Smash hit

The Sundance premiere of This Film is Not Yet Rated is apt, given that many of the offended film-makers have shown their films at the festival over the years. Apt also because Sundance’s geographic location is entirely contradictory. Presided over by the iconic Robert Redford, the festival is the bedrock of the independent film community in the US and yet it is held in Park City, smack dab in the centre of Utah, the most conservative state in the union.

Conservative or liberal, independent or studio-bound, Dick had a hard time finding people willing to talk about the ratings system, let alone finance a film about it.

“There was a surprising level of paranoia,” says Dick. “Some film-makers were afraid to speak because they might get a harsher rating on their next film. In terms of funding, we went to a number of people who said they really wanted to help us make the film but who got word from ‘higher up’ not to proceed.” While This Film is Not Yet Rated provides a controversial anchor to proceedings at this year’s Sundance, the festival is marked once again by a tantalising mixture of small budget films and big studio extravaganzas. The festival’s opening night film, Friends with Money, is classic Sundance. The director, Nicole Holofcener, is as indie as they come — her 1996 feature debut Walking and Talking had its premiere there — as are her supporting actresses Catherine Keener, Francis McDormand and Joan Cusack. Her headliner, Jennifer Aniston, though, is definitely not. An ensemble drama, the film follows a quartet of friends, three of whose lives rotate around their well-to-do families while Aniston struggles to keep her head above water. Closing night seems similarly structured: Nick Cassavettes’s Alpha Dog features the Hollywood heavyweights Bruce Willis and Sharon Stone along with Justin Timberlake. But the Sundance habitué Emile Hirsch runs the show in this true-life story of a young drug dealer who became the youngest person to land on the FBI’s Most Wanted list.

Sundance also boasts a strong documentary competition. Many consider the cost of the War on Terror and the conflict in Iraq. Patricia Foulkrod’s Ground Truth: After the Killing Ends investigates how the US military trains its soldiers, while in Iraq in Fragments James Longley provides three portraits of contemporary Iraq.

The German film-maker Heidi Specogna’s The Short Life of José Antonio Guiterrez considers the first US soldier to die in the war, a Guatemalan whose family came to America looking for a better life.

“During the 1990s you had independent films that were insular, even navel-gazing,” says Geoffrey Gilmore, the director of Sundance. “It’s changed a great deal. You could argue that it was 9/11 that did it but I think it was already changing at the millennium. The world feels more vulnerable.”

The Sundance Film Festival begins today at Park City, Utah. http://festival.sundance.org/2006/

Page 2: How film classification works in Britain ()

Choice cuts: how film classification works in Britain

The British Board of Film Classification is an independent body that has classified cinema films, advertisements and trailers since it was set up in 1912.

Statutory powers over film classification remain with local authorities, but the board was introduced to establish uniformity in ratings across the country. It also classifies videos and DVDs and video games with particularly violent or sexual content.

The board processes around 15,000 submissions each year, of which around 600 are feature films viewed by the board’s 25 examiners before their release in cinemas, at a cost of around £650 per film. At least two examiners then watch the film in cinema conditions — considering among other things the impact of special effects and soundtrack on the likely audience — and recommend a rating.

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