Sundance Film Festival 2012

Goats

Having a self-absorbed New Age mother and an estranged father means 15-year-old Ellis Whitman has grown up relying on an unconventional guardian: a goat-trekking, marijuana-growing sage called Goat Man. So when Ellis decides to leave the alternative ways of his desert homestead for a stuffy East Coast prep school, major changes are in store. But not in the way you’d think. Though often stoned, the exceedingly smart and capable Ellis effortlessly aces school and excels at track. As the year progresses, it’s his relationships with the adults in his life that test him, challenging his beliefs about responsibility and trustworthiness.

With its expansive vision of family and passel of delicious oddball characters transposed from screenwriter Poirier’s novel with deadpan naturalism, GOATS wryly balances satire with poignancy and tenderness. Ellis’s eventual disillusionment with his various “parents” forces him to seek and find strength within and to realize the truth about love: it’s never perfect, but it is always there.

Director: Chris Neil
DP: Wyatt Troll

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I Am Not a Hipster

Things are not looking good for Brook, a young, talented singer/songwriter who has become the clichéd tortured artist. Slow to come to terms with the death of his mother, Brook is self-absorbed, aggressive, and the major obstruction to his own career success. His isolation is lifted when his three sisters and estranged father come to spread his mother’s ashes. Brook’s loving sisters have a magical effect on his anger and apathy, suggesting there may be hope for the misanthropic musician after all.

Writer/director Destin Daniel Cretton (whose short film Short Term 12 won the Jury Prize at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival) returns to the Festival with an extraordinarily moving debut feature. Set in a wannabe-cool, art-and-indie rock scene, I AM NOT A HIPSTER is true to its title. Not tragically hip but, rather, emotionally rich, this portrait of a man in pain celebrates the healing power of family love. It aims straight for the heart and hits it.

Director: Destin Daniel Cretton
DP: Brett Pawlak

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