ABSTRACT
This chapter explores a curatorial challenge to festival programmers: to see the value and relevance of films that might register our own structures of taste and resonate outside of our personal and professional networks and affiliations. It considers the curatorial practices of film festivals within the relational contexts of taste, aesthetics, ideology, and desire. It focuses on developing a curatorial practice that calls for programmers to be open to seeing and feeling something differently, and acknowledging the limits of one's own sensibilities. With thousands of films made every year, festival programmers are the ones who identify groundswells of filmmaking styles and storytelling practices by shining a light on representative films in the festival line-up. The mission of the most important film festival for American independent film, the Sundance Film Festival, has been to connect independent filmmakers who have the ideas and the guts with Hollywood's financial and technical resources.
