The Sundance Film festival is coming to London in April and with it emerges not only the best in cutting edge film, but also the melding of fine art and multi-media film installation.
The festival which has garnered a worldwide reputation was established in 1988, The Sundance Group is a business entity wholly owned by Robert Redford. The Sundance Group oversees Redford’s ownership interests in Sundance Resort, Sundance Catalog, Sundance Channel, Sundance Cinemas as well as his involvement in the not-for-profit Sundance Institute, Sundance Film Festival and Redford Center. In addition, the Sundance Group is responsible for evaluating and launching new business opportunities for Redford and the Sundance Brand. Each year over 6,000 films are submitted to the Sundance Film Festival. Of those, just 120 are picked to play at the festival in Park City. From the 120 that were shown at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2012, 14 have been selected to make their UK premieres at Sundance London.In addition to these great films, there will also be some unique opportunities to attend Panels and hear guest speakers talk about the part they play in making films, documentaries and the role of music in modern cinema as well as the chance
One example of film and multimedia installation is, “An Oversimplification of Her Beauty” which premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival in the New Frontier category, a section that celebrates the convergence of film, art, and new media technologies as a hotbed for cinematic innovation. The film has since screened at the International Film Festival Rotterdam and MoMA’s New Directors New Films.
You’ve just arrived home after a bad day. You’re broke and lonely, even though you live in the biggest and busiest city in America. You do, however, have one cause for mild optimism: you seem to have captured the attention of an intriguing young lady. You’ve rushed home to clean your apartment before she comes over. In your haste, you see that you’ve missed a call. There’s a voice mail; she tells you that she won’t be seeing you tonight.With arresting insight, vulnerability, and a delightful sense of humour, Terence Nance’s explosively creative debut feature, An Oversimplification of Her Beauty, documents the relationship between Nance and a lovely young woman as it teeters on the divide between platonic and romantic. Nance creates an exquisite tapestry of live action and various styles of animation to delve deeply into his own young male psyche as he sweats and stretches toward maturity. The result is an exciting and original film that announces the arrival of a bright new cinematic talent.
Watching Terence Nance’s Oversimplification Of Her Beauty is like being talked through the contents of a shoebox, each item another memento of The One That Got Away. Live action, animation, claymation reenactments, direct-to-camera address by him, on-camera interviews of her by him, blurry, amateur footage shot by her of him, all guided by a formally written voice over, delivered with somber, staccato clarity by an anonymous older man. Descriptions and depictions of other girls slide in and out of the narrative, intercut with shots of The One, whose name is Namik. One animation of a long-distance affair depicts a hand-drawn Terence rising from a grave, holding flowers, the girl walking away, while voice-over intones that “She was repelled by your inability to speak clearly about your feelings no matter their implications… However you hypothesize that the cause of your separation may be because you are too sure of the connection’s viability. A commitment with a woman with whom you are so intensely compatible that it would leave you with nothing else to search for, rendering your distance from her a product of your addiction to the unpredictability of a feast and famine romantic existence. On a more pragmatic level, Joy may just not be that into you.” ;Filmmaker Magazine stated.