Eugene Hernandez over at IndieWIRE recently interviewed Geoffrey Gilmore, Director of the Sundance Film Festival. The point of the interview, for Gilmore, was to make it very clear that this year's Sundance will be less a winter fashion show for celebrities, and more brand-spanking-new filmmakers emerging onto the scene (see the line-up here).

I want to believe the Sundance Film Festival is returning to its roots as advocate for truly independent filmmakers, but in reality it's a business. All of the publicity they get from dramatic deals being struck late into the night after a film's premiere and celebrities shopping on the main drag draws more sponsors (Chrysler and Sundance, I never got it) and sells more tickets. Gilmore has become adept at walking the line between Hollywood sellout and independent militant. Which makes me wonder about the back-to-basics spin on the next festival.

Sundance is certainly at the place where they can have a line up of never before seen films made by first time filmmakers. They get thousands of submissions each year, so the pool is plenty wide and deep. But why, all of a sudden, is this year's lineup bent so heavily toward these new guys?

Could it have anything to do with the success of Napoleon Dynamite? In the article, Gilmore describes many of this year's films coming from "over the transom," the phrase I heard him use in the Library Theater when he introduced the premiere of Napoleon Dynamite in 2003. Is it that break-out films do more to boost business for Sundance in the long run than Britney Spears flying in to catch a movie?

Or maybe, just maybe, this year really is an exceptional year. Like the "Class of '92" which, along with introducing Quentin Tarantino, became a tipping point for the short-lived independent film movement of the '90s. Maybe some years, great new films just start coming out of the woodwork, for no apparent reason. Or maybe that's the story Gilmore's putting out there to draw more buyers and create more big distribution deal hype.

Who knows? It's hard to trust anything you read anymore. Everybody's got their agenda. But I do love tipping points oh so much. And I've been predicting that the engine will again kick over with this next generation of filmmakers producing more films faster than ever before. So I'll admit, deep down I really hope Geoffrey Gilmore wasn't just hitting the points his publicist told him to hit, and that years from now 2006 will be known as a year when the face of filmmaking changed.