Indian Sunbeam

Thom Powers uncovers a little bit of India at the 21st Sundance Festival
Time Out Mumbai, Feb 11-24, 2005

When Sesh Kannan made his first trip to the Sundance Film Festival 13 years ago, he had no connections to the film industry. He just wanted to watch movies. Raised in Mumbai, Kannan was then pursuing a globetrotting career as a geologist. The US festival, held every January in the western ski town of Park City, Utah, was just a diversion. On January 20 this year, the 38-year-old Kannan returned to Park City for the opening of the ten-day festival. Only this time, he came as a director with his own film.

Sundance, now in its 21st year, was founded by Robert Redford, who rose to Hollywood stardom with the 1969 film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. During the 1980s and ‘90s the festival earned a reputation for launching the directorial debuts of Steven Soderbergh, Quentin Tarantino and many others. Today, the festival is alternately hailed for enshrining independent film and derided for becoming too commercial. Peter Biskind explored the duality in his 2004 book, Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance and the Rise of Independent Film.

But love Sundance or hate it, filmmakers can’t ignore it. Like thousands of others, Kannan was emboldened by the Sundance mystique to try independent filmmaking for himself. He fared better than most. To give some idea of the odds, this year Sundance received submissions for 2,613 feature films to vie for only 120 slots. Kannan’s project Beyond the Fire combines three trends that have grown increasingly prominent at Sundance: documentary, new technology and world cinema. Designed for the Internet, Beyond the Fire profiles teenage refugees who have relocated to the United States from seven war zones including Iraq, Afghanistan, and Liberia.

The inspiration to explore immigrant communities came from Kannan’s experience working as a geologist in South America and Africa. “I kept seeing expat Indians who carried cultural affiliations from the time they left India,” he told Time Out. “They were practicing traditions in Kenya or Bolivia or Nevada that weren’t familiar to me. It was a snapshot of the India they left a generation or two generations ago.”

Fortunately, to see Kannan’s work, you don’t need a ticket to Utah, only a high-speed Internet connection. Beyond the Fire continues to be showcased online at www.sundance.org under the “Frontier” section for experimental work. It can also be viewed directly at www.beyondthefire.net.

Midway through Sundance on January 25, the festival’s power to catapult a documentary to success was made apparent when nominations were announced for the Academy Awards. (The award ceremony takes place on February 27). Three of the five documentary candidates had premiered in Park City. One of them, Born Into Brothels, follows kids in Calcutta’s red light district who flourish when a visiting photographer Zana Briski teaches them how take pictures. Directed by New Yorkers Briski and Ross Kauffman, Brothels won the Sundance Audience Award in 2004 and spawned an organization to spread its mission of educating underprivileged kids (see www.kids-with-cameras.org).

Currently, the directors are holding back distributing the film in India, Kauffman explained in an e-mail, because they don't want to bring unwanted attention to the women and the children who are depicted. When the Oscar nominations were announced, the directors were visiting their subjects in Kolkata. A year ago they were unknowns, deep in credit card debt. How does it feel to have come this far? They summed it up in a press statement, “We are pleasantly shocked.”

(Thom Powers is the co-owner of the New York-based production company Sugar Pictures. He’s currently writing a history of American documentary called Stranger Than Fiction.)