Silver screen anniverary: Sundance celebrates 25 years of independent filmmaking

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the Sundance Film Festival, the premier showcase for independent films and world cinema in the United States. Well, maybe it does. …

Even Robert Redford, the actor, filmmaker, activist and part-time Utahn who serves as the festival's public face, isn't so sure.

"It seems to me like we've been celebrating Sundance's 25th anniversary for what's going on five years now," he chuckled.

But according to the Sundance Film Festival research department, 1985 was the year in which Redford's Sundance Institute organization — which celebrated its own 25th anniversary in 2006 — took over for the festival.

To that point, the event — which was known as the Utah/U.S. Film Festival when it began in 1978 — was struggling just to find its footing and an identity.

But with the support of Redford and his Sundance Institute, the festival has survived and thrived. It has become a place where little-known filmmakers got their big breaks.

Among the notables are Kevin Smith (1994's "Clerks"), Robert Rodriguez (1993's "El Mariachi"), Christopher Nolan (2000's "Memento") and Steven Soderbergh (1989's "sex, lies and videotape").

All have gone on to bigger things — with "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back," the "Spy Kids" movies, "The Dark Knight" and the "Ocean's" movies, respectively.

And it's done the same thing for some Utah filmmakers and actors. Witness the careers of Jared Hess and Jon Heder (2004's "Napoleon Dynamite"), James Merendino ("SLC Punk!") and Trent Harris (2001's "The Beaver Trilogy").

In 1997, two BYU graduates — actor Aaron Eckhart and filmmaker Neil LaBute — arrived at Sundance with a dramatic thriller titled "In the Company of Men."

Audiences that year were blown away by Eckhart's performance as a misogynistic cad. And screenwriter/director LaBute received a Filmmakers Trophy from the festival.

As he recalled, "You can imagine what it was like. No one had seen the film, I'd made it literally in my back yard in Indiana, and we were virtual unknowns."

Eckhart agreed, saying that "nobody could have seen this coming. Neither of us did, that's for sure."

Eckhart had already gotten in contact with a professional agent he had met while driving a bus for the Sundance Institute's summer lab program. But it was the Sundance success that really got him noticed by Hollywood. (From there, Eckhart has gone on to star in such movies as last summer's blockbuster "The Dark Knight.")

LaBute called the initial Sundance experience a "terrific ride" and said he "can't imagine having another experience in film that will equal or better that one."