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Slamdance: Park City Silver Mine. (photo by David Geffner)
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Packed Slamdance gatherings book-ended an eclectic slate of 12 dramatic and documentary features screening in competition this year. Jury prize for Best Feature went to
The Holy Land, Eitan Gorlin's soul-searching narrative about a young rabbinical student in Israel who falls in love with a Russian prostitute. Gorlin, who was in attendance at the DGA-sponsored Pinot luncheon for the 2001 Los Angeles Film Festival, is a former yeshiva student who talked about the origins of the
Holy Land.
"I worked in a bar in Jerusalem very much like Mike's Place in the film," Gorlin said in the post-screening Q&A. "I had written an unfinished novel about that bar and this Canadian war photographer who owned it. I had also grown up Orthodox. So all these things came together in this screenplay I wrote, including a recent phenomenon I saw when I was living in Israel where a million Russian immigrants have come into the country in the last ten years. Israel only has five million people. Less than half those Russians are Jewish. The country has a real feeling of Casablanca with all these immigrants there and I wanted my film to capture that spirit."
Other "Sparky" Award winners at Slamdance this year included the Documentary Grand Jury Prize for My Father the Genius, directed by Lucia Small. A special grand jury honor, as well as the Audience Award for Best Feature went to Mark Moskowitz for Stone Reader, a non-fiction tale of why a critically acclaimed debut novelist dropped out of sight. The spirit of Slamdance award went to Heaven's Crossroad, a penetrating journey through Vietnam from director Kimi Takesue.
Describing her experience as a Slamdance juror, DGA Independent Directors Committee member Penelope Spheeris said it was, "exhilarating that all mainstream filmmakers could use to get back in touch with the passion that made them filmmakers in the first place." Spheeris, who recently went back to her own guerilla roots by self-distributing The Decline of Western Civilization Part III, was a visible and enthusiastic presence at many of the Slamdance offerings.
