Robert Redford, Al Gore, environmental films heat up Sundance

PARK CITY, Utah — It’s nearly impossible to avoid thinking about the environment in Park City, especially considering that, at the time of this writing, it’s 27 degrees with snow seemingly blowing from every direction at once.

But this is the first year the Sundance Film Festival is directly addressing it with The New Climate, a program of conversations, films and virtual-reality experiences about environmental change and conservation that began with Thursday’s opening-night screening, “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power.”

“My whole M.O. throughout most of my adult life has been focused on two things: nature and art,” Robert Redford, Sundance Institute founder and president, said Thursday during a press conference to kick off this year’s fest.

He spoke about growing up in Los Angeles, calling it “a beautiful city” and “a city I could be proud of.” Then, after several years away, he returned to a city “that had so suddenly changed, because development was totally out of control. … So that’s when I began to get concerned about how we were savaging nature in order to develop for short-term profit.”

The New Climate “was an idea we developed with Redford in the summer,” said Trevor Groth, Sundance’s director of programming, who oversaw CineVegas for eight years. “And we’re thrilled with the caliber of films that came in to help us showcase this section.”

In addition to “An Inconvenient Sequel,” Al Gore’s follow-up to 2006’s Oscar-winning “An Inconvenient Truth,” The New Climate includes such diverse documentaries as “Water & Power: A California Heist,” which has drawn comparisons to a real-life “Chinatown”; “Plastic China,” which follows Yi-Jie, an 11-year-old girl who works alongside her parents in a Chinese recycling facility; and “The Diver,” a look at Julio Cesar Cu Camara, whose job is to swim in the Mexico City sewer system and dislodge garbage.

“I tend to push too fast and too hard. And if I have an issue, particularly on the environment, I’m going to push hard,” Redford said later, explaining why it took so long to shine a light on his favorite cause.

“I said, ‘Couldn’t we get out in advance? Couldn’t we get out and create a category and be ahead of the game?’ ” But Redford credited festival director John Cooper for making him wait until the right films materialized.

“In a sense, it’s come to us,” Redford said of The New Climate. “We didn’t go to it.”

Advance buzz suggests the idea is working. “An Inconvenient Sequel” is, to pardon the pun, one of the hottest tickets in town. Not just on Thursday, a day when relatively few films are shown as a sort of soft opening, but throughout the festival.

To put it in perspective, the demand to be near Gore on Thursday night was so great, I couldn’t get anywhere near the press line for the film.

On the other hand, I had zero trouble making it into the one that overlapped his: “Twilight’s” Kristen Stewart talking about “Come Swim,” her writing-directing debut.

Contact Christopher Lawrence at clawrence@reviewjournal.com. Follow @life_onthecouch on Twitter.