Sundance Film Festival panels to discuss the sound design of a Jesus movie, and faith-based films in general

The “year of the Bible movie” may have come to an end, but the genre — and the issues it raised — aren’t going away any time soon. For evidence of that, look no further than two panels coming up at the Sundance Film Festival, which starts later this week.

Exhibit A: The Dolby Institute is hosting ‘Last Days in the Desert: The Art of Sound Design and Music’, a panel that will look at Rodrigo Garcia’s film starring Ewan McGregor as Jesus and Satan, on January 27.

Dolby has awarded the film its Dolby Family Sound Fellowship, which “provides a range of postproduction resources to allow the fellowship recipient to fulfill the creative potential of the film’s sound design.” A Dolby press release states that the filmmakers “did a great job capturing the on-site soundscape of the desert,” and that the film was chosen partly for its “complex canvas and nuanced characters.”

The panel will be moderated by Glenn Kiser, director of the Dolby Institute, and it will feature Garcia as well as the film’s composers and two of its sound mixers.

The film itself will premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on January 25.

Exhibit B: Tim Gray will host a panel on ‘Faith in Film’ on January 29.

Participants will include: Devon Franklin, producer of Heaven Is for Real; Adam Hastings, director of marketing for Pure Flix Entertainment (the outfit behind God’s Not Dead and many other Christian films); Bill Reeves, founder of Working Title Agency; and Julie Fairchild, a publicist with Lovell-Fairchild Communications.

The panelists “will explore the idea of faith in film, foster ideas about how to tell a compelling story, and provide insight into marketing to your target audience.”

It sounds like these panels will be very different — one will look at an arthouse film while the other, from the sound of it, will look at what we might call, for lack of a better word, Christian “niche” or “ghetto” films — but they’re both about independent filmmaking of one sort or another, so they’re a perfect fit for Sundance.

I can’t help wondering what it might have been like, though, if Sundance had hosted a panel that featured both the arthouse filmmakers and the niche filmmakers. That could have led to some interesting dialogue. Ah well, maybe some other year.