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Interview, April, 1996 by Graham Fuller

The Sundance Film Festival, on the other hand, is where women can be relied on to count coup these days. Sundance has emerged as one of the most egalitarian cultural events of the '90s - at times, a siege-proof bastion of political correctness - although a few years back it looked like it was turning into Testosterone City in the wake of Reservoir Dogs (1992). The nadir was 1993 when Rob Weiss's cocksure but insubstantial Amongst Friends became the buzz film at the festival and Bryan Singer's unreleasable Public Access shared the Grand Jury Prize in the Dramatic Competition. Singer went on to make The Usual Suspects, best of the post-Tarantino guys' movies. Weiss went on to a so-far-unfruitful three-picture deal at Universal and a starring role in the funniest chapter ("Amongst Jerks") of John Pierson's marvelously mordant memoir of recent indie filmmaking, Spike, Mike, Slackers & Dykes (Hyperion/Miramax Books).

Sundance '96 had a veneer of class - sponsors included Hugo Boss, Mercedes-Benz, and Absolut Vodka - but, apparently at the prompting of founding-father Robert Redford, the movies were leaner and grittier this year than they had been for a while. Much of that grit was female grit. Women directed or co-directed eleven of the sixteen films in the Documentary Competition, and although only four of the eighteen films in the Dramatic Competition had women helmers, ten of these dealt solidly with women's issues.

Of the documentaries, the one that moved me the most was Jenifer McShane and Tricia Regan's A Leap of Faith, the heroic story of a group of dedicated teachers and parents and their endeavor to found a primary school for Protestant and Catholic children against the backdrop of sectarian violence in Belfast. The film follows the principal, Mrs. Farrimond, as she tries - sometimes, heartbreakingly, in vain - to enroll pupils for the school, and balances the joy of the opening day with the dismissive comments of a Catholic priest and a Protestant MP. Watching the first girl pupil walking up to the school door, I was reminded of a shot of another little girl walking down a riot-devastated Belfast Street in the Thaddeus O'Sullivan film Nothing Personal, Sundance's powerful dramatic analogue to A Leap of Faith.

The toughest of the women's stories in the Dramatic Competition was Girls Town, a verite-style drama of three New York-borough high school girls learning to counter institutionalized misogyny. The movie was unsentimentally directed by Jim McKay, who shared a special prize for script collaboration with his lead actresses. They included Lili Taylor, who also won an acting prize for her portrayal of Valerie Solanas in Mary Harron's I Shot Andy Warhol, which, in its impressions of Warhol's failed assassin and the Factory's hollow glamour, provides not a whisper of comfort. Taylor's Solanas is an unstintingly harsh physical presence.

A more sympathetic and redeemable figure is that of Shay in Neil Abramson's black-and-white odyssey Without Air. Shay is a blues singer with a great tragic voice - but she's also a stripper and heroin addict locked in a mutually obsessive relationship with her boyfriend. The story is based on the past experiences of Lauri Crook, who essentially plays herself in the film and does phenomenally well in her acting debut. Without Air played in the American Spectrum section, newly created by Sundance's organizers to offset the upstart Slamdance Festival, which had a presence at Park City for the second year running. Abramson's raw, wrenching drama, though, was good enough for the Dramatic Competition; indeed, it belonged there as much as Care of the Spitfire Grill, a mildly feminist, crowd-pleasing tearjerker beautifully acted by Alison Elliot, Ellen Burstyn, and Marcia Gay Harden.

Not all of the women's films at Sundance impressed me. Stacy Title's anti-p.c. satire The Last Supper batters its one joke to death; Nicole Holofcener's Walking and Talking, about the loves and friendship of two Manhattan women (played by Catherine Keener and Anne Heche) involves a little walking, a lot of talking, and ends up where it begins, in twentysomething irresolution. Much more satisfying is Susan Streitfeld's Female Perversions, a gorgeous-looking satire - boldly acted by Tilda Swinton as a narcissistic fashion-plate lawyer and Amy Madigan as her scruffy kleptomaniac sister - on how women strait-jacket themselves in the quest for self-empowerment.

Sundance has always found slots for sapphism. This year, in Bound, an enjoyably tongue-in-cheek lesbians-against-the-mob thriller, directors Larry and Andy Wachowski endowed femme seductress Jennifer Tilly and implausibly hutch Gina Gershon with genuine noir glamour. Bound is a male-fantasy flick really, on a different planet than Sundance's "baby dyke" entries like 1994's Go Fish and last year's Incredibly True Adventure of 2 Girls in Love. Julia and Gretchen Dyer's Late Bloomers, a gentle tale of the romance between two women who work at a suburban school, offers a less stylized account of lesbian love. Todd Solondz's prizewinning Welcome to the Dollhouse, meanwhile, probes another kind of suburban experience: that of an unloved and unlovely eleven-year-old geek. As played by the extraordinary Heather Matarazzo, this movie character is probably the one most of us will identify with more than any other this year.