Day : the Diary of a Teenage Girl, Slow West, and more

Sundance.org is dispatching its writers to daily screenings and events to capture the 10 days of festivities during the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. Check back each morning for roundups from the previous days events.

The Diary of a Teenage Girl by Jeremy Kinser

While introducing The Diary of a Teenage Girl, which premiered in the U.S. Dramatic Competition, David Courier prepared the audience to meet two striking new talents. The Festival's senior programmer noted that he was honored to have Marielle Heller, a veteran of the Sundance Institute Screenwriters and Directors Labs, return with her debut feature, and predicted actress Bel Powley's future is so bright that we're going to be seeing her work here for years to come.

This wasn't typical pre-screening hyperbole. The film, based on a graphic novel by Phoebe Gloeckner, is indeed a remarkable debut for both Heller and Powley, a British actress who carries the film with complete assurance, as well as a faultless American accent. Powley stars as Minnie, a lonely, precocious 15-year-old in 1976 San Francisco who finds the attention she yearns for through sex with Monroe, the 35-year-old boyfriend (Alexander Skarsg rd) of her drug-using mother, Charlotte (Kristen Wiig). Minnie creates a diary of sorts to document her secret affair using expressive illustrations and brutally honest messages spoken into her tape recorder.

The Diary of a Teenage Girl Heller's film has the hazy look of a faded 1970s Polaroid and she unobtrusively integrates animation, some of it based on Minnie's drawings and others inspired by the comic books she reads. The director said she found Gloeckner's book to be a revelation. I never encountered such an honest portrayal of a teenage girl, she told that audience. I found her to be so vulnerable and brave and funny and embarrassing and smart and exciting.

The film received sustained applause after the screening ended, and many in the audience were curious how Heller found her perfectly-cast leading lady. Bel submitted an audition tape from England and did her whole audition with an American accent and I didn't realize she was British until the end when she delivered a personal message to me, Heller said.

Powley said the whole experience was incredible and she was overwhelmed by the response. I read the script and I'd never read anything like it, she shared. It was something I related to in so many ways. I thought I have to be in this.

Skarsg rd, who achieves a small miracle here by making his character extremely likable and surprisingly uncreepy, explained how he developed such chemistry with his young co-star. We had three weeks in San Francisco before Kristen joined us so we rehearsed, he revealed. We shot our scenes first and I think they went pretty good because when Kristin got there we had a secret.

Slow West by Eric Hynes

The Western may be among the most American of genres if not the most American of genres but that has never stopped filmmakers from around the world, from Italy to Japan and beyond, from trying it on for size. In Slow West, which premiered on Saturday night at the MARC Theater as part of the World Dramatic Competition, English writer-director John Maclean doesn't transpose the genre to Europe he brings a European sensibility to the American West. Considering the preponderance of immigrants who migrated to and settled in America, it wasn't exactly a crazy notion. The more I read about it, the more I realized the Germans, Scandinavians and Africans were everywhere in the Old West, and fundamental to the formation of the country. I did want to make sort of the truest western, he said, wryly.

Caren Pistorius at the premiere of Slow West.

Sundance Institute | Stephen Speckman The film stands out not only because of its European influences Maclean chose a 1:66 aspect ratio rather than the familiarly epic widescreen scope to offer a less operatic, more European arthouse aesthetic but thanks to a unique tonal approach. Once upon a time, 1870 to be exact, is how the film starts, and an air of storybook wonder is maintained although so is a wicked gallows humor and pistol-packed violence. An innocent young Scottish man named Jay Cavendish, played by Kodi-Smit McPhee, travels westward in search of his lost love, Rose (Caren Pistorius), and is befriended by a bounty hunter played by Michael Fassbender who, unbeknownst to Jay, also has the fugitive Rose in his sights. The way I approached this was a mixture of realism and a kind of fairytale. I wanted it to be authentic but also kind of like a dream, Maclean said. I hoped it would be sort of funny and sad sometimes at the same time.

While Fassbender was absent from the post-screening discussion he's on location filming the Steve Jobs biopic, and sent along a greeting Pistorius and McPhee were joined by supporting star Ben Mendelsohn, who was outfitted in the hugely shaggy fur coat worn by his outlaw character in the film. Without giving too much away, by the end of the film a great number of the characters are snuffed out, stars included, and at the end of the film Maclean makes the uncommon choice to revisit and, to some degree, pay respect to the scenes of carnage.

When I was writing [the film] there were some 80s Eddie Murphy films on the telly, he recalled, stifling a laugh. And there were security guards getting blasted by the goodies, and then after [we're] not having a second thought about it. So I just wanted to pay tribute to people that died making this journey. And with that he perfectly evoked the wry humor of his film, its blend of pathos and parody, horror and hilarity.

Hot Girls Wanted by Eric Hynes

For their last film, Sexy Baby, co-directors Jill Bauer and Ronna Gradus chronicled the effect of pornography and social media on young

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