Filmmaker Bruce LaBruce. (Bruce LaBruce)

After a good night’s sleep, it’s time to face the last dance at Sundance. It’s hard to drag myself away from our cozy fireplace, but I’m scheduled to appear on a panel at the Queer Lounge entitled “Gay Filmmakers and Sexual Provocation,” a subject upon which I do have a thing or two to say. My fellow panelists, Isaac Julien, here with his Derek Jarman doc, and Lesli Klainberg, who co-directed the TV series Indie Sex, are both quite agreeable. Kyle Buchanan, the Advocate film critic who conceived and moderated the panel, isn’t afraid to dig into contentious subjects, like whether or not GLAAD — the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, and sponsor of the Queer Lounge — tries to censor or otherwise influence Hollywood scripts and teleplays. I’ve always vehemently and publicly opposed this strategy, and I do so again today. A representative from GLAAD denies that the organization still does this, and says that he is no longer in favour of his organization trying to act as a lobbyist to coerce “positive portrayals” of gays and lesbians out of Hollywood writers and producers. After all, as Isaac comments, “One man’s treasure is another man’s trash.”

I’m almost late for my own screening, so I have to run up Main Street, which is on a relatively steep hill, to get there on time. As the elevation of Park City makes the oxygen a little thin, I arrive totally winded and sweaty. The theatre is full, and the screening, in a more intimate theatre, is much more successful than the premiere. The audience seems to be really into the film, with very few walkouts, although the gut-f---ing scene always manages to clear a few people out. I’m not sure if we’ve sold the film yet, but I’m not really focusing on that. For me it’s more important to observe how it plays to audiences and how people respond afterwards.

In the afternoon Jeremy, my Otto, and I catch a movie called The Broken, a British horror movie about monstrous doppelgangers who break out of mirrors to murder and replace people. Think Invasion of the Body Snatchers meets Alice Through the Looking Glass. Despite its overabundance of horror clichés, it isn’t half bad. Then again, that must mean it isn’t half good.

When I first traveled to Sundance in 1995 with my movie Super 8 ½, the festival was essentially two snow banks and a pre-eyeliner Jared Leto. But even then it had apparently become too mainstream for some disgruntled film folk, who started up a parallel film festival, Slamdance, that year. (A few years later, an alternative to the alternative, called Slamdunk, would emerge, followed by Tromadance, the only festival with no entry fee and free screenings.)

I can’t remember much about my screening in 1995, but I do vividly recall attending Larry Clark’s Kids, the sensation of the festival, as the guest of its executive producer, Gus Van Sant, and its writer, Harmony Korine. I remember because Gus and his then-boyfriend, D-J, and I smuggled a bottle of tequila into the screening and kept slipping it to Harmony, who was under the legal drinking age. Fun times!

The following year, I presented the world premiere of my movie Hustler White. at Sundance. Hollywood had really begun to descend on the festival with a vengeance, like a plague of sewage (see: the South Park episode about Sundance). It was still fun, but there were too many agents and entertainment lawyers and other men in black running rings around the poor Parker Poseys, desperately looking for the next big thing. As I had partly financed my film by pre-selling U.S. rights, they pretty much left me alone. Besides, a movie featuring an amputee hustler who pleasures his clients with his leg stump isn’t necessarily the kind of indie fare they’re looking for to break into the multiplexes.

Four years ago I returned to Sundance with The Raspberry Reich, a sexually explicit movie about the leader of a gang of extreme left-wing terrorists who makes her straight male followers have sex with each other to prove their revolutionary commitment. Once again, it wasn’t exactly Little Miss Sunshine, and as it had been pre-sold to US. distributor Strand Releasing, I wasn’t paid much mind, although the film did go on to play at over 150 film festivals worldwide. This time I was a little shocked to discover that Sundance had become so overrun by Hollywood types that Paris Hilton herself was in attendance. In fact, at one party, I was asked to relinquish my banquette beside the DJ booth to make way for the Queen of All Emptiness. Only to prove that chivalry wasn’t quite dead yet, I magnanimously complied.

Returning this year with my new movie, Otto; or, Up with Dead People, all bets are off. It’s another world premiere, but this time we haven’t pre-sold the U.S. territory. I will be attending with my Canadian co-producers, Jennifer Jonas and Leonard Farlinger of New Real Films, and our sales agent, Charlotte Mickie of Maximum Films, who will have the pleasure of trying to sell a melancholy gay zombie movie with political overtones to a mob of distributors looking for the next Juno. On the upside, I’m in the Park City at Midnight section alongside Diary of the Dead, directed by recent Toronto resident George A. Romero, the master of the zombie genre. Apparently we used the same camera to shoot our respective zombie movies, the Panasonic 900 HDX. I couldn’t be more thrilled.