Hollywood alternatives dig deep

If Sundance was formed to encourage an alternative to commercial Hollywood cinema, Buried fits the bill perfectly.

Sundance regularly comes under fire for presenting smaller versions of commercial Hollywood films. Yet if Sundance was formed to encourage a cinematic alternative to Hollywood, Buried is just that kind of cinema. Directed by Rodrigo Cortés and starring Ryan Reynolds in the film's only on-camera role, Buried is the story of a US truck driver in Iraq on a contract who is held for ransom in a coffin-sized space, with only a cigarette lighter and a mobile telephone, after his convoy is attacked.

The phone works, so Paul Conroy (Reynolds) can talk to his loved ones and to his captor, who wants $5 million (Dh18.36). Without giving too much away, the ending is not one that you'd expect from Hollywood. And that's what kept Buried from being made for many years, said the screenwriter Chris Sparling, who discussed the film after a world premiere screening that had the audience wincing. Sparling said he reduced the script to the most spare elements in order to get it made. "I started to consider what would be the cheapest movie to make - ever," he explained, finally settling on one character, one location and minimal props and lighting. Yet Buried remained on what's called a black list of scripts that most producers considered unfilmable until Sparling found a producer, who found Cortés and eventually hired Reynolds. Sparling said that he would have compromised and written scenes outside the coffin if that would have given the script a better chance of becoming a movie. But Cortés never considered shooting anywhere else. "We did end up building seven coffins," he noted.

Grabbing much of the attention is Four Lions, the feature film debut of the British comedian Chris Morris, about a terrorist cell in the UK. Peepli Live is also a film that deals with a serious subject but is a comedy, or at least plays that way with audiences. In the first film written and directed by the Indian journalist Anusha Rizvi, a poor farmer in a region where desperate farmers commit suicide at alarming rates ponders the government's offer to compensate, to the tune of 100,000 rupees, the family of a farmer who kills himself. When word gets out, a media and political circus erupts in the small village of Peepli.

Asked after the screening whether she thought the suicide of farmers was an appropriate topic for a comedy, Rizvi responded that "the treatment can be very light, but it's a serious film. I do not see this film as a comedy". Some in the audience who had laughed at the film then laughed at her answer. She and members of her team proceeded to give the audience an introduction to the difficulties that Indian farmers face with higher prices for seed and fertiliser and low prices in the market for their crops.

There are also comic elements in Cane Toads: The Conquest, an Australian environmental documentary that premiered yesterday. The film's title suggests a disaster epic, and cane toads magnified by the camera can look like fearsome creatures. The real horror, as shown in director Mark Lewis's earlier 1988 docuentary, Cane Toads: An Unnatural History, is that the creatures imported to save the continent's sugar cane crops from pests have caused serious ecological damage.

One message of Lewis's new film is "move over, Avatar". Cane Toads: The Conquest, is in digital 3D, the first film in Australia to be made in that format. Shot in the rugged regions of northern Australia, which can look like cinema's version of a moonscape, the film traces the toads' march through Australia which, so far, has been unstoppable. Sometimes the toads were so thick on the ground during filming, Lewis said, that the creatures formed what seemed like a carpet underfoot.

Filming the toads in 3D explores the parallels between the animals and movie monsters. It also gave Lewis and his team another tool to view the landscape from a toad's eye-view. But at a place like Sundance, where technology is monitored carefully for its potential use in low-budget work, 3D is a new tool for independents, and not just for James Cameron. Chances are that we'll see more of it next year at Sundance.