Seattle Movie at Sundance

The Sundance Film Festival opens Jan. 15 in Park City, Utah. Among the 118 features is at least one Seattle-made title (I'm still digging through the list): Humpday, by writer-director Lynn Shelton. It's her first film at Sundance, so congratulations. It's entered in the U.S. Dramatic Competition category--that's 16 titles culled from 1,026 entries, according to The New York Times (full list here), which give you an idea of the fest's selectivity and the nature of Shelton's achievement.

Her prior features, which some will recall from SIFF, are We Go Way Back (SIFF '06) and My Effortless Brilliance (SIFF '08), which we did not love. But we did respect the way Shelton stuck to her small-bore story, basically an unembellished two-hander about a pair of dudes, once old friends but now estranged, stuck in a cabin. Her new work sounds somewhat similar, only funnier and more eventful (we dearly hope). A release from her production outfit describes the film thusly:



So, let's hope the bromance does well in homophobic Utah, and then makes its way to SIFF '09.