Festival

Monday

Gavin Smith

Sundance memories

In 1969 Robert Redford purchased 5,000 acres of land in the mountains of Utah and built a ski resort. In 1981 he founded the nonprofit Sundance Institute to cultivate new voices in American independent film through annual directing and screenwriting labs (alumni include Quentin Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson) and to provide financial support for select projects. In 1985 Redford took over the US Film Festival, based in nearby Park City, and brought it under the Sundance umbrella. In 1989, the festival had its breakthrough with Sex, Lies, and Videotape. Sundance became a film-industry fixture for talent scouts, acquisitions executives and journalists, particularly those inclined to go skiing in their downtime.

sundance

Wednesday

Daniella Greenbaum Davis

Why the lessons of Purim remain relevant for Jews today

Over the course of tonight and tomorrow, Jews around the world will eat a lot of hamentaschen, dress up in costumes, listen to the megillah, and give charity and gifts of food and drink to their friends. Some of us will also get quite drunk; partly because it’s fun, and partly because the Talmud says that on Purim, a person should be so drunk that they cannot distinguish between Haman (villain of the Purim story) and Mordecai (one of the heroes of the Purim story). As far as Jewish holidays go, Purim is a fun one which means that many of its crucial lessons often go unappreciated. Americans tend to know that on Passover, we celebrate the Exodus from Egypt, and that on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we atone and hope to be inscribed in the book of life.

purim

Thursday

Michael Hann

Paul Simon says farewell with a daring and inventive show

Early in 1987, a middle-aged woman approached me on the record counter of the Slough branch of Boots. ‘What do you have by Ladysmith Black Mambazo?’ she demanded. Nothing. Boots in Slough wasn’t big on South African isicathamiya choral music. ‘Well,’ she suggested, ‘you really ought to get their records in. They’re going to be huge.’ She was wrong, but I knew why she was so sure. Ladysmith Black Mambazo had been among the standout guests on Paul Simon’s Graceland, released a few months before. Graceland made Simon, by my reckoning, the first pop star who had emerged from the rock’n’roll era to make a major cultural impact across three decades. By the 1980s, the Stones had become just a touring machine.