It's Sundance time!

This weekend sees the opening of the Sundance Film Festival, founded by Robert Redford, and held every year in Utah. When I went back in 2003 there was no cool documentary on the exploits of Banksy, and his fellow street artists.

"'The story of how one man set out to film the un-filmable. And failed,' is how Banksy describes 'Exit Through the Gift Shop'."



"Many here in Utah are already surely wondering, will the artist be in attendance?"

"'Banksy is a graffiti artist with a global reputation whose work can be seen on walls from post-hurricane New Orleans to the Palestinian segregation wall in the West Bank,'" said the festival, in a description.

"Fiercely guarding his anonymity to avoid prosecution, Banksy has so far resisted all attempts to be captured on film. ‘Exit Through the Gift Shop’ is the story of how an eccentric French shop keeper and amateur filmmaker attempted to locate and befriend Banksy, only to have the artist turn the camera back on its owner with spectacular results. Billed as ‘the world’s first street art disaster movie’ the film contains exclusive footage of Banksy, Shepard Fairey, Invader and many of the world’s most infamous graffiti artists at work.”

"‘Exit Through the Gift Shop’ is one of those films that comes along once in a great while, a warped hybrid of reality and self -induced fiction while at the same time a totally entertaining experience,' said John Cooper, Director of the Sundance Film Festival, in a statement. 'The story is so bizarre I began to question if it could even be real… but in the end I didn’t care. I feel bad I won’t be able to shake the filmmaker’s hand and tell him how much I love this film. I think I will shake everyone’s hand that day and hope I hit on Banksy somewhere. I love his work in all forms.'" Indiewire

The founder, Redford, told reporters that in recent years he has felt Sundance was "sliding" from its original vision because indie film began to mesh with studio movies. But Reuters noted that "In fact, some of the best indie films of recent years were products of divisions of Hollywood studios that worked in the arena for low-budget moviemaking. "Slumdog Millionaire," for instance, was originally backed by Warner Independent Pictures, a now defunct unit of Warner Bros."

Mammoth...Traffic's gonna blow!

On Friday I met at Lumme’s house in Brentwood where Paul C met us to drive the 6 hours to Mammoth, via Mojave. She was a PhD candidate at UCLA in mathematics and and I guessed she was from Finland. Nope, she was from Estonia, next door, but I was close ;-)

“Let’s leave by 6pm”, Paul said, “traffic’s going to blow!” You see, Paul is a surfer and a volleyball player who lives on the beach. He is Ecudorian, works as a film editor and talks in affirmative “beach speak”, dude! We headed off in his Nissan Armada which comfortably carried the three of us and our winter gear up the 405, 5, 14, 395 freeways. In the car I asked Paul: “When something ‘stinks’ we know it’s bad, but when something ‘sucks’ or ‘blows’ what does that mean?!” “Good question...”, Paul said. Lumme was silent. “I mean, is it a sexual swear word thing…to suck or to blow?”, I continued.



We stopped off at Denny’s in Mojave. We were nearly halfway there. The food was consistently Denny’s. When Tina and I went skiing in Park City during Sundance Film Festival (1999) we loved our Denny’s that was under our Best Western motel. Their skillets of home fries, sausage and cheese hit the spot on a cold, winter’s day, just before skiing. May be not the healthiest start to the day, but crazy tasty!

Paul looked around at all the white families in Denny’s and said we were the most diverse group in the place. Understatement! I mean, I couldn’t get over the fact that we’d only known each other a few hours, were from different backgrounds and were voluntarily going to share our long weekend together. But we were getting on fine!

It was near midnight when we arrive safely in Mammoth. Paul had stayed the condo last week, but that was the only constant. This weekend, we were all new to each other. Inside I met Joe, the financial advisor from Seattle and Suzanne from LA whom I’d had a couple of chats with. She was blonde, tallish and pretty in a Claire Waller kinda way. In fact, exactly like Claire Waller. For those of you who don’t remember her, Claire was the singer/pianist girl who Jason met and made part of the band I named Fat o’ The Land, along with Nick. We had some minor success on a Sickle Cell charity recording with fellow Bristolians, Tricky, Massive Attack,

So, this was my Big Brother experience: five strangers, a condo and Mammoth Mountain. All brought together through Facebook. (As it happened Joe and Suzanne actually met in Whistler earlier in the ski season, but you get the jist.)