Slamdance Film Festival Continues to Elevate...

For 26 years, debuting filmmakers have traversed the wintry landscape of Park City to screen their films at the Slamdance Film Festival, and this year’s crop of selections promises to showcase significant talent. Taking place January 24-30, this celebration of cinema continues to be, as co-founder and president Peter Baxter calls it, “the premiere film festival by filmmakers and for filmmakers,” with an emphasis on creating a community for emerging independent artists. “We’re an artist-led festival where everyone nurtures each other’s visions, while always looking for new ways to explore and evolve as storytellers.”

The 2020 feature competition boasts 16 premieres, with projects originating from Belarus, Canada, Germany, Japan, Mexico, Peru, Poland, Russia, South Africa and the United States. As always, all films are feature length directorial debuts with budgets of less than one million, and which lack U.S. distribution. “We’ve been working behind the scenes year round to ensure that we have another fantastic festival. We’re always looking for strong and distinct storytelling voices,” says festival manager Alina Solodnikova.

Hope- A Light Once There

If Bloom’s A Light Once There touched on Cole’s acts, its sister film Hope delves into it further with the main aim of looking at the incident from Hope’s point of view, Cole’s sister. Hope is not a sequel, but a more elaborate answer to why what happened did. 

It uses a lot of footage from A Light Once There (ALOT) which helps make sense of the whole tragedy, and very cleverly subverts the possibility of feeling repetitive. Hope opens on one of the lightest scenes in the story– brother and sister reminiscing about their younger days and luging before Hope moves out. The scene is shot beautifully: a preserved, nostalgic memory of growing up in the suburbs. It then moves on to another scene of preparation for Hope (Kendal Rae) moving out, then blending into the story of how they lost their mother: how Cole (Diego Josef) isolated himself during a picnic after a fight, their mother (Brynn Horrocks) having a heart attack while despairing on the pitfall laden path of raising children. And how afterwards, Hope could barely hold herself up while Cole could not express his grief openly. All the actors are brilliantly authentic, the music only adding to the spell that the film’s craft casts. The film then inserts scenes from ALOT to draw a more detailed picture. The rest of Hope sees Hope grown up, moving on with her life while Cole struggles to find peace…