Filmmaker Nahid Sarvestani (left) and Farrah, the former queen of Iran
Each time I go to Sundance, I wonder if there will be one film that stands apart from the others. Perhaps this year will be more even, with many great films but none that make a huge splash? To start the third day, we downed espressos and dashed over to the Prospector Theatre to see “The Queen and I,” a film by Nahid Persson Sarvestani, an exiled Iranian revolutionary who set out to make a documentary film based on interviews with Queen Farrah, the wife of the deposed Shah of Iran. What started as an exposé of the Queen turns into a begrudging friendship between the filmmaker and subject and an endearing portrait that explores history, politics and the falsity of ideologies.
Did I mention that - on the first day - we scored six sets of tickets to daytime films? We saw two of the films today: “Toe to Toe” and “Big Fan.” After a couple of days at the festival, we start to hear people’s reviews on the films and “Sin Nombre” and “Cold Souls” were sounding like winners. Unfortunately, we had tix to “Toe to Toe,” a meandering, overly earnest film about the turbulent friendship between a poor, high achieving African American girl and a rich, slacker white girl. While the performances of the lead actors were exceptional, the plot was contrived and tiresome, making for the longest 106 minutes that I’ve spent in a theatre.
“Big Fan” was a quirky and somewhat lightweight tragi-comedy about a hardcore football fan who - in an unusual turn of events - is beaten up by his favorite New York Giants player. As a pair of lovable losers, Patton Oswalt and Kevin Corrigan have the rapport and pitch perfect performances that hold the story together. The film also explores the seamy underbelly of sports talk radio and its über obsessive fans.
After a quick dinner, we dashed to the Holiday Theatre for “No Impact Man,” a documentary that follows Colin Beavan, his wife and young daughter as they lived for one year with no net impact on the planet. As Colin puts it, “no trash, no carbon emissions, no toxins in the water, no elevators, no subway, no products in packaging, no plastics, no air conditioning, no TV, no toilets…”