Sundance Gets it Right, Reeler Gets to Eat

Sarah Steele in Myna Joseph's short film Man, en route to Park City

By S.T. VanAirsdale

I am often accused of taking a few too many dogmatic moral stands on The Reeler. Maybe I do, but when the cosmos listens, everybody wins. To wit, this note about Columbia alum Myna Joseph's brilliant short film Man, which I viewed at the Woodstock Film Festival and wrote about here Oct. 16:

Man's desaturated ennui recalls a few of the acclaimed shorts of Joseph's Columbia colleagues; the overturned rustic idyll of Ian Olds' Bomb and triangulated crisis of Fellipe Barbosa's Salt Kiss come immediately to mind (not coincidentally, Barbosa edited Man). But Man feels less alloyed than each of those films; its introspection, while not necessarily autobiographical, informs something more organic -- tragic realism as opposed to magic realism, a world where so much as a stroked finger symbolizes a watershed of compassion. It's an astonishing directing debut, the kind of fearless first effort you envy, embrace and pray for. If I don't see Joseph this winter in Park City, I'm starting a hunger strike on [Sundance Film Festival director] Geoff Gilmore's doorstep.

And then this from Sundance's short film program, announced Thursday:

MAN (Director: Myna Joseph) –- Maggie and her sister form an unusual bond during an encounter with a young man.

Huge, huge kudos to Joseph, and many thanks to the Sundance shorts programmers who narrowed 5,107 submissions to 83 selections; I was starving.

Check back with The Reeler in the weeks ahead for more news and interviews featuring Sundance 2008's NYC delegation.

Posted at December 6, 2007 2:18 PM