Che for today

The Latin American revolutionary got on his bike and stole the show at this year's Sundance festival. B Ruby Rich reports

By B Ruby Rich

Thursday January 22 2004

Mark the date: this year's Sundance film festival, the 20th under Robert Redford's stewardship, is the one in which meaning returned to US independent film. The 2004 dramatic line-up includes film after film with a willingness to engage with the world, alongside an unprecedented political commitment in documentary. It's as though the gods of cinema smiled on the anniversary and, forgoing the usual cake and fireworks, offered up a reminder that the festival has roots.

One of the strongest films in the dramatic competition is Joshua Marston's Maria Full of Grace, a study of New York's Colombian immigrant community without a false note. The film tracks a beautiful teenage protagonist, Maria, from her home in a village outside Bogota to her fateful decision to accept a job as a "mule" transporting drugs to the US.

Shorn of fiction film's usual drug formulas, Maria Full of Grace instead focuses on the psychological elements that lead a person to such a decision, the unbearable pressure of a flight with a belly full of drug pellets, the suspense of customs interrogations and, finally, the consequences on the ground.

Think of it as Traffic turned inside out and viewed through the other end of the telescope. In case you're wondering where that model started, look no further than the pair of films that bookend the festival.

Mario Van Peebles's ponderously-titled homage to his dad, Baadasssss! (aka Gettin' the Man's Foot Outta Your Ass!) is showing alongside the Sundance Institute's latest preservation effort, Melvin Van Peebles's Sweet Sweetback's Baad Asssss Song. The smoothly entertaining Baadasssss! takes us back to the moment of creation of that landmark movie, fusing the book that the elder Van Peebles published after his movie's success with the point of view of his son the director, then a kid tagging along with daddy. It is mightily entertaining, given the whirling kaleidoscope of 1971 hipsterism, hucksterism, orgies and Black Panther film-promotion strategies - and a fascinating oedipal drama.

Baadasssss! is one of a trio of impressive African-American history fables at the festival, but the two others replace family legacy with astonishing invention. The provocative CSA: The Confederate States of America is an odd hybrid, a sci-fi mockumentary that poses as a BBC (renamed BBS) production from an alternate universe. Film-maker Kevin Willmott takes a simple, daring conceit and pushes it to the max.

The idea? The north lost the civil war, the south won - simple. Framed as television programming, with fictional commercials and newscasts alternating with the BBS history programme, CSA sucker-punches its audiences with poisonous hilarity. Take the shot of the first astronaut on the moon, for instance, planting the Confederate flag. Or the story of Abraham Lincoln trying to escape to Canada with the help of Harriet Tubman, founder of the underground railroad. Besides Willmott's brilliant history lessons, his film's pleasures also derive from the spot-on parodies of documentary form and television marketing. Slave-shopping network, anyone?

In Brother to Brother, first-time filmmaker Rodney Evans joins Van Peebles and Willmott in mining history, but with a different goal: to find kindred spirits in the Harlem Renaissance and provide an anchor for his film's present-day African-American protagonist, lost in the homophobia of the contemporary African-American community.

Bruce Nugent, a central figure of that history who ended up in homeless shelters in New York as an old man (for real), is re-imagined and revived. Willmott re-animates the time of the Harlem Renaissance in black-and-white flashbacks that show us Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman in high style, putting out their journal Fire! and turning heads as thoroughly as Van Peebles would, decades later. Undoubtedly influenced by Isaac Julien's pioneering Looking for Langston, Brother is time travel at its best.

Documentaries have frequently commanded attention at Sundance, but after the break-out success of theatrical "docs" in 2003, this year there was a veritable race to pick the horses. The Corporation, a brilliant Canadian film that traces the history of that institution and terrifyingly documents its permutations and effects, is an early favourite. Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott have rounded up interviews with the likes of Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein. Lots of this year's documentaries have their subjects in tow, but if No Logo's Klein were to appear, she might well have been thrown into shock by the promotional fanfare all over town.

Other subjects do, indeed, make appearances on screen as well as off, to stunning effect. Former Illinois governor George Ryan was the featured speaker at a party to launch Katy Chevigny and Kirsten Johnson's Deadline, a chilling documentary on his historic decision to suspend the death penalty and commute it to life sentences for everyone on his state's death row during the final days of his administration.

For Heir to an Execution, director Ivy Meeropol played the dual role of director and subject, given that she's the granddaughter of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, whose story she re-examines here; her dad, Michael, joined the audience for discussions. At the screening of Neverland: The Rise and Fall of the Symbionese Liberation Army, a question about the omission of Patricia Hearst in the film was answered by Hearst herself, popping up in the audience.

In the end, however, the most chilling subject participation at the festival took the form of absence. Persons of Interest, an unusual collaboration by dramatic filmmaker Alison Maclean and Tobias Perse, focuses attention on the horrifying fate of Arab residents rounded up under the National Security Act in the days after September 11. One at a time, they or their families appear on screen in a stripped-down, minimal set that resembles nothing so much as an unfurnished prison cell. With sadness, dignity, humour and bitterness, they and their relatives tell their stories. A postscript explains why they aren't in Park City, as it spells out the follow-up saga of imprisonment and deportation. Unlike CSA, this is no science fiction.

Of course, there's a huge section of international film as well, though few are premieres and therefore get less attention. One that was, and was eagerly anticipated, was the world premiere of Walter Salles's saga of Che Guevara's youthful adventure on a motorcycle around Latin America, The Motorcycle Diaries. Impossibly romantic, lushly beautiful, it's a sort of feelgood fable about the making of a revolutionary. The first half is more travelogue than anything else, but as Che (sexily played by Gael García Bernal) and his pal Alberto Granado enter the Amazon and stop to work at a leper colony, the emotional impact kicks in and the film soars. It was snapped up for distribution.

What a good year for a film on Che. As I prepared to descend the mountain yesterday, Al Gore had already arrived and MoveOn.org, the new online organising group that propelled Howard Dean to national attention, was preparing its first Sundance event with a long line of film-makers on tap as hosts. This is a new Sundance, one I've never seen before. And, I must say, I like it.