Sundance Film Festival (*1) is held in Park City, UT, during January by focusing on independent and diversified movies. I first learned about Sundance Film Festival through a series of story, Road to Sundance, published on movie magazine, CUT (*2) . The story was written by Mirai Konishi (*3) , a filmmaker and critic. In 2014, I joined Sundance for the first time by taking advantage of living in the United States. Immediately I was captivated by the inclusiveness of Sundance through Q&A sessions at screenings. I was relieved to see how Sundance Institute listens to every voice without any cliché. Since 2014, every year I go back to the festival.

Year 2016 was the first year after I launched moonbow cinema. I decided to bridge two activities, screening event in Japan and visiting Sundance in US, to better each other. First, I was interested in writing an article about Sundance for Japanese audience to promote Sundance and moonbow cinema. I looked for the media who is interested in the activity of moonbow cinema and Sundance. I contacted UPLINK (*4) who was most supportive to put invitation cards for the past moonbow cinema screening events and run the web magazine, Web DICE. UPLINK kindly replied this time as well. I was more motivated to publish an article (*5) and finished with more than ten thousand words. I clearly remember myself kept writing during my flight back to Japan.

To attend Sundance, I set my mind as a founder of moonbow cinema. I brought an introduction card of moonbow cinema written in English to initiate deeper conversations with people who I met at Sundance. I gave the card to people who I had a chat in the shuttle or in the line to enter the theater. The card made conversations more interesting. Some told me about screening events with the similar concept with moonbow cinema. Others gave me ideas of a combination of a film and a location. I really felt that I was one step deeper to Sundance community. Especially a conversation with Jason Lew left the biggest impact on me and the following screening of moonbow cinema.

Every year, more than one hundred feature films are premiered at Sundance. The information to choose which film to see is really limited to profiles of production members or summary of story because most of films are world premiere. Under this condition, the first film I chose to see for Sundance 2016 was The Free World (*6) because of the profile of director/writer Jason Lew. Lew previously wrote Restless (*7) directed by Gas Van Sant and played a main role at All God’s Children Can Dance (*8) based on the short story written by Haruki Murakami. I intuitively felt that I somehow share the same point of view with Lew. The Free World was the first movie I saw during Sundance 2016. My excitement to be at Sundance was at the peak after arriving from Japan that year. The film fulfilled my expectation and made me really confident that to come to Sundance even from Japan was right decision. After the screening, I had a chance to talk with Lew at the lobby of the theater by presenting moonbow cinema card. Later that day, I met Lew again in the screening of  WE ARE X (*9) . I was so happy that he recognized me thanks to moonbow cinema.

At Sundance, I intentionally see films set in Japan. It’s a nice occasion to observe Japan from outside through the reaction of audience or Q&A with production members. I’m often able to recognize what is actually not normal, average, beautiful, strange, etc. In 2016, I chose a documentary film WE ARE X about X Japan, a Japanese rock band. Lew happened to sit close to myself at the screening and after the film we talked about Japanese traditional view on death and suicide by referring to Restless. Through our conversation I could learn more about how his stories The Free World and Restless were born.

Two months later from Sundance, in March 2016, I was planning to host the third moonbow cinema screening event. I decided to add new contents to the event based on conversations I had at Sundance 2016. (To be continued.)