ANDREW CURRIE (director-co-writer, Fido)

I’ve always loved films that cross genres and use different genres as a way of telling their stories. Blue Velvet, Kill Bill and Edward Scissorhands all went against the conventions of a specific genre in telling their stories. For me, the most difficult part of making Fido was walking the line between social satire, melodrama, comedy, boy-and-his-dog films and the zombie genre while maintaining the look and feel of a ’50s Technicolor movie. Back at the script stage, this created real confusion with some readers. The single most common thing we heard was, “If you don’t pull it off, we have nothing. It’s not a zombie movie. It’s a violent boy-and-his-dog film! What is it, really?!”

This became a very specific and personal challenge to me. I started working with a conceptual artist to generate key images for the film. I storyboarded practically everything, and brought composer Don MacDonald on board early in order to create a template that would help me define the world.

At its simplest, I wanted Fido to work as a boy-and-his-dog film (for adults), and because on one level the film is an allegory about our modern world, I wanted to set the story in something closer to a fable. Something not grounded completely in realism. I have always been drawn to the visual boldness of Douglas Sirk films, and I love the way he used melodrama and contrasting imagery to comment on society, and so working in a style that reflected this made perfect sense to me. Then there was the horror-zombie element, which is just a great genre to play with and infuse humor into. And finally I wanted to express the theme that love, not fear, makes us more alive. I’m not sure why, but that theme always seems harder to express in a comedy, maybe because people aren’t really looking for it. I’m not really sure....

PERNILLE ROSE GRØNKJAER (director, The Monastery: Mr. Vig and the Nun)

Magic! Magic is what happens when you find your main character. That was what happened the day I met Mr. Vig. For 50 years he had tried to turn his old castle into a monastery, and at the age of 83 he still chased this romantic lifelong dream. His appearance, his wisdom and the fairy-tale surroundings left me with no doubt in my mind: This was a fairy-tale story that had to be told.

The problem was that nobody else believed in this story, and for five years I filmed alone with no funding. It was a struggle, but if anybody understood, it was Mr. Vig. After all, he had been working on his project for 50 years.

After five years of believing in Mr. Vig and his story, I finally met a producer, Sigrid Dyekjær at Tju-Bang Film, who also started believing in Mr. Vig too. From that day on many other believers came, and today the result is a wonderful film — a real fairy tale! So please, believe in what your heart and stomach tells you. It is a risk worth taking.

DROR SHAUL (writer-director, Sweet Mud)

I arrive back on the kibbutz where I was born. With me is a strong, tall man who is a TV journalist making a news item about me. We reach my mother’s apartment and he is trying to open the door but the door won’t open. Thorny shrubs grow wildly all over the door and windows. The big man pulls at the branches with force and tears them apart.

Inside the dark room, almost invisible, growling like a wounded animal, lays my mother, covered with a blanket, totally helpless. I don’t have a father. My brothers are not here. I have to save my mother. And I always fail.

A little later, we are all sitting on the grassy lawn, enjoying the sun. My mother is young and healthy. She keeps smiling while she is having an intimate conversation with Ronit Yudkevitch, the actress who played her character in Sweet Mud. They like each other and they talk about me with great pride. Very soon, we will all go to Sundance together. The good people in Sundance also want to meet my mother. For the first time of my life, I depart from the shame. I am flooded with feelings of relief, freedom and endless joy. I wish to shout: “Mom, wake up! We won! All you ever wished for just came true. Now, the whole world will hear your story!”

All this took place a few weeks ago. I couldn’t stop smiling for a full week after I woke up from that dream.

In a way this dream has transformed me. It provided an emotional experience I never had before and for which I longed for my entire life: knowing that I’m being eternally and unconditionally loved. I know that this specific moment had never actually occurred in reality but subconsciously it was so strong and so real that it finally provided me with that brief moment of true happiness, a moment I will treasure forever.

In a way it is like fixing a flat tire on the bicycle I used to ride as a child. The puncture remains there, but it is healed with a thick layer of tape, and thus becomes the strongest part of the wheel.

I realize now the risk I took when I decided to make Sweet Mud. I am still uncertain if this was an act of bravery or that of stupidity. The emotional experience I went through while making the film and especially during my participation in the Sundance Labs, proved that I made the right choice by deciding to do the best thing for me: to feel.

MASHA NOVIKOVA (director, Three Comrades)

While shooting Three Comrades, I undertook a lot of risks. I still am actually.

First of all, shooting in Chechnya and Ingushetya is forbidden and impossible.

So I couldn’t take my operator with me. I had to wear long dresses and a headscarf , because of the fear that you can be arrested on the street and disappear, which happened to our first “comrade,” Ruslan Chamchoyev. But beside the fisical risk, there is also the fear that the footage I make on my own with my small miniDV camera will be of inferior quality.

While we were shooting in Moscu, in front of the Butyrka prison, where our second comrade Islam Bashirov used to be held, we were arrested and they tried to accuse us of filming for terrorist purposes. That we were preparing a terrorist attack on the prison.

After a half day of being held there we knew what Islam must have felt, who was also falsely accused.

It was also very fearful to copy all the footage of Ramzan Mezhidov, our third “comrade.” Not only for me, but also very risky for all these people who were hiding it. That’s why I never tell anybody where he hid his tapes before he got shot.

And now when the film is ready, I am afraid that one day while I am in Russia they will arrest me as a traitor. On the other side the Chechen rebels are also not too happy with my film because there are people in the film who do not talk positive about their first president, [Dzhokhar] Dudayev.

DAVID KAPLAN (writer-director, Year of the Fish)

Everything about Year of the Fish was a risk — the script, the casting, the locations, the financing — but I suppose the biggest risk of all was this rotoscoping animation thing we decided to do. Following in the footsteps of Linklater’s Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly, we shot and edited on miniDV and then digitally painted over each frame in post to create an HD animated film.  However, we were unable to raise enough money to hire the 40 full-time animators typically needed for this kind of work, so we wound up creating this film with an advance algorithmic software based on cognitive neuroscience studies into the process of human visual perception.  The result is less like a graphic novel and more like a living, breathing painting brought to life.  But I and everyone else had to learn everything from the ground up, and the technical and aesthetic challenges were considerable. And now, a month before the festival, it’s still unclear as to whether this is a risk story with a happy ending (“They were wild and crazy and risky but it all paid off!”) or a folly.