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The day before the Sundance Film Festival. I blogged about five films I was looking forward to at the festival. As so often happens at film festival overloaded with premieres, most of the films I was excited to see failed to live up to my expectations, while a number of titles for which I had zero expectations ended up making a much better impression. After the jump, check out the five films that I left Sundance unable to shut up about.

The Imperialists are Still Alive! (above)
I didn't have time to write about Zeina Durra's Dramatic Competition entry during the festival, but I did talk to the director and the film's producer, Vanessa Hope, for my Sundance wrap story, which will be in the LA Weekly this week. I'm glad I let Durra's film sit with me for awhile before attempting to analyze it; while a number of Sundance films faded from memory virtually instantly, Imperialists stays vivid, troubling, seductive.

A subtle socio-political satire set in moneyed, multicultural expat circles in post-9/11 New York,  Imperialsists stars Elodie Bouchez as a Paris-born, Middle Eastern mutt artist whose idyllic bourgie day-to-day (and a new romance) are haunted by her very personal connections to bombings in Beirut and terrorist panic in the States. Shot on grainy, gorgeous 16mm, borrowing its title and core ideological ideological inspiration from Godard, and its ironic wit, loose ensemble feel and glossy milieu from Whit Stillman (who has a winking cameo as a nightclub dancer, natch), Imperialists was like nothing else at Sundance this year. While so much press focused on "lost" American auteurs returning to the festival after a long absence (Derek Cianfrance, Debra Granik, even Lisa Cholodenko), they should have been heralding the arrival of Durra, a not-quite-fully-formed but potentially fascinating new talent whose global-minded work makes much of its competition seem positively provincial.

Lovers of Hate
Though Blue Valentine, another Dramatic Competition title about the dissolution of a marriage, got all the accolades (but, notably, left Park City without a jury prize), Brian Poyser's hilarious, unexpectedly suspenseful bizarre love triangle offers the more radical stylistic hybrid. Lovers of Hate puts the sparse means of production and naturalistic feel of mumblecore to the service of a genre film -- physical comedy with a gilding of near-horror  -- fueled by the Swiss-watch comic timing of leads Chris Doubek (his nearly-wordless performance in the film's second half is silent-horror perfection) and Alex Karpovsky (between this, Beeswax and Harmony and Me, is swiftly becoming my favorite comic actor...in Austin, at least), and grounded by the bravery and emotional precision of actress Heather Kafka.

Teenage Paparazzo
Leon Gast won the Sundance Best Director jury prize for Smash His Camera, his stodgy, nostalgic portrait of original paparazzo Ron Galella, but the weirder, more relevant paparazzi documentary screened out of competition. Time will tell whether or not TV star Adrian Grenier has any real talent for filmmaking, but his willingness to intellectually interrogate the increasingly symbiotic relationship between celebrities and the media, while physically infiltrating the parts of that machine usually off-limits for a celebrity, lead to an up-to-the-minute understanding of the appeal of the products of paparazzi that Gast's film sorely lacks.

Catfish
Let's hope that if Sundance continues the well-intentioned but initially underwhelming experiment that was the NEXT section, they'll open up the category to embrace a film like Catfish, which could well feel out of place in either a Dramatic or Documentary competition. A no-budget collision of real life and the talent and readiness to spin reality into art (literally!), the Catfish may not conform to the social justice standards of the standard Sundance doc, but that's part of what's great about it. Its courage to go deep inside an unseen world is remarkable, although on that score, it's no match for...

The Red Chapel
The surprise winner of the World Documentary Competition was also the best film I saw this year at the Festival, and unquestionably the film to most naturally fit into a sincere reading of the festival's stated theme of "cinematic rebellion." Whether you read Chapel as a Borat-like prank on an unsuspecting host country that probably deserves what's coming, an uproarious Trojan Horse smuggling a genuinely-felt portrait of the everyday struggle of the disabled to a cynical audience, or something else entirely, this is yet another testament to the unlikely emergence of Denmark as a hotbed for anarchic, genre-busting cinema. Chaos reigns, indeed.