ART + CULTURE

Out of a total of 5,874 films submitted to this year's Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, two San Diego filmmakers made the grade, while another film about San Diego was among the 255 accepted.

For any aspiring filmmaker, this is big. With the possible exception of the Cannes Film Festival, Sundance is the most important film festival in the world.

The careers of cinema giants like Kevin Smith, Steven Soderbergh, Terry Zwigoff, Quentin Tarantino, the Coen brothers, Todd Haynes, Robert Rodriguez, Steve James, Todd Solondz, Liz Garbus and Patricia Cardosa took off after hitting Sundance.

Last year's winners-Capturing the Friedmans by Andrew Jarecki, American Splendor by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, The Station Agent by Tom McCarthy and Whale Rider by Niki Caro-were on the admiring tongues of millions once the rest of the world found out what the Sundance people already knew.

“I hate to sound clichéd, but getting into Sundance was a dream come true,” says Eric Chaikin, whose film, Word Wars, was one the more popular documentaries at Sundance this year.

The game of Scrabble is the talk of the Park City this week, thanks to Chaikin and Julian Petrillo's entry.

For some people, it's just a game. But for Joe Edley, Matt Graham, Marlon Hill and “G.I” (gastrointestinal) Joel Sherman, Scrabble can be their stair to stardom if they win the National Scrabble Championship in San Diego.

None of them are necessarily likeable. Graham is a horrible misanthrope. Hill seeks out a Tijuana hooker during the Championship. Sinus Sherman brutalizes the Beatles' “The Long and Winding Road.” Edley is a lousy father.

“I would never cross an ethical boundary and deliberately make people bad,” says Chaikin. Two of his prickly characters-Hill and Sherman-are actually on hand at Sundance, schooling anyone who challenged them to their chosen game board of expertise.

“When I first got into Scrabble, I soon learned that there are levels to the game that are not even conceivable,” says Chaikin.

For trivia's sake, he explains that an anagram for San Diego is “diagnose.”

Nearby, the stars of his film cream two unlucky, aspiring wordsmiths.

Although critics have claimed Sundance has become too commercial, this year's content sure seems dedicated to independent filmmaking, not only in terms of aesthetics and subject matter, but form as well.

The interactive films used in the Sundance Online Film Festival (now in its fourth year) not only challenge viewers' perceptions of the film experience, especially our notions of where we experience them, when we experience them, and in what order the stories are told.

“It's one of the few places that has an online film festival that accepts this kind of [controversial] material,” says Carroll Parrot Blue, a professor of film theory and history at San Diego State University. “It's cutting edge and it's an attempt to try to do something different. They're trying to help the future move to that next step, so it's an honor to be involved in the next step.”

Blue is referring to her and Kristy H.A. Kang's film, The Dawn at My Back: Memoir of a Black Texas Upbringing, based on Blue's titular book of the same name. Set against Blue's former hometown of Houston, Tex., The Dawn at My Back illustrates how racism in the 20th century permeated everything from interfamily relationships to recurring nightmares.

Blue started writing the book about 10 years ago in order to readdress the role African Americans played in the history of Houston-especially her mother, Mollie Carroll Parrot.

“She spent her entire life in community activism,” yet went unheralded for her work, Blue explains. The author-filmmaker believes the cause for this is that “historians only go to the official archives, [which contain] people who have been in newspapers. My mother was never a public office holder, she was never interviewed by any newspapers... she was just underneath the radar.”

With that in mind, Blue didn't want to put her book into traditional narrative form a là Hollywood, but vis-à-vis the Internet, where the archival materials she created could be accessible to millions. Hopefully, this way it would inspire similar works-perhaps about San Diego's own racist history.

“All of San Diego had places where blacks could not buy land up until the '60s,” says Blue.

Cedar Sherbert, a Native American from the Kumeyaay tribe, could probably tell us a few things about racism in San Diego, but he has chosen to tell a more personal story in his short film, Memory.

“It's about mourning and loss,” explains Sherbert, who attended Granite Hills High School in El Cajon. “As Indians, we all experience loss at a young age. It's about pain that ripples through generations.”

Shot on the Manzanita Reservation in California, the filmmaker from Santa Ysabel Reservation cast this story about the confrontation between a little girl (Raven Lockwood) against an old woman named Tantoo Cardinal.

John Reis, frontman for San Diego rock icons Rocket from the Crypt, composed the score.

Thanks to his acceptance by Sundance, Sherbert says, he's been contacted by officials from film festivals in New Zealand and Indonesia, as well as the Smithsonian Institute and the San Diego Film Festival.