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Park City • On the night before Donald Trump's inauguration, former Vice President Al Gore rallied the attendees of the 2017 Sundance Film Festival to keep up the fight against global climate change.
"No one person can stop this," Gore said when Trump's name came up Thursday night, after the festival's opening screening. "It's too big now. We are shifting, and we are going to win."
Gore received a standing ovation from the 1,300-strong audience of Park City's Eccles Center, after the premiere of "An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power," a documentary that follows up on the Oscar-winning 2006 film "An Inconvenient Truth."
Like the original film, "An Inconvenient Sequel" follows Gore as he delivers his "slideshow" describing the increasing dangers of global climate change. The new film goes further, traveling with Gore as he trains young people to deliver his presentation, while also bearing witness to success stories in renewable energy and helping broker a deal at the 2015 Paris climate accords.
Gore applauded the filmmakers, led by directors Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk. "This film gives me an extra burst of hope," Gore said, because of the way the directors "really effectively tell the story of how much hope there is to transform our energy system."
Trump's face and voice pop up periodically during the documentary — usually in interviews with Fox News during which he lambastes the Paris climate conference.
Gore demurred on the Eccles stage when asked about Trump directly, specifically his meeting with the president-elect at Trump Tower just after the election. He said he wouldn't betray the confidence of his private conversation, "in the hopes that there will be more." Gore did note that, two days after the meeting, Trump appointed Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt to lead the Environmental Protection Agency. Pruitt, Gore said, is "someone I don't think should be head of the EPA."
That was the first overtly political statement at a festival whose opening weekend overlaps with Trump's inauguration — and where the shadow of the new president looms large.
In that shadow, Sundance Institute founder Robert Redford said he chooses to see the bright side.
"In this current dialogue, it looks like a lot of things are going to be taken away, or try to be taken away, from us," Redford said at the festival's opening news conference Thursday afternoon in Park City's Egyptian Theater. "You want to look at where the light is going to coming from."
Redford said he expects the change at the White House "will galvanize the people. … Those people who weren't interested or figured, 'Who cares?' are now going to realize they're going to be directly affected, and they're going to step up."
Redford believes a movement will rise up "to go against whatever choice is made to cut things away that affects people," he said. "They're going to rebel against that. A movement will be created, and I think that will be very, very healthy."
Officially, Redford and his Sundance Institute aim to stay beyond politics — and neither he nor the others speaking at the afternoon news conference mentioned Trump by name.
"Presidents come and go. The pendulum swings back and forth, it always has, it probably always will," Redford said. "We don't occupy ourselves with politics. … We stay focused on the stories being told by artists."
The festival gets underway in earnest Friday, with 10 days of screenings across Park City and at venues in Salt Lake City and the Sundance resort. One of the most anticipated events will be on Main Street on Saturday morning: a protest march tied to the Women's March on Washington to protest Trump's inauguration.
Two filmmakers who joined Redford on the Egyptian stage said artists' reactions to political events, like the election, have to stay true to storytelling.
"As a filmmaker, you have a podium," said David Lowery, whose "A Ghost Story" premieres Sunday at the festival. "I don't want to go and turn that into a soapbox and shout from it."
Lowery said he took to heart a quote that "every film is a political film." "I think it's important to think about things that matter to you, in light of current events, and just make sure you're saying something that's worth saying," he said.
Filmmaker Sydney Freeland said, "My response to this current climate is to find films that ring true and have authenticity to them, to provide a counternarrative." Freeland directed the comedy-drama "Deidra & Laney Rob a Train," which was filmed in Utah and has its premiere Monday at the Egyptian.
The Gore documentary, with its focus on climate change, will kick off the festival's "The New Climate" initiative, which aims to spark conversations about environmental issues. Festival director John Cooper said plans for the initiative were in the works last summer, before the election.
"What became evident is we wanted to take the conversation more global," Cooper told reporters after the news conference. "There's a problem up here that overrides [domestic politics]."
Redford, in his opening remarks, noted that his Sundance Institute got some of its seed funding from the National Endowment for the Arts — a federal agency that, according to reports Thursday, the Trump administration wants to eliminate, along with the National Endowment for the Humanities.
"This is a human issue. It's about free expression, and it's about what role the arts play," said Keri Putnam, the institute's executive director.
Cutting NEA and other federal arts funding, long targets of conservative lawmakers, would reduce the budget by such a minuscule amount, she said, that "it feels more like a statement about the arts. What people can do, not just artists, but all people … is to speak up for what role arts bring to our culture and our lives and to our ability to understand our world."
Twitter: @moviecricket —
Sundance opens
The 2017 Sundance Film Festival runs through Jan. 29 in Park City and at venues in Salt Lake City and the Sundance resort in Provo Canyon. Ticket and schedule information at sundance.org.