Sundance 2012: Documentaries dominate

Despite the dangerousness of his dissidence, Ai still manages to enjoy several good meals in this documentary. Suggested blurb: "This film made me very angry – and very hungry."

Chasing Ice is a documentary by Jeff Orlowski about global warming unlike any others I've seen. (Weatherwise, my Sundance experience could be characterized as "Chased by Ice." If only Redford had been a surfer instead of a skier, we might all be watching movies in Kauai.) National Geographic photographer James Balog created the Extreme Ice Survey, in which 30 cameras across three continents record irrefutable evidence of the Earth's melting ice. The sped-up results of this survey have a harrowing power that no set of graphs or stack of statistics can convey. Looking fit as a mountaineer, Balog, at the public screening, spun a cautionary rap. "Carbon fuels used to be our best friend, but now we need new ways of thinking about the world. It's outrageous that the air we share is used as a garbage dump."

As a blood-stirrer, the film is right up there with another Sundance entry, We're Not Broke, which delineates how multibillion-dollar American corporations get away with legally paying virtually no US income taxes. Sundance, of course, is heavily sponsored by corporate underwriters, an irony not lost on Redford. "What I tell them," he said in an interview, "is that it's wonderful to have your support, so long as you don't intrude on our mission. The people that are sponsors are supporting something they believe in. But that something is independence."

"How great is my mother?" Rory Kennedy told the packed house for "Ethel" after its public screening. Earlier in the day, a seemingly endless stream of Kennedys, many of whom stayed to ski, filed into the press tent for what is known in the biz as the "step and repeat" – a species of photo op. Included among them was Ethel Kennedy herself, who later sat for the first public screening of the film. Rory, with whom her mother was pregnant when Robert Kennedy was assassinated, makes no pretense of "objectivity" in her film. It's valuable as a personal historical document, replete with family home footage going back to Ethel's childhood, and also as something more: a testimony to a woman who has lived through a succession of tragedies that would seem almost unendurable and yet who still carries on. (It will be aired by HBO in the summer.)

Two days after her husband was shot, Ethel convened the family and told them, "Be kind to others and work for your country." Speaking now, she cautions, "Nobody gets a free ride. Have your wits about you and dig in and do what you can because it might not last." These moments don't seem platitudinous, just the simple truth. Mother of 11 children, she is no-nonsense. She doesn't deny that she knew so little about cooking that she used to coat the frying pans with Vaseline. Responding to her daughter on camera, she wonders, half huffily, half tongue-in-cheek, "Why should I have to answer all these questions?" Some of the questions, especially concerning the day her husband was shot, she doesn't answer at all.

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