PARK CITY, Utah — My first trip to the world-famous Sundance Film Festival was filled with horror.
Well, horror movies, to be more specific. But also the individual, real-life horrors that can scar lives — here in Rockford, and the rest of the world.
Over the past several years, former Rockfordian Bing Liu, who graduated from Guilford High School and then Rock Valley College before attending the University of Illinois at Chicago, brought “Minding the Gap” to life utilizing the streets of Rockford. He followed his local skateboarding buddies Keire Johnson and Zack Mulligan as they used their favorite pastime to escape from a rough home life.
I followed the film to its premiere on Sunday at the Sundance Film Festival, the nation’s largest independent film festival in the heart of snowy Park City. My coverage, I suspect, will continue as the film secures distribution deals to screen at our regional AMC cineplexes or, at the very least, air on our television sets.
But for the hundreds, perhaps thousands, from around the world who will see the documentary as it screens throughout the rest of the week at the festival, "Minding the Gap" is providing a glimpse of the real Rockford through Liu’s uncompromising lens.
I’m no stranger to the Hollywood film and entertainment scene. Before moving to the region to study sketch comedy, I was a reporter in Los Angeles, where I covered movie press junkets, production, the anniversary concert of The Beatles on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and the Golden Globes. I even worked at TMZ for a little bit, something I confess publicly in an effort to cleanse my soul from that dark, dark time in my life.
But Sundance was a whole different beast. I was there specifically, but not exclusively, to cover the premiere of “Minding the Gap.”
The beauty of attending the festival is seeing movies before the general public does, before box-office receipts and tomatometers affect your judgment. I saw three movies, and they were all world premieres; all I had to go on as I walked into the theater were the carefully curated program descriptions by Sundance staff and producers.
In my off time, I made sure I got the full Sundance experience — which involved chowing down on Airborne immune boosters to keep illnesses at bay, Ubering onto Main Street in downtown Park City to take a photo in front of the iconic Egyptian Theatre, and accidentally bumping into dozens of people only to pile into equally crowded restaurants before standing in line for an hour in the cold for the latest movie premiere.
And I loved every minute of it.
In addition to covering the premiere of "Minding the Gap," my schedule allowed me to see a couple of films in my free time that happened to be horror films. One of the phantasmagorias was “Piercing,” a gruesome cat-and-mouse psychological thriller about a man who plans to murder a call girl with an agenda of her own. I initially hated it, but it's sunk in and I've grown an appreciation for it — begrudgingly so.
I also saw “Hereditary,” an excellent little thriller that blends family drama with supernatural horror. The movie already has been acquired by A24 for release sometime this year, and I can’t recommend it enough when it comes to local theaters.
(I should have snuck into a screening of the new animated kiddie version of “White Fang” at least once just to cleanse my palate.)
Then I teared up in “Minding the Gap” watching no-name — at least at the time of this writing — Rockford residents share on film their experiences with volatile living arrangements, begging the question of when discipline ends and life-altering domestic abuse begins.
Horrors of a higher order — real, every day horrors that can transform someone — left a more emotional impact on me than the fictional horror I experienced in the other two films.
When Liu, Mulligan and Johnson, among others, participated in their Q&A after “Minding the Gap,” there was a conversation, a back-and-forth, and a boundless sense of pride and excitement about “Minding the Gap” that generated conversation and even brutal honesty from the documentary’s stars.
Mulligan saw the film for the first time with the rest of the premiere audience. He had to relive a scene from years ago where a younger, less mature and more emotional version of himself says hitting a woman can be OK depending on the circumstances. He told the audience during the Q&A that watching the film was like witnessing "his own suicide."
As for the perpetually smiling Johnson, one audience member commented that love and enthusiasm seemed to “ooze” from him.
There was honesty, dialogue, openness at the Q&A for "Minding the Gap," which permeates the film and its exploration of the lives of Liu, Mulligan, Johnson and their loved ones.
Characters swear and trespass and drink beer and smoke weed. Soundbites from WREX and WIFR keep audiences from outside the Rock River Valley abreast of our problems with violence, poverty, population loss and unemployment.
“Minding the Gap” is real. It’s raw. It’s Rockford.
Adam Poulisse: 815-987-1344; apoulisse@rrstar.com; @adampoulisse