I’m packing my bags today and flying out to Salt Lake City tomorrow. The first stop is the 6th annual Art House Convergence – a yearly meeting of independent and art house movie theater owners and operators that takes place January 14 – 17 in Midway, Utah. The conference will include talks and discussions by film historian David Bordwell, Alamo Drafthouse Cinema founder Tim League, actor Crispin Hellion Glover, and even Sundance top dawg Robert Redford will be there for the opening dinner to talk about Sundance Institute. It’ll basically be a bunch of workshops, seminars, and presentations where both film exhibitors and distributors meet to talk business, and this will then be followed by a trip to Park City to attend the 2013 Sundance Film Festival.

This year, Sundance runs for 10 days from January 17th – 27th. I’ll only have enough time to catch half of it, and in that time I have over 100 films to choose from. As an Industry Pass Holder, my screenings will take place concurrently in four different theaters.  This requires some hard choices when selecting which films to watch, but after some preliminary homework I’ve whittled down my list to the following titles:

Crystal Fairy (World Cinema Dramatic Competition):
A story about insensitive Americans taking a road trip in Chile to ingest a hallucinogenic cactus. If the premise seems like something pitched to Judd Apatow, my reason for selecting this film over its competition is that it’s helmed by Sebastián Silva, the Chilean writer and director behind the 2009 film The Maid which, among many awards, won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance four years ago.

When I Walk (Documentary Premieres):

In 2006 Jason DaSilva, a 25-year-old aspiring filmmaker, fell down on the beach and couldn’t get back up. He was later diagnosed with multiple sclerosis – a devastating disease that can lead to loss of vision and muscle control. In this documentary he turns the camera on himself to both chronicle and make sense of his situation. My interest in When I Walk stems, in part, from the fact that I come from Colorado – which, for unknown reasons, has the highest per-capita cases of M.S. in the nation. As a result of this I  know over a dozen people that have to deal with M.S., a disease that effects those who have it in very different ways.

There Will Come a Day (World Cinema Dramatic Competition):

A young Italian woman decides to accompany a nun to minister to Indigenous Brazilian villages along the Amazon River. Described as being “a feast for the eyes” (an overused phrase that can be cause for suspicion) I’m nonetheless a huge sucker for any film that takes place on or alongside a big river. Director Giorgio Diritti’s debut film, The Wind Blows Round, made waves on the festival circuit back in 2005.

God Loves Uganda  (U.S. Documentary Competition):
Two sentences from the catalog say it all: “American evangelical Christians have chosen Uganda, with Africa’s youngest and most vulnerable population, as their ground zero in a battle for the soul of a continent.” And: “(Director Roger Ross) Williams captures vérité footage so shocking that viewers may be squirming in their seats.” It’s also billed as “the most terrifying film of the year.” Yikes!

Dirty Wars (US Documentary Competition):
This promises to be a gripping look at the rise of the Join Special Operations Command (JSOC), “the most secret and elite fighting force in U.S. history, exposing covert operations carried out by men who do not exist on paper and will never appear before Congress. No target is off-limits for the JSOC ‘kill list,’ even if the person is a U.S. citizen.” Eeek.

Computer Chess (Next):
“Next” is a relatively new sidebar that Sundance has created for films that pair digital technology with “unfettered creativity.” Computer Chess is billed as an existential comedy about the men who taught computers chess, and after watching God Loves Uganda and Dirty Wars I’m pretty sure I’ll be ready for some comedy.

Google and the World Brain (World Cinema Documentary):
On a related note to the notion of people getting together to try to make an artificial brain, this doc looks at Google’s plan to scan every book ever made. The title hints at a more shadowy and possible secret intention. Singularity fans, unite!

Sightseers (Spotlight):
A comedy by the director of one of the most disturbing film released in 2011? Yup, Ben Wheatley, the man behind Kill List, here tackles the story of a man who wants to show a sheltered woman a bit of the world by taking her on a journey of the British Isles. Methinks the comic edge will take a dark turn…

What They Don’t Talk About When They Talk About Love (World Cinema Dramatic Competition):
This Indonesian films is centered around a high school for the visually impaired in Jakarta. Selling point: “Writer/director Mouly Surya elegantly employs the language of cinema to evoke the sensory experience of her protagonists through deliberate silences, languid tracking shots down corridors, and highly choreographed movement.”

Coming up: some new horror films (S-VHS), more docs (Inequality for All, Manhunt: The Search for Osama Bin Laden, We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks) controversial films focusing on S&M culture (Interior. Leather Bar. and Kink), films about the Beat Generation (Big Sur), a “postmodern voyage into the bowels of ‘family’ entertainment” (huh?) and much, much more. Which is to say… to be continued.