead-on performances by a handful of adolescent leads.

"Aquarium" screened last night as part of the "Shorts Program I" compilation, which also included a very strong post-Hurricane Katrina short story called "Second Line" -- it played like black Flannery O'Connor from where I sat -- and an eerie Dutch short called "Dennis," featuring an amazing man-mountain body-builder in the title role.

Anyway, the filmmakers were all at the screening and answered questions at the end, Here's a video of Meyer telling the audience that, no, he did not kill his dog.

PARK CITY, Utah, Jan. 24, 2008 (PRIME NEWSWIRE) -- Delta Air Lines (NYSE:DAL) toasted the winner of its second annual national short film competition, Delta's Fly-In Movies, at a celebratory party hosted Wednesday night by Cheryl Hines at SKY360* by Delta - Park City during the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. Vancouver filmmaker Robert Kirbyson was awarded the top prize for his film "Ctrl Z." In addition to the trip to Sundance, Kirbyson receives a $10,000 cash award and a pair of round-trip tickets valid anywhere Delta flies worldwide.