Austin360 blogs > Austin Movie Blog > Archives > 2010 > January > 25 > Entry
Williams at Sundance
This is the second post from Kelly Williams of the Austin Film Festival, who’s attending Sundance. The following is based on his Saturday experiences. Sunday’s update will be coming shortly.
The first day in Park City can be overwhelming, the airport, the shuttle ride from Salt Lake, checking in, picking tickets and badges and coming from 75 degree weather in Austin to the low 20s in Utah. Don’t get me wrong, the snow is beautiful, but I am just not used to the weather.
After settling in, the day was almost over. Along with my AFF co-workers, we took in dinner with Dallas International Film Festival programmer James Faust and The Violent Kind producer Don Lewis (Don and I volunteered together at Sundance 10 years ago and his first feature is premiering Monday night). From there, we went to a house party hosted by Austin based Bside, Magnet Releasing and Fantastic Fest. There were lots of Austinites I usually only see at out-of-town film festivals to catch up with, plus Tim League brought along his now signature karaoke machine.
From there, I met the filmmakers from two AFF 2009 films Cummings Farm and The Scenesters at a local bar. Both films pulled the hat trick of making it into competition at the Slamdance Film Festival.
The Scenesters, like during AFF, have proven to be film festival marketing masters - selling out an unfortunate Friday morning at 10 a.m. screening and already selling out a Monday screening. Berger is a UT alum (along with most of his cast and crew) who is now based in LA. He mentioned they were worried to have the 10 a.m. opening screening because as he noted, “I’ve never seen any movie that early.” He was worried people would’t laugh at the film, but “we got huge laughs, even laughs in places that we have never gotten before and the festival crowd even got our obscure Lar Von Treir reference.”
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