Man on Wire
Say Sundance and you think American independents. But the festival has added international sections, and last year the big news from Park City was this documentary on the attempt of French funambulist Philippe Petit to walk on a wire from one tower of the World Trade Center to the top. Winning both the Jury and Audience awards in the World Cinema Documentary category, James Marsh’s movie later won the top doc prize in all the American critics’ groups (Boston, Chicago, L.A., New York, Toronto, the National Board of Review and the National Society of Film Critics). It stands as a tribute to the focused fury of artistic ambition, as well as an artifact from a decade of outsize dreams — when New Yorkers build the tallest slabs in the world, a Frenchman decided to straddle them and, in the unlikely host state of Utah, Robert Redford said, hey, let’s put on a festival of independent movies.
