Tabitha Jackson: Sundance Film Festival 2022

The Treatment

KCRW

Arts

4.6 • 639 Ratings

🗓️ 18 January 2022

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week on The Treatment, Elvis welcomes Tabitha Jackson, Director of the Sundance Film Festival. This year’s festival has shifted to an online format because of the pandemic. Jackson tells The Treatment this shift will make the festival’s offerings even more inclusive than in years past. She talks about why she is worried about the “tyranny of story,” and says we have to move away from the traditional western three-act story structure to allow for a more transcendent movie-watching experience. And she recommends festival goers seek out the films they don’t think they will like.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From KCRW Santa Monica and KCRW.com, it's The Treatment.
0:14.6	Welcome to the Treatment, the Home Edition. I'm Elvis Mitchell. Well, what do you do after you've
0:19.4	shaved your dreadlocks off in front of a crowd of people and got buried in the past few years? I know you take over a world known film festival in the midst of a pandemic. I'm, of course, speaking to Tabitha Jackson, who is the director of the Sundance Film Festival, which is imminent a few days away. First of all, Tabith, thanks so much for doing this.
0:36.9	It's an absolute pleasure, Elvis. Great to be here.
0:39.9	There's a question I wanted to ask you. What was your first film festival experience?
0:43.5	What did you, the first festival you went to, if you remember it?
0:46.2	I think it was actually the Sheffield International Documentary Festival in the UK.
0:54.0	And it took me a while to be able to afford to go to a film festival.
0:59.3	And that was the first one.
1:01.5	And I just remember the thrill of it, the thrill of being able to talk to people about
1:07.7	the films we'd all watched.
1:08.8	And then the slightly insane kidney damaging social
1:14.0	life that also went with that.
1:18.6	Well, I guess because the first time we go to festivals and you get a chance to be around
1:23.4	people who think the way we do, who have the same excitement about film that we have,
1:27.7	and getting to see a movie early for the first time is really an indelible experience, isn't it?
1:33.2	It is.
1:34.3	And one of the things, I was just, because I was just trying to think, what did I see at that festival?
1:39.8	One of the things I saw was a slate of Iranian films put together by Mark Cousins.
1:47.1	And at that festival, we sat down for the first time and I was able then to support him
1:53.9	making his first documentary called The First Movie.
1:57.9	But it's that sense of discovery.
	...

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