Sundance: Regrets, I have a few ...

PARK CITY — An old-timer, by which I mean someone five years older than me, was telling me the other day how the Sundance Film Festival used to be 10 days of nonstop movie premieres and parties.

Now, she sighed, "all the premieres are at the beginning because everyone wants to get out of here."

Well, if you're a card-carrying member of the indie filmmakers' society, I can see the reluctance. But after seeing 25 films in five days, I'm ready to go.

Not that I don't have regrets. I have a formidable list of independent films that were recommended to me at Sundance, but because I had something else to see — or, heaven forbid, sleep to catch or stories to write — I didn't.

Top of that list is "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired," a documentary about the controversial director. In terms of buzz it completely overshadowed the Colin Farrell film "In Bruges," the much-ballyhooed crime film that opened Sundance. "Polanski" was like a lot of this year's great crop of documentaries — a small story used to tell a bigger story, specifically what Polanski's 30-year-old criminal case, and its aftermath, says about our judicial system.

A couple of fiction films are also on my regrets list: "Sunshine Cleaning," about people who clean up crime scenes, and "Frozen River," a feature film starring Melissa Leo as a single mom who agrees to smuggle illegal immigrants into the U.S. for money.

I also didn't catch the documentary about homeless men playing soccer called "Kicking It," and though it's not really my cup of tea, I wanted to see "Anvil! The Story of Anvil," a sort of true-life "This Is Spinal Tap" about a Canadian metal band trying to emerge from two decades of obscurity.

But as I say, I'm ready to go. Brain capacity has been sapped by sleep deprivation, and movies are starting to run together in my head. On Tuesday night, at the premiere of HBO's "Sugar," the story of a minor-league baseball prospect from the Dominican Republic, there is a scene where Sugar (Algenis Perez Soto ) is making a little extra money working in a diner. As a co-worker shows Sugar how the dishwasher works — the kind you see in church basements, with guillotine-style doors — I had the weirdest deja vu moment.

And then I realized: There's a scene in the documentary "Up the Yangtze," set on a pleasure boat cruising up the Yangtze River, where a young Chinese girl is taught to use the exact same dishwasher in a strikingly similar scene. What are the odds?