In addition to Spudwrench-Kahnawake Man, Chile, Memory, Silent Tears, Jerry and Tom, Bruce Sweeney’s Dirty and Thom Fitzgerald’s The Hanging Garden, Rosa’s Time from first-time director Dan Hawkes of Toronto’s Ink Monkeys Film and Toronto screenwriter/playwright Thom Ernst will make up the Canadian contingent at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival. It will screen as part of the Native Program.

Sundance, in Park City, Utah, Jan. 15-25, will premier the 17-minute tale of a mysterious salesman played by Gary Farmer (Dead Man), who encounters a young girl and her single mother and alters their life forever. Rosa’s Time is produced by Hawkes and Alan Collins.

Besides utilizing the strong on-screen presence of Farmer, the film boasts an array of high-profile credits. Edited by the Genie Award-winning team of Ron Sanders (Crash) and Tad Seaborn, Rosa’s Time was shot in a well-shadowed black and white by veteran dop Derek Van Lint (Alien). The $20,000 short was financed by the National Film Board, the Ontario Arts Council and a tvontario presale.

In addition to screening Rosa’s Time and looking for a distributor and international sales, Hawkes and Ernst say they intend to use their Sundance invite to pitch upcoming projects Too Quiet Blue, a feature about radio and wwii, and Pie’s Extra, a short about a man who pays a woman to act motherly towards him.

The doc side of Sundance

While the excitement builds around Sundance, especially on the fiction side, it’s a tough market to crack for doc distribution, even for seasoned filmmakers like Errol Morris – despite the egalitarian non-fiction programming emphasis of the festival.

Morris, one of the half-dozen American documentary filmmakers to make a buck at the box office, has little distribution advice for the producers showcased in this year’s Sundance doc competition.

‘Good luck.’

While he says a screening at the prestigious festival guarantees distributors will step up to the plate, there’s no guarantee they’ll swing. And even if the distributors come through with a single or homer for a documentary, the North American theatrical realities are still pretty bleak.

For example, Morris’ recent documentary Fast, Cheap & Out of Control debuted at Sundance last year and was picked up by Sony Classics for theatrical distribution. It showed on 40 screens in the u.s. and Canada, and as of the end of 1997 was still in the red.

Fast, Cheap – chronicling the eccentric lives of four men – comes on the heels of several box-office successes for Morris including The Thin Blue Line and A Brief History of Time, which grossed in the neighborhood of $2 million each. His next doc about an electric chair repair man already has studio backing.

In 1997, the number one box-office draw for documentaries was Warren Miller, whose latest formulaic ski-themed annual, Snow Riders, grossed about $2.7 million and ranked 200th on the top 300 films list. The Celluloid Closet (Sony Classics) was number 209, Al Pacino’s star-driven Looking for Richard (Fox Searchlight) was 225, Microcosmos (Miramax) was 223 and Anne Frank Remembered (Sony Classics) was 225. The total domestic box office for the 15 highest grossing documentaries was only $7.2 million.

However, North American audiences are becoming aware of how much documentary programming they enjoy on their home sets through 60 Minutes or The Discovery Channel and theatrical releases could eventually benefit as a result.

Documentaries are a slowly but steadily improving worldwide trend, says Betsy McLane of the International Documentary Association, which represents 2,000 members in 25 countries.

‘When you go to a documentary and you see real life, you can’t dismiss it,’ says McLane, describing the documentary experience. ‘As artful as it may be, the documentary at its heart is still telling a truth. That’s a very different experience than walking out of a theater and saying `That was fun, but it was just a movie.’ ‘

TV market the best bet

In the meantime, tv is the real market for contemporary doc makers, and broadcasters hungry for non-fiction content are becoming increasingly voracious.

Elizabeth Dreyer is director of acquisitions at Miramax, which lists Michael Moore’s next corporate America essay The Big One as the only documentary on its new release slate.

‘We will always watch documentaries at the festivals,’ she says, maintaining that distributors keep an open mind. ‘If you’ve gotten that far, then we want to see what you have. There is definitely a market [for documentaries], but it’s about deciding what will play to an art-house crowd versus the rest of America. It may be that that great documentary will do incredibly on cable.’

The easier tv sales are for documentaries which tackle themes such as the animal kingdom, nature, history, travel, science and other topics that dovetail with the growing number of specialty channels, says New York-based distributor Jonathan Miller of First Run/Icarus.

Primarily a television distributor with more than 500 documentary titles in his 600-film inventory, Miller says the tougher sales involve films with socio-political messages, foreign languages or out-of-the-mainstream themes.

Documentaries lucky enough to be shown theatrically, even in special venues such as New York’s Film Forum, also have a leg up on the competition vying for broadcaster interest, says Miller. Even if they don’t make money, he adds, the theatrical release adds value to the after market.

With files from Andy Hoffman.