JOE BERLINGER
With "Crude," the two-time Emmy Award-winning director makes his fourth visit to Sundance as a filmmaker, following the three films he co-directed with Bruce Sinofsky, "Brother's Keeper" (1992), "Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills" (1996) and "Metallica: Some Kind of Monster" (2004).
The Sundance vet got a sobering education the first time he hit the fest. "We went into Sundance in 1992 wanting the $3 million Michael Moore deal, and walked out with nothing," Joe Berlinger remembers. "I was shocked and stunned. But now I'm glad we had that downturn, because I learned the distribution business backwards and forwards."
"The festival has been an incredibly important place for me to premiere difficult material, and giving me the stamp of approval for my work to go out into the world," he adds.
"'Crude,'" he says, "is an inside look at what plaintiffs have to do to hold a corporation responsible and raises troubling issues of how do we define justice in the 21st century. I was moved to make it because the white man's treatment of indigenous peoples in the last 500 years is a shameful chapter in human history, and this is the modern extension of that."
R.J. CUTLER
"The September Issue'' marks Emmy-winning producer-director R.J. Cutler's first trek to Sundance in the docu feature competition, but he's been to Sundance before with the short ``Anita Liberty'' in 1997 and as a producer of Lauren Greenfield's ``Thin'' (2006).
``It's no revelation that Sundance has been the single most important force in the American documentary, in terms of film festivals,'' he says. ``Because of the platform they have given to documentaries, the health of the American documentaries has thrived. They're intent on asserting, rightly so, that nonfiction form is as important an art form as fiction film.''Cutler's latest work charts the production of the September issue of Vogue. ``I spent eight months with (Vogue editor-in-chief) Anna Wintour and her team of editors as they created the single largest issue of any magazine ever published. It's also a very funny movie about the fashion industry, the workplace and the unique, dynamic and entertaining relationship between Wintour and Grace Coddington, the creative director of Vogue.''
LIZ GARBUS
In 1998, Liz Garbus, along with co-director Jonathan Stack, won Sundance's Grand Jury Prize for ``The Farm: Angola USA,'' which went on to garner an Oscar nomination. She returned in 2002 with ``The Execution of Wanda Jean'' and appears this year with ``Shouting Fire: Stories From the Edge of Free Speech.''
``Frankly, the festival launched my career as a filmmaker,'' Garbus says. ``It was integral in my ability to make films about social issues. Sundance has a brand that allows people to understand that these are high-quality films. There's a way in which Sundance just thrusts the film into the public eye that is difficult to find without it.''
Garbus' latest pic tackles another social issue. ``Daniel Webster said, `If you have to preserve one right in a democracy, you preserve free speech, because without it, you can't fight for the others,''' she notes. ``The film looks at the people fighting those battles, from Daniel Ellsberg to an Arab-American principal in Brooklyn. And my father (First Amendment attorney Martin Garbus) is a guide, whose own cases form the spine of the film.''
DOUG PRAY
Pop-culture chronicler Doug Pray makes his third visit to Sundance's docu competition with ``Art & Copy,'' following his 1996 debut ``Hype!'' and 2001's ``Scratch.''
``It's an exploration of creativity and the innate human urge to say something, even if it's for a product,'' says Pray about his latest pic. ``Everybody is affected by commercials, whether we like it or not. We all love to hate them, but my movie is about a bunch of people who have affected culture as much as anybody else. Who the heck are these people manipulating us and making us do things and changing our culture?''
Pray favors unveiling his films in Park City. ``At Sundance, it feels like you're 100% on par with the dramatic films,'' he says, ``and I say that with a chip on my shoulder, because at most festivals, you realize you're not, where it's really about actors or celebrities. It's just an amazing platform for documentaries that you can't get at other festivals.''
ONDI TIMONER
In 2004, Grammy-nominated musicvid helmer Ondi Timoner won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize for ``Dig!,'' her seven-years-in-the-making portrait of the band the Brian Jonestown Massacre. She makes her second trek to Sundance this year with ``We Live in Public.''
The new pic, as she describes, is ``the story of the greatest Internet pioneer you've never heard of, Josh Harris, and about the experiments that he did to test the effects of technology on human interaction.'' Harris himself is ``a walking cautionary tale,'' she adds, ``because his whole life was mediated by television. At once, he's telling us what our world will be like and he's showing us the dangers of allowing the virtual world to consume our social interactions.''
Timoner credits Sundance for putting her on the map. ``And now that I'm going back, it feels like returning to a safe, nurturing environment,'' she says.
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