Traveling from New York to Park City may have taken 14 hours, and establishing a functioning Internet connection may have taken 24 hours, but through it all, you have to have known you could not get rid of me that easily.
And so begins the 2006 Sundance Film Festival–breathtakingly immense, ball-shrinkingly cold and exploding today with more than three dozen screenings across eight area venues. Then there are the parties, panels, performances, celebrity jurors (Terrence Howard, making his triumphant return a year after Hustle & Flow) and, of course, an opening day press conference with festival godfather Robert Redford, holding forth on Sundance’s evolution as its namesake institute celebrates its 25th anniversary.

Geoffrey Gilmore and Robert Redford wistfully recall the old days as shared by Friends With Money filmmaker Nicole Holofcener (Photo: STV)
“Your perception of the festival depends on where you sit,” said Redford, meaning philosophically and not in a 25-degree bus shelter across the steeet from the Library Theater. “If you get away from the main heart of the programming, which is basically programming for new voices in film and new filmmakers, it’s about discovery. It’s about discovering the filmmakers by creating the opportunity for them. That’s our focus. So we program this thing as a festival, which means we don’t program it according to partiality. We don’t make that choice. I wouldn’t want that on my shoulders anyway.”
Redford’s remarks–touting the growth of international and documentary cinema in particular–followed an introduction by festival director Geoffrey Gilmore, who managed to score the day’s Sundance-keyword-quota of “work” and “independent” within seconds of sitting down. The pair was joined onstage by Nicole Holofcener, the Sundance alum from way back whose latest film, Friends With Money, opened the festival Thursday night. She led the gathering on a nostalgia trip to the early ’90s, when she emerged from the institute’s writing and directing labs with her clever, assured debut feature, Walking and Talking.
“I was born at Sundance,” Holofcener said. “I have a really bad memory, but I remember panicking because I forgot how to talk to actors. Or I realized I never knew how to talk to actors. And I had these actors looking at me–one liked to rehearse, one didn’t like to rehearse. One was in a bad mood, one was insecure. And there I was, and I think that they sometimes thought I was supposed to know what I was doing, and I kept telling them, ‘No, I was told this was for practice. I was told it’s OK if I don’t know what I’m doing.’ ”
It was at that point that Holofcener said she leaned on her Sundance advisors for the luxury of advice. “I’ve got to just do it my way and not the way I think it might sound ‘intelligent’ or sound like a director,” she said she learned. “It’ll sound like me, and in a way that will get them to do what I want on film. I think that was the most valuable thing in the directing labs, I think–being able to run to these people that I respected and have have them look at me like, ‘You can do this.’ And they’re not my Mom.”
Ah, Sundance. Selective, independent and nurturing. No wonder we put up with all of this fucking snow.

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