Very, very early tomorrow morning, the Spout team will decamp for Park City, Utah, where we will spend the next week plus covering the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. I hope to see somewhere between 20-30 films before coming back to New York, but here’s a look at five of the titles in competition that I’m most excited about. Tomorrow, I’ll post about the films in the Spectrum, Premieres and Midnight sidebars that I can’t wait to see.

American Teen (directed by Nanette Burstein. Documentary Competition)

Excerpt From the Official Synopsis: “American Teen intimately follows the lives of four teenagers in one small town in Indiana through their senior year of high school. Using cinema vérité footage, interviews, and animation, it presents a candid portrait of being 17 and all that goes with it. We see the insecurities, the cliques, the jealousies, the first loves and heartbreaks, the experimentation with sex and alcohol, the parental pressures, and the struggle to make profound decisions about the future.”

Why I’m Interested: It’s no secret that the media climate of My Super Sweet 16, Gossip Girl and the masterfully manipulative Laguna Beach is in need of a serious real-world corrective. I hope Burstein (who was nominated for an Oscar for On the Ropes, and whose last theatrical release was the cheekily worshipful Robert Evans doc The Kid Stays in the Picture) has managed it.

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