I landed in Salt Lake City at 6:45 pm, a shuttle dropped me off at the Park City condo around 8:30 pm, I unpacked my stuff and went right over to Fresh Market to stock up. At the checkout counter I ran into Indiewire critic Eric Kohn and five young critics (Carlos Aguilar, Robert Fowler, Mary Sollosi, Emma Myers, Kyle Burton) participating in a Sundance Institute Fellowship for Film Criticism and funded by the Roger Ebert Memorial Scholarship. (A sixth young critic wasn’t there.) The critics, chosen from roughly 400 applicants, are going to be reviewing films under Kohn’s guidance during the Sundance Film Festival as a kind of rough-and-tumble workshop. Tough deadlines, publicists, long ticket lines, party food, not much sleep, long hours…enjoy Sundance, guys!


(l. to r.) Eric Kohn and five of the six participating critics (l. to r.): Carlos Aguilar, Robert Fowler, Mary Sollosi, Emma Myers, and Kyle Burton…although I’m not 100% sure of the sequence of the names because Kohn sent a needlessly complicated email stating that the names should be regarded counterclockwise. Who says “counterclockwise”?? Everybody says “left to right” when they send along captions.