The upstart in its tween years

Four years ago David Greenspan’s 12-minute, Japanese-language, black-and-white student film -- his first -- about a Japanese boy’s first day at a new school in 1933 Tokyo captured the top prize, the Palme d’Or, in the short film competition at the Cannes Film Festival.

As Greenspan, then a graduate student at USC’s School of Cinema-Television, stepped on stage to accept his award for “Bean Cake,” 1,000 people in the audience erupted in cheers. But when the applause died away and he returned to the U.S., he faced a daunting question: What do you do next?

Today Greenspan, 32, is back as director of his first feature-length film, which will premiere Tuesday at the Slamdance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. It was at Slamdance 2001 that “Bean Cake” made its premiere before going on to Cannes.

But this film is a far cry from the measured tone and understated story of “Bean Cake.” With “Mall Cop,” Greenspan has made a dark comedy with a macabre plot twist about a security guard who loses his right arm one night while chasing a burglar through the mall where he works and, after recovering, returns to the mall and becomes a burglar himself.

In many ways, Greenspan typifies the creativity and struggle experienced by many new independent filmmakers whose works are showcased at Slamdance.

The festival was founded 11 years ago as an alternative to the Sundance Film Festival founded by actor Robert Redford, which draws tens of thousands of people to snowy Park City each winter.

But even Slamdance is coming of age. As Peter Baxter, the festival president, recently noted: When Slamdance first arrived in Park City there was a sense of “there goes the neighborhood.” Baxter still remembers that the former Park City police chief wrote of Slamdance that its “days were numbered”.

“Sundance and Slamdance actually complement each other,” Baxter said. “If you want to see something new or fresh, look at Slamdance. If you want to see something coming through the mini-studio system, with bigger budgets and industry talent, look more to Sundance. Both can be celebrated.”

Slamdance was the first to feature the films of then-unknown directors such as Marc Forster (“Finding Neverland”) and Christopher Nolan (“Memento”). And, says Baxter, Jared Hess, along with Slamdance programmer Jeremy Kuhn, made a short film called “Peluca” that premiered at Slamdance 2003. After meeting investors at the festival, a year later the project was developed into “Napoleon Dynamite,” which premiered at Sundance and went on to win rave reviews and find commercial success last year.

This year’s Slamdance drew about 2,800 submissions from three dozen countries -- almost half from outside the U.S. “They came from everywhere -- Asia and Europe and Australia,” said festival director Kathleen McInnis. “A few came from South America and South Africa.”

The festival, which runs today through next Friday, has a record 23 world and U.S. feature premieres and has physically expanded to include a second screening venue and new box office on Main Street. In competition this year are 11 narrative feature films and eight documentaries, with nearly 80 short films playing throughout the festival.

Among the feature films being screened are the absurdist comedy “Phil the Alien,” about an alien’s unlikely effect on a small Canadian town; the relationship-challenged “Four-Eyed Monsters”; “Milk Can,” about a rivalry between two small towns over a milk can that has grave consequences; and the psychological drama “This Very Moment.”

This year’s festival saw an upsurge in the number of documentaries submitted, according to McInnis, and documentaries will open and close the festival.

“I was at the Seattle Film Festival for 12 years and submissions of documentaries continued to rise and rise and rise,” she recalled. “We noticed the same thing here.” She said the increased interest in documentaries is being fueled by such successful films as “Fahrenheit 9/11,” “Capturing the Friedmans” and “My Architect.”

Opening Slamdance this year is a documentary by director Marilyn Agrelo and writer Amy Sewell called “Mad Hot Ballroom,” which follows 11-year-old New York public school kids as they are introduced to ballroom dancing at their schools. The schools included P.S. 150 in Manhattan’s tony Tribeca district; P.S. 115 in a predominantly Dominican area of Washington Heights; and P.S. 112 in the working class Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn.

Agrelo and Sewell said the film didn’t make it into Sundance. “We saw [the list] of films [Sundance] did take and it seems like their particular slant or what they want to see is politically oriented,” Agrelo said. “ ... Our film is really a story of diversity, of contrast, and it’s about kids, but it’s so much more.”

Observing the kids -- many of them children of recent immigrants -- dancing to the music of Frank Sinatra and Peggy Lee proved to be an integral part of the film.

“At first it’s foreign to them but then they learn to love the music,” Sewell said. “Some girls sing ‘Fever’ in the hallway after class has finished.”

Closing the festival will be Michael Franti’s “I Know I’m Not Alone,” a personal diary of the musician’s journeys through the war zones of Israel and Palestinian territories as well as Iraq.

For fledgling independent filmmakers like Greenspan, Slamdance is a godsend.

After Cannes, Greenspan took meetings with Hollywood agents who told him he needed to come up with another script. So, with a college friend, he went to the Japanese island of Kyushu, where he was befriended by a Buddhist monk, taught part-time, and, in return, was given a place to stay. But before he could finish the outlines for the scripts he was contemplating, terrorists attacked the U.S. on Sept. 11, 2001, and Greenspan yearned to return home.

Back in America, the filmmaker heard from a friend who, with a co-writer, had a screenplay about a shopping mall security guard. It wasn’t at all like “Bean Cake,” but it intrigued him.

Meanwhile, an East Coast film producer, Andrew Louca, had seen “Bean Cake” and liked it so much he wanted to know if Greenspan had another script. The director mentioned his friend’s “Mall Cop” script.

With a budget under $1 million, and financial incentives from New Mexico’s film commission, “Mall Cop” was filmed in and around Albuquerque in October 2003. Greenspan insists the movie is a comedy, although there are scenes that are not for the squeamish.

“I’m proud of ‘Mall Cop,’ ” he said. “I feel I made a film that I wanted to make and that is true to, like, whatever my sensibility is.” “I do have an agent now,” he added, “but unless something actually happens with ‘Mall Cop’ during the next few months, I’m almost in the same spot I was in four years ago. I’ve still not broken through.”