The 16th annual Sundance Film Festival kicks off today, and the most exciting thing always about Sundance is knowing that we're sure to see the debut of one of the next decade's most intriguing filmmakers. Cuz look what's happened in the last two decades:

It was still called the Utah/US Film Festival, but it had been taken over by the Sundance Institute, and what would officially become, a few years later, the Sundance Film Festival awarded its first Grand Jury Prize in 1985. It went to the Coen Brothers' Blood Simple [my review], and with that debut conferring of that award, although it might not have been obvious for a while, Sundance had earned its major mark of distinction. It became the premiere festival for picking filmmakers whose artistry would not get lost even amongst the temptations of commercial success.

There's the Coens, for one (or two). It may seem dark and grim at first glance, but there's a heightened, even brightened sheen to the reality of the neo-noir Simple, one that becomes even clearer looking back with the hindsight of their subsequent films. With Raising Arizona (1987), Miller's Crossing (1990), and Fargo (1996), the Coens -- Joel directs, Ethan produces, they both write -- have refined and redefined what the crime film can do, lending the genre an airy lightness that, paradoxically, makes even more potent the quiet bleakness that underscores even their lightest films, like Intolerable Cruelty (2003) or The Ladykillers (2004). It's what makes their greatest film to date, 2000's O Brother, Where Art Thou? [my review], feel so much more imperative than its blithe cheeriness would seem to indicate. It's an elusive sense of the mirror-image duality of good and evil, light and dark: for the Coens, one cannot exist without the other, even cinematically, and it's there in the sly humor of Blood Simple.

If there's one way to pin down the adventurous career of Steven Soderbergh, it might be to call him unpredictable -- he is constantly, with every film, playing around with genre, with using new technology to tell stories in a new way, even with the concept of "the remake." None of his films looks much like any of his other films. But perhaps this could have been predicted in the wake of his 1989 Sundance win of an Audience Award for his Sex, Lies, and Videotape, which upended conventions of filmed storytelling with its characters who speak directly to the camera, speaking specifically for an audience ... with its clever positioning of a filmmaker -- the James Spader character -- as complicit in the act of coaxing and cajoling a filmed story into being. Which seems to go without saying, when you think about it, and yet somehow never becomes apparent with most films by other filmmakers. Soderbergh, though, took that position and turned it into the sneaky, deeply shrewd, fundamental joke of his Ocean's 11 [my review], which makes no pretense to being anything other than the director and his friends offering their take on a classic movie they all love ... which is what makes it one of the most brilliant popcorn entertainments ever made.

Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs made such a splash at Sundance in 1992 that it's worth pointing out that the film garnered no awards at the festival. The next year, though, Robert Rodriguez drew on the same love for the ol' ultraviolence that was bubbling through the zeitgeist with his $7,000 El Mariachi, winner of 1993's Audience Award. In the decade-plus since, Rodriguez has become a major player in Hollywood by steadfastly refusing to be a major player -- though his films cost more than seven grand these days, he maintains almost total control by keeping budgets lean (reportedly none of his films has cost more than $40 million) and handling more production chores than seems humanly possible, acting as his own "one-man film crew" by embracing digital technology, particularly in his phenomenally successful Spy Kids series -- Rodriguez remains one of the most resolutely independent Sundance alums. More importantly, from the viewer's standpoint, Rodriguez has helped nurture, if so tender a word can be said to apply, the modern eye for balletic stylishness and a positively Shakespearean poeticism to onscreen brutality from his El Mariachi days, through the completion of that trilogy with Desperado and Once Upon a Time in Mexico, and into his current collaboration with pal Tarantino: their upcoming Grind House is one of the more anticipated films of 2007, and is practically guaranteed to be one of the most casually violent movies of the year. His resignation from the Directors Guild of America over a credited issue with his Sin City [my review] does not appear to be hurting his career one bit.

Kevin Smith, Todd Haynes, Ed Burns, Wes Anderson, Neil LaBute ... all have earned major kudos at Sundance and gone on to make not just films that have been even more successful but that have also retained the unique voices and viewpoints that endeared them to Sundance audiences in the first place. It makes the experience of Park City even more piquant: you're almost guaranteed to be among the first to see work that everyone will be talking about in the short term, by artists we'll be talking about for a long time to come.

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MaryAnn Johanson
author of The Totally Geeky Guide to The Princess Bride
minder of FlickFilosopher.com

This is part of Film.com's coverage of the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, which will include daily diaries from Film.com staff, video updates from the streets of Park City, photo galleries of celeb attendees and movie premieres, and actor and director interviews. Check back here throughout the festival for continually updated information.

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