Second Life Addicts, Dropout Factories and Sundance 2010's Last Gasp

PARK CITY, Utah -- We are almost T minus zero here at Sundance and honestly feel like filmmaking warriors after the boot camp experience of 10 days of movies, alcohol, press, altitude and jangly nerves. We are grown women now.

We've had the distinct pleasure to be part of an absolutely excellent year of non-fiction entries in the festival. Everyone is at the top of their game in our category, and it feels damn good.

Today, we saw "Waiting for Superman" an infuriating and sometimes deflating new film directed by Davis Guggenheim. This ambitious doc takes on the failed public school system and reveals the often-humiliating process that low-income parents and their children have to endure to get a decent education. It describes the "drop out factories" in city school districts and spends time with the kids and parents who are suffering from this system. This topic is near and dear to us, as we filmed for an entire year for our first film "The Boys of Baraka" inside a middle school in Baltimore , which we often refer to as "the mental institution." We saw it first hand, and it's the greatest shame of this nation.

The film spends a lot of time with various education reformers including Michelle Rhee who, as Washington D.C.'s controversial schools chancellor (and the 7th chancellor in 10 years), has shaken up the status quo but is ultimately stymied by the unions and the bureaucrats. The film is packed with facts and figures that will hopefully shock people to action, as there is no doubt that as our education system goes, so goes the country. Particularly disturbing in the film is the description of "the dance of the lemons" (also called "pass the trash," the "turkey trot" and "the rubber room"), which brings to light the absolutely hideous yearly custom of trading all the teachers who have had serious problems in their schools to other public schools. The system can't actually get rid of them; it just trades them off to some other parent's kid.

Another winner of a film is "Life 2.0" which reveals the phenomenon of "Second Life," a fascinating train wreck of a social experiment that is uncomfortably revealing about where we are as a society. People invent their avatar, and then actually build a second life online, where they can be anything they dream: rich, attractive, popular. A sexy, thin avatar named Asri Falcone is a mini-mogul in Second Life, building homes and living a life of luxury. Her creator is an obese Detroiter, chain-smoking in her mother's basement, but reality and fiction become hazy and confusing after 15-hour days in this alternative reality. I was alarmed at the millions of people that were spending the majority of their "earthly" time in this fantasy world. Extremely weird.

OK, tonight is the awards ceremony and there is some seriously tough competition. Regardless, we've had an incredible ride showing our film to some of the smartest, toughest audiences we've ever had. We couldn't really ask for anything more.