December 2003

Suppose that you’re thinking of doing a documentary film about Elvis Presley, or a diner in your home town, or images of Islam in American popular culture. Something about the topic has caught your interest, and you think you want to take it to the next level.

First-time screenwriter/director Tom McCarthy didn’t stray too far from home when he decided to make his debut film The Station Agent. The film, set and shot about twenty-five minutes away from where McCarthy grew up in rural New Jersey, is a small-town story about an out-of-towner new to small-town life. Finbar McBride, played by veteran independent film actor Peter Dinklage, is the reclusive dwarf obsessed with trains at the center of McCarthy’s stirring film about personal connections and disconnections.

The word “edit” has a bad reputation. To lay folk, the word brings to mind overindulgence, censorship, and the property neighbored by “File” and “View.” But people in film know better.

Suppose that you’re thinking of doing a documentary film about Elvis Presley, or a diner in your home town, or images of Islam in American popular culture. Something about the topic has caught your interest, and you think you want to take it to the next level.

The word “edit” has a bad reputation. To lay folk, the word brings to mind overindulgence, censorship, and the property neighbored by “File” and “View.” But people in film know better.

In 1997, I had a decent career as a freelance magazine writer when at the beach one day I told a friend, a production executive at a major studio, about a book I’d recently reviewed. She said she thought it would make an interesting movie. A year later, I moved to LA with the option to the book and forty-three pages of a screenplay.

What is the Sundance Institute Documentary Fund?
It’s a fund to support documentaries in the US and internationally that deal with contemporary human rights issues, social justice, civil liberties, and freedom of expression. It used to be the Soros Documentary Fund.

A painter who hijacks billboards for subversive messages against corporate advertising; a man trying to convert his car to run on French fry oil; a boxing cutman who loses his touch; a homeless African American man struggling to find an apartment and reclaim his dignity; a dying Hollywood producer who bribes his son into filming his death; a woman uniting with her estranged family to reveal a tragic secret.