It’s not often that music legend Neil Young makes a stop in the red-state of Utah. It’s even more unusual that the 66-year-old Canadian came to Park City for two days, and didn’t even pick up a guitar. As part of this year’s Slamdance Film Festival, Young joined Academy Award-winning director Jonathan Demme in a lively, two-hour Q-and-A with indie filmmakers and fans to discuss their latest film, Neil Young Journeys.
Neli (Ana Stojanovska) left Bulgaria to go to America, where she ended up getting engaged to Scott (John Keabler), but when she returns to her home country to see her grandmother and her friends one last time, she must decide between the protection and financial security Scott can offer her and the crazy, alcohol-driven passion she finds in her longtime friend, Val (Valeri Yordanov).
No Ashes, No Phoenix follows the Phoenix Hagen, a basketball team in Hagen, Germany, as they fight to maintain their newcomer status in Germany’s 1st league. Knowing that they’ll be booted back down to the 2nd league without a few wins, Phoenix Hagen’s head coach signs on another American player–Michael Jordan.
Roger Paradiso documents the rise and fall of hip hop pioneers Wonder Mike and Master Gee, original members of The Sugarhill Gang, the group responsible for the seminal record “Rapper’s Delight.” After the release of the world’s first commercial hop hop composition, Wonder Mike and Master Gee’s artistic credit and monetary earnings were taken by Sugar Hill Record execs, throwing the two into a 30-year struggle to reclaim their place in hip hop history.
“I’m in love with the concept of being in love,” says amateur porn producer Dan Leal, aka Porno Dan, in the beginning of this documentary following his unrelenting search for love amid porn conventions and gangbangs. But for co-dependent sex addict Porno Dan, love is hard to come by when sex with hundreds of women is business as usual.
20 years ago, Shaun Parker made a horrible student film. In Hope. You Like Crap., Parker shows the film in its entirety, talking shit on it and his former pretentious self with amusingly scathing, self-depreciating commentary.
Peter Baxter, the current president of Slamdance and one of its founders, revealed his latest documentary in a special screening during the Slamdance 2012 festival. Narrated by Sean Bean, Wild in the Streets focuses on the town of Ashbourne, Derbyshire, England, built along the Henmore River, where the townspeople have been playing a game called Shrovetide for over 1,000 years.
A riotous and irreverent tale of three high school virgins and their quest to “fuck shit up,” Bindlestiffs is like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Superbad on crack—literally. Suspended from school for graffiti after The Catcher in the Rye is banned, Andrew, Luke and John check into an inner-city motel, determined to experience the world, Holden Caulfield style. What follows is a week of debauchery as the boys go looking for love, good times and poon.
We hear Ozzy Osbourne wailing in the background as Damien rises into the air, hanging several feet above the ground from the hooks in his back. Then the film fades to black—at least for me, because I passed out cold. I came to as the end credits rolled—apparently I had slumped over onto the audience member to my left and had missed the end of the film.
Daniel, a middle-aged man with a wife and son, serves as 90-year-old Edeltraut’s caretaker while her son, Sven, works during the day. When Edeltraut, suffering from dementia, locks David out on her balcony and takes off, David and Sven search the streets of Berlin to track her down. Thus begins the start of their unspoken secret romance.
