Sundance 2016 Talking Movies

Hello and welcome to the Sundance Film Festival, here in Park city

Utah. I am Tom Brookes. In today's programme we will be looking back at

the highlights of this 11 day film extravaganza. We report on the first

major depiction of President Obama as a younger man on his first date

with the future first Lady. It is not a date until you save his. A

documentary which tells a strange story of North Korea's Kim Jong

Il's kidnapping of a director and his actress ex-wife. Also the tragic

tale of the Florida TV reporter who killed herself on the air. And from

Afghanistan, a documentary of sorts in which the country is revealed

through the eyes of children. All that and more in this special

Sundance Film Festival edition of Talking Movies. Over the past ten

days, the Sundance Film Festival, cofounded by Robert Redford more

than 30 years ago has been taking place here in Park city. A large

contingent of filmmakers made it to Sundance Film Festival this year.

All in all, some 120 film features were shown and they encountered a

variety of responses. Up in the mountains, a 45 Minute Drive from

salt lake city -- Salt Lake City is the festival which is home to a

veritable feast of movies, featuring films from 27 different countries.

Everything from a documentary portrait of the late musician and

composer Frank Zappa to an electrifying slave revolt drama the

Birth of a Nation which set a record for sales. The films covered a lot

of subjects, Oley Help cover the cult which originated in California.

Many members lost faith in their leader. They were so blissed out and

hide without drugs. Daniel Radcliffe and fellow actor Paul Dano starting

Swiss Army Man which wasn't well-received. Was it a challenge

playing a corpse? Physically, obviously there's a lot of things to

do in the film that I had to work out ways of doing which felt really

natural in keeping with the character. And also, it is still

weirdly emotional even though he is dead. I was trying to work out how

to communicate that all being dead. Also from India the team who created

one of the first overt Indian sex comedies. I don't really drink.

Nonsense. Everybody drinks. We have a billion people back home and no

one talks about sex and I think this is a deep-rooted problem in India. I

think most Indians are like this. And I really hope that this film

helps further, to make it easy for the next filmmaker to come out and

do something like this. They put her into the back of the van I didn't

know if I was going to see her again. One well-received picture was

Jim the James Foley Story which told the story of a journalist but by

Islamic State in 2015. It was put together by a childhood friend of

James Foley. As a filmmaker, Sundance Film Festival is amazing.

But this film is bittersweet. It is a film that I never would want to

make. Why don't you let me take you? Films like Sex come out Lies

and Videotape and Reservoir Dogs have been hits in the past. Last

year, Brooklyn, a best picture contender this year in the Oscars

race debuted at Sundance Film Festival. This year, there could be

future award favourites. The directors who find their films have

been selected can be in for a heady experience. This woman made Kiki

which explores the culture of LGBT youths who explore dance. I wanted

the film to be seen by many people in many different audiences and I

think that Sundance Film Festival can be the gateway for that. I don't

see it as a commercial film but I know I wanted a big audience. For

all the people who consider Sundance Film Festival a wondrous place to

be, there are many challenges, mainly the struggles that filmmakers

have in trying to make sure their films have an afterlife once they

leave. It used to be that Sundance films would wind up in art-house

cinemas but now streaming services have changed the length gate. And

the first half of the festival, Internet streaming services were the

most commonplace bidders. Companies like Netflix and iTunes have

dramatically changed the marketplace for independent film and they have

been the epicenter of independent film. These companies have had a

huge influence in the way that movies get out there in the world.

The festival has a big impact locally in Park city where hordes of

people descend on this winter ski resort. It increases business and

drives business. It is paper restaurants and makes the community

vibrant. I think it is a big positive. There were themes that

Sundance this year, four pictures on gun violence, and films touching on

race. A range of movies which festival-goers anchored in reality.

Even among the fictional offerings, many of this year's Sundance stories

dealt with real issues and events. I need you to go and prevent the

assassination of John F. Kennedy. One of the more intriguing stories

that Sundance this year could be found in the documentary the Lovers

and the Despots which sheds light on how Kim Jong Il allegedly kidnapped

a director and his actress ex-wife. The purpose of this abduction was

apparently to enable the North Korean leader to have his own

personal filmmaking team. BBC Culture editor Anderson reports. If

you made this up it would be too far-fetched. This actress went

missing in Hong Kong and shortly after her husband, a director went

missing as well. Years later they appeared making movies in North

Korea. They claimed they had been kidnapped and brought to North Korea

where they were forced by Kim Jong Il to make films for the regime. It

is an incredible tale, told by two British documentary makers. The

actress who was the protagonist in our story, she was quite protective

and there was a little bit of controversy about the story, whether

they were willing or not. We had to be careful. The other main problem

we encountered was, we have the actress telling her story, but there

are two other main characters, the director had died a few years

earlier and Kim Jong Il was still alive when we first started making

the film but he has since died. Kim Jong Il was mad about movies. His

personal film collection was said to be comprised of more than 15,000

tapes. He had people in Embassies picking up prints of films from

around the world to deliver and translate to him. He had this huge

scope of knowing what movies were like and he loved them. But he also

saw what was being produced in North Korea and he wasn't satisfied with

it. The whole crazy story was presented as true in the Sundance

documentary but many in South Korea don't believe the actress. They

claimed A2 went over willingly to the north where Kim Jong Il lavish

them with budgets and resources to make movies that would be

unfavorable in the South. But the documentary features tapes, the

first ever recording of Kim Jong Il's voice. The filmmakers save A2

were kidnapped. She recorded him secretly in the meeting to try to

get him to confess to prove their story was true. She knew that South

Koreans wouldn't believe it because it is a crazy story. It's kind of

makes you tune into the words that are being said and it does leave a

bit more to the imagination in terms of what is going on in the room. In

South Korea, the director's films had run massively over budget but

once he was in the North, money was no object. When Kim Jong Il is your

patron, you can do pretty much anything on a movie set. Budgets

were not a factor and there is an anecdote about him saying that he

had an idea for a film with the crescendo of the steam train blowing

up and he asked Kim Jong Il if you would be able to do that and he said

yes -- if he would. The movie went down well with audiences at its

Sundance premiere but the critical reaction has been mixed. Many felt

that the relatively straightforward style of filmmaking which mixes

archival footage and talking head interviews was disappointingly

mismatched with such a jaw-dropping story. We are used to the story but

hopefully there are people out there who have not seen or heard about it.

Maybe somewhere. And that is the exciting thing. To imagine myself

watching this for the first time, I think it is a really crazy story.

Conflict on Afghanistan has been represented in several different

documentaries but nothing is quite like the Land of

which showed here at Sundance. It looks at the country through the

children and was shot over a period of seven years. It is a mixture of

dream and reality. to marry to add favour to the union.

First of all, we wanted to Afghanistan today. I wanted to tell

the imagination of the kids and that is how we ended up in a more

fictional storyline embedded in a story about reality today in

Afghanistan. Who was pro- train the children? Were they real children or

actors? The kids in the minefield who were digging up the mines were

real people, they do this day in and day out. Their parents ask them to

do it to make money. They sell it for scrap metal. They sell the

explosives. The board's dream was based on many

with different groups of children that I met and I wanted to

wanted to go one step beyond and really go into the world

children. The film is striking to look at. You shot it your self.

texture of the film -- we shot it in. We wanted to have these really

timeless shots use different techniques to try to

explain and to visualise the dramatic landscapes. How would you

describe the genre of the film? Is it a documentary or a fictional

film? I think it is still a documentary because what we are

showing, for me, is not invented. Everything that we show is related

to the country itself. But we characters to interpret things. What

does your film tell us about Afghanistan that we don't already

know from news media? Because it is not as if we are short of images

about Afghanistan? No, that is true. I showed the film a while ago to a

UN conference about the future in Afghanistan, so they were all

experts on Afghanistan and they said this was the first film that they

saw which was so focused on local people and not only focused on the

war and Nato and the Americans fighting. But really going deeper

into daily life. In 1974, a Florida television

reporter created shockwaves which it picked up a gun and killed herself

on the air. That harrowing incident has inspired two films that were

shown at Sundance this year. On a fiction film and the other a

documentary. It is a documentary called Cate Plays Christine that we

focus on in this report. I am hoping to find the tape. In this film the

focus is on a TV journalist who killed herself on the air in 1974.

We know she was a serious journalist, Berry tired of how the

movement towards blood and cost news and she also did the biggest blood

and guts news thing possible. -- Berry tired of the movement towards

blood and guts news. Anything that you archived offer.

Kate Plays Christine stars a rising actress as herself, as she prepares

to play the role of Christine. She travels to Florida, where Christine

worked and eventually died to find answers. There are a lot of opinions

about her and stories. No one has had any particular insight. I don't

know exactly why she did what she did and I will never know. There's a

great impulse, human impulse, to explain tragedy and we certainly

buttered up against that quite a bit in talking to people. Another

Sundance film about Christine this year it is Christine, a drama

starring Rebecca Hall. Both films have been breakout hits at the

Sundance Film Festival this year, earning rave reviews. Rather than

competing against each other the film is actually completely the

other, with Christine being a heartfelt dramatisation and Kate

Plays Christine a more subversive deconstruction of the story. The

challenge of promoting both of these films at Sundance has been about

making them. How do you present the story in a way that is empathetic

and not exploitative? It is not fetishising some very dark story,

that we will all now turn to movie and is about great, it is actually

about intimately regarding someone who is struggling to survive. And

who doesn't begin by society's standards and who is on a consistent

emotional rollercoaster that she can't handle and she hasn't got the

tools to deal with life. I think that's actually what this film is

about, is looking at someone like that and feeling for them and

understanding them. I have decided to kill myself. I will blow my

brains out right on this programme a week from today. Christine

Chubbuck's suicide is believed to have inspired this film, also

featuring a suicidal news anchor. The actions may be even more

relevant to today's media landscape. The fact that she has suicide speech

was reeling against blood and guts television is something that has

become even more prevalent today than it was 40 years ago. And also

the fact that she decided to enter a life on television in such a public

way, I think our desire as a culture to make parts of our lives public is

so much more prominent now. Everyday we are confronted with images and we

have to think about whether we look at them or not. If you look on CNN

you see the shooting or something and you've always got... People are

always questioning whether they should click on that link or not.

These people have opinions about what might have driven her to do it.

The story raises powerful questions and deserves to be recognised. It is

a shame that she is only getting the recognition now in death that she

might have preferred to have while living.

A film inspired by President Obama and his wife was a big talking point

at Sundance this year. It is additional account of the

President's Cup is the dates to win the first Lady. All the action takes

place on a single day in Chicago in 1989.

The world premiere of the film. The actor arrives looking remarkably

like young President Obama. Also there is the actress who presents

some resemblance to the first Lady. He was playing the young President

Obama act at 27 and present him as thoughtful. He was just coming to

the realisation that he could do something big in politics. Other

than that he was not a nerd is a big reader, an avid reader. The film's

focus is on his first date with his wife to be, Michelle. They both

worked in the same law office. She was a working attorney, his

supervisor. The film will open at the Walkabout town chatting. You

think I'm cute? I didn't say that. They talk about her father with MS,

they talk about why does she love what she is doing? Does she love

it? He challenges her and she challenges him about his father. So

it is real-life conversations. How difficult was it for you to get this

right? I worked from a straight on impersonation first and foremost. I

get this sort of the down and make sure I can do that and then I bring

it back and by the time I get on set I would try to drop at all. So the

register -- residue was still there, so you still have some mannerisms.

Many critics at Sundance have been impressed by this film, as have

festival-goers. I really enjoyed it. It was a love story and I was

expecting more of a pickle pit of some sort and it was really... I

thought it was beautifully done. -- political pitch. I loved it. It was

so direct and to see where they met, I had no idea. I didn't know the

background story. To see Chicago, I loved the meeting they had. But how

accurate is it? The film very closely adheres to the real Aya

graphical details of their lives. As far as what they talk about, it's

all conjecture. But is the timing right? President Obama is near the

end of his term. My baby -- might be the more interested on coaxing on

Hillary Clinton or politics of the moment? -- focusing on. It is truly

a love story and you see two powerful minds walk and talk all

day. I love it because it is before cellphones so they have to talk to

each other. It is a film that is favourable to the Obamas, it puts

them in a flattering light. But the director says there was no

interference from the White House. No meddling. I've heard from

reliable horses that the couple are aware of the movie and beyond that I

don't know anything. It's a picture that will probably play better to

Democrats and Republicans. Had it been released earlier in his term it

might have been seen as propaganda. But instead most who see it it

humanises them. As one leading entertainment trade paper put it,

it's a disarmingly dramatic Walkabout. OK, it's not a date.

Fine. Until you say it is. Well, that brings this special Sundance

addition of Talking Movies to a close. We hope you have enjoyed the

programme. Remember, you can always contact us online and you can find

us on Facebook. From me and the rest of the production team here in

Utah, goodbye, as we leave you with a Michael Jackson video that is

partly featured in a new documentary all about him, directed by Spike Lee

and shown here at Sundance. On Friday, Shetland recorded the

strongest wind here for 16 years. Gusts of 105 mph,

particularly damaging winds across the Northern Isles on Friday but

very windy for the north of Northern Ireland, north-east England, gusty

winds and the Scottish capital.