PARK CITY, Utah -- Forget Jim Carrey, Uma Thurman or Chris Rock. If this year's Sundance film festival has a single luminary, it's our imperiled planet.
"There's a lot of activism in this year's documentaries," says festival director Geoffrey Gilmore.
And a lot of it is about the Earth. Five of the 32 documentaries in competition centre on environmental issues -- an offspring of the success of 2006's An Inconvenient Truth. They are:
- The Cove is an ecological thriller that follows a team of activists as they attempt to unravel the conspiracy behind the slaughter of dolphins in Japan.
- Dirt! The Movie examines how soil sustains us.
- The similarly ocean-themed The End of the Line reveals how, unless overfishing is curtailed, the world's seafood supply will be exhausted by the middle of this century.
- Big River Man follows a man who swims the world's rivers to draw attention to pollution.
- And Crude explores the dumping of toxic waste in the Ecuadorian Amazon.
Founder Robert Redford is clearly pleased at the explosion in volume and breadth of this year's non-fiction filmmaking. "I've always been high on documentaries," he says. For the past two decades, he explains, Sundance has strived to show that docs can be more than just educational tools -- "more advanced and more activist-oriented. There was a value to that."
Unrelated to the environment is tonight's screening of Tyson. Both director James Toback and Mike Tyson will be on hand for the premiere of the movie, which rifles around the inner thoughts of the polarizing boxing figure.
"I've observed the most surprising responses from audiences," Toback says. "He induces in people a deep emotional response, including tears at the end."
