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My Winter Break Diary: Sundance Stories3 min read

Lucy Shaw, MBA Class of 2017

lucyFor most people January is a month of detox, hitting the gym, giving up alcohol. For most of my fellow Stern MBA1s January is a manic month of preparation and interviews. But, to me, and a small town in the mountains of Utah, January means something completely different: Sundance Film Festival. Over the last thirty years the festival has screened a diverse selection of critically acclaimed films and helped launch the careers of notable directors; Four Weddings and a Funeral, The Blair Witch Project, Donnie Darko, Quentin Tarantino, David O Russell, Steven Soderbergh, all films and directors whose break came from Sundance.

2016 marks my sixth time volunteering at the festival. I join 1,800 people from all over the world congregating in Park City, UT to help run US’s largest independent film festival. Whilst we have diverse backgrounds–I’ve worked with a police officer from Australia, a lawyer from Chicago, a flight attendant from Texas—we all have one thing in common: a love of independent film. In return for our 80 hours of volunteer work (I help manage one of the theatrical venues at the festival) we have access to all the film screenings at the festival, as well as the art installations, panels and music performances that make up this 10-day celebration of film.

I was one of the first people in the world to know what it meant to be “Catfished” –  the first Sundance film I saw, back in 2010. The film was an “is fact or fiction” documentary about an online relationship being a social-media hoax. I was also there at one of the first screenings of Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash – one of last year’s Oscar’s Best Picture Nominees. This year I was lucky to be at the World Premiere Screening of Nate Parker’s Birth of a Nation – based on the true story of Nat Turner, a slave / preacher who would lead one of the most successful slave rebellions in US history. Seven years in the making, it was a labor of love for actor-writer-producer-director Parker, and a powerful depiction of a significant historical moment. His extraordinary achievement was rewarded with a well-deserved standing ovation from the audience, and bought for distribution by Fox Searchlight for a record-breaking $17.5m.

But Sundance isn’t just about the future award winners; it’s also about the smaller films which tell stories from a unique perspective. Life Animated, a documentary by Roger Ross Williams, tells the story of Owen, an autistic twenty-something young man, who uses Disney animation as a guide to express his thoughts and emotions. Equity (bought prior to the festival by Sony Picture Classics) turns the stereotypical Hollywood male-dominated world of Wall Street on its head. Starring Breaking Bad’s Anna Gunn, Meera Menon’s dramatic thriller is an honest, unapologetic portrayal of what being a female in world dominated by men looks like.

So why else have I given up three months of my life to attend this festival? Fellow volunteers have described it as “summer camp for adults”.  It’s true, instead of spending my vacation drinking beer on a beach, I spend mine drinking beer in a ski-resort, but instead of hitting the slopes, I watch more films in ten days than most people do in a whole year. But it’s not just the films. It’s the people I volunteer with that make this experience special – I’ve met some of my best friends on this mountain. Also, I need to credit Sundance in my decision to attend NYU Stern. It was here in 2014 that I decided that I wanted to get my MBA and play a role in getting the films I see each January in front of audiences around the world. Two years later I am a quarter of the way through into making that goal into a reality, and this semester, along with the rest of the NYU Production Lab’s Team, will be helping plan the distribution of NYU Tisch Alum, Chloe Zhao’s film, Songs My Brothers Taught Me which, coincidentally, premiered at Sundance in 2015.

 

 

 

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