Snow and cinema. That's what it's all about right now in Park City. Yesterday, I had the chance to attend the world premiere screening of Grace Lee's American Zombie at the Slamdance Film Festival (sort of the low-rent Sundance happening simultaneously). It's an entertaining, nicely produced mockumentary about a community of the living dead living and working among us. Zombies. It's a solid work in both the mockumentary and zombie genre tradition, with a great cast that includes Suzy Nakamura and even Grace Lee as herself. Despite less-than-ideal screening conditions (there were several projection/sound complications and the theater was hot as hell), the Slamdance audience seemed to have a good time. Grace as well as several members of cast and crew were on hand to answer questions afterwards. All in all, a very clever, inventive and creepy follow-up to The Grace Lee Project.

Woke up crazy-ass early this morning to line up at the box office in the freezing cold. Sundance sells a limited number of day-of tickets, and I wanted to get my hands on tickets for Steven Okazaki's White Light/Black Rain and Justin Lin's Finishing the Game. The box office opens at 8:00, so Michael Chen from SDAFF and I were in line around 6:15. Madness. The things you do for the love of cinema. I managed to get tickets for White Light, but Finishing the Game was gone gone gone. Completely sold out, dammit. The saddest part was, we ran into Roger Fan, one of the stars of Finishing the Game, who was way, way behind us in line also to get tickets... to his own movie. Looks like I'll be setting up camp in the rush line tonight... wish me luck.

The annual Meet the Filmmakers Reception is this afternoon at the China Panda Restaurant—the one and only Chinese restaurant in Park City. More updates later...