Documentary filmmaker Rob van Hattum's latest effort, Waste = Food, explores the concept of "cradle-to-cradle" environmentalism. First developed by celebrated environmental architect William McDonough and chemist Michael Braungart, this pioneering design philosophy envisions endless use and reuse of raw materials. Since Van Hattum's film recently premiered on Sundance Channel's The Green, this seemed like the perfect moment to have a chat with him.

Netscape: When did you first become interested in environmentalism?

Van Hattum: Quite a long time ago, actually. In 1972, when I was 17, there was a report released by a nongovernmental think tank called the Club of Rome. They argued that we would soon have a very polluted environment, and problems with energy and natural resources. We discussed the report at school and it got me rather worried. It was the first moment my mind was turned towards the environment and the impact man has on the planet.

The year after that, there was an oil embargo by the OPEC countries. As a result, we experienced government-mandated car-free Sundays in the Netherlands. I talked about the environment a lot, about our impact on the planet, and you could say I was kind of a nerd in the eyes of my friends. They always tried to convince me that science and technology were the cause of all the environmental evil. I tried to convince them that mankind itself was the problem, at least those who believe that you can use the oceans and the air as a sewage system for harmful products.

A day or two after I arrived in Park City for the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, I found myself chatting with a documentary director at a party. As he explained, he was taking a detour from a year-long festival tour promoting his second major doc, which had premiered last fall at the Toronto Film Festival, only to be overshadowed by some of the more star-studded projects on the program. "I mean, we got enough press," the director told me. "But Toronto is a festival where it's still possible to play under the radar. Unlike Sundance."

I had that conversation in my head as I tackled about 20 of the 125 features at this year's festival. As even the most casual follower of the film industry knows by now, Sundance has become a famously buzz-driven affair. About 75 percent of the media who attend the festival concentrate on the dozen or so films that screen in the non-competitive "Premieres" sidebar. These are usually Hollywood-financed pictures with an A- or B-list star and/or director; they tend to be the objects of bidding wars if they don't go into the Festival with distribution already secured. This means that the 105 additional films on the schedule have to fight an uphill battle to gain any visibility. In past years, the competitive Jury Awards have served as a corrective to this problem. In 2006, for instance, while Little Miss Sunshine soaked up the lion's share of headlines and distribution funds, a three-part marvel of personal, truly independent filmmaking called Iraq in Fragments quietly bagged three Jury awards. And just last week, the same production secured an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary. For a film largely shot and edited by one man on a low six-figure budget, that's about as successful as you can get.

This year, the four Juries divided their accolades evenly between small "issue films" and heavily-hyped acquisition bait. Whilst Grace is Gone, the first big sale of the festival, went home with the Dramatic Audience prize as well as the coveted Waldo Salt Screenwriting Prize, the World Dramatic Jury prize went to Sweet Mud, a story of life on an Israeli kibbutz that both press and Festival goers had all but ignored. Other major jury prizes went to the Afghani elections doc Enemies of Happiness (Grand Jury Prize, World Documentary) and immigration drama Padre Nuestro (Grand Jury Prize, Dramatic).

To say that many of these films were not exactly the hottest tickets of the fest would be an understatement. But Jury Prize winners rarely are. It's not that Sundance 2007 was badly programmed; of the 20 features I saw in their entirety, only two were really awful, and seven films fell somewhere between Very Good and Undeniably Great. What's interesting, I think, is that the very best films I saw at Sundance 2007 were almost completely overlooked by the Festival press corps. And since many of them screened in the somewhat marginal Spectrum sidebar, they were ineligible for profile-boosting awards. Three dramatic features are worth singling out for their formal innovation, their fresh perspective, their directors' willingness to take risks....and for the fact that each project left Sundance without distribution.

An estimated 30,000 prisoners were executed at Abu Ghraib Prison by Saddam Hussein, their bodies buried in shallow mass graves, and in most cases, all record of their existence erased. Shortly before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Saddam granted amnesty to all living persons incarcerated at Abu Ghraib. He then used the vacated prison cells to incinerate reams of documents recording the misdeeds that had taken place at the prison.

in Rory Kennedy's documentary Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, both baby-faced grunts and seasoned intelligence professionals describe feeling "haunted" on the grounds of the prison. There were wild dogs digging up corpses, DayGlo portraits of Saddam still adorning the walls, and the pervasive funk of sweat and human feces exacerbated by the 130-degree heat. It was, in short, a climate that sapped soldiers of the ability to exercise rational morality. It's Kennedy's thesis that this climate turned soldiers into the perfect vessels for a defense policy that was willfully defiant of the Geneva Conventions, thus making the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal possible.

Speaking at the Sundance Film Festival on the morning after Bush's State of the Union address, Kennedy (the daughter of RFK and niece of Senator Ted Kennedy) says she came to the project almost by accident. "I had originally planned to do a very different film, which was more about the nature of people who commit extraordinary acts of evil, and we were looking to genocides to exemplify that. And then I, like so many other people, was really horrified by the photographs that came out of Abu Ghraib. I saw them and found myself asking very similar questions: Who were these people, and what motivated them? Were they the kids next door or were they psychopaths?" When the director asked the soldiers themselves why they had participated in the abuse, they all gave her the same answer: "I did it because I was told to do it.'"

Early one morning in 2005, a dying man was unceremoniously dropped off at a hospital in Enumclaw, WA, a small town 45 miles outside of Seattle. Hours later, the man, who was carrying no identification, died from internal bleeding caused by a perforated colon. Security camera footage of the car that dropped the man at the hospital led authorities to a horse farm. There they found "buckets full" of video tapes documenting men having sex with horses. The farm was apparently a meeting spot for an online community of zoophiles (they call themselves "zoos"), who would gather to drink daiquiris, watch science fiction films, and engage in sexual intercourse with Arabian stallions. The regular visitors to the farm knew one another by their online screen names. The dead man's name was Mr. Hands.

The incident became a major media event in the Pacific Northwest, and videos confiscated from the farm eventually made their way online. Since there is no law against bestiality in Washington, none of the men who operated and frequented the ranch were charged with a crime. They did, however, come in for their share of public humiliation. Now those men are telling their side of the story, in Seattle-based filmmaker Robinson Devor's Sundance Documentary Competition entry, Zoo.

Devor incorporates audio interviews with regular visitors to the ranch, as well as reenactments of (non-sexual) events, many featuring the actual participants. "We had no interest in regurgitating what was already out there," Devor told Netscape News, referring to the tabloid TV and Internet exposure. "It was difficult. Just getting [the participants] to talk openly was a challenge because we were 'The Media'. And 'The Media' was bad for a lot of people involved. Some of them would have preferred to have seen a hard-line, 60 Minutes sort of documentary expose. But that's not what we do as filmmakers."

It's rare for a film festival to spotlight major political figures. But earlier today, former Bush Administration officials appeared on a panel alongside filmmakers Charles Ferguson and Alex Gibney to discuss their Sundance Documentary Competition entry, No End in Sight. First-time director Ferguson described the picture, which premiered here in Park City on Monday to standing ovations from both festival attendees and press, as pointedly non-partisan. Instead he aimed at creating a cohesive historical record of the mistakes made in the first year after the Iraq invasion. "I don't want it to be seen as having an ideological bent," Ferguson explained. He added: "I wanted it to be a simple accounting of what occurred. Because what happened was so stunning.... I thought that we would all be best served by showing what happened."

The panel, moderated by journalist David D'Arcy, brought together five interview subjects from No End, including U.S. Marine Lieutenant Seth Moulton; former U.S. Ambassador Barbara Bodine, who was kidnapped in Kuwait during the first Iraq war and was placed in charge of a Baghdad for a short time after the 2003 invasion; and Omar Fekeiki, the former office manager of the Washington Post Baghdad bureau. Two former Administration officials participated via satellite: Lawrence Wilkerson (who was Colin Powell's chief of staff) and Jay Garner (who was head of the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance in Iraq).

D'Arcy led the panel through a discussion of some of the major points made by the film, including the Administration's refusal to stop the looting that erupted immediately after the fall of Baghdad. "I was in the push to Baghdad," recalled Lieutenant Moulton. "There's this mistaken perception that the Marines in Baghdad couldn't have done something to stop the looting. In truth, we were told not to. We certainly had enough troops to stop the looting right there in Baghdad."

"While the American officials in Baghdad were trying to figure out what to do," said Fekeiki, "we were deceived by what they were telling the press, that everything was planned perfectly. People were building their hopes high, because they all thought we would be liberated, and that we would start rebuilding the country in six to eight months."

The much-buzzed Grace is Gone stars John Cusack as Stanley, a conservative, middle-American father of two who has just learned that his soldier wife has been killed in Iraq. Deliberately paced and remarkably tender, the film defies expectations by avoiding political statement in favor of intimate portraiture. In the context of Sundance, a festival known for showcasing polemics, that in itself feels like a revelation.

On the eve of a major exhibit at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, artist and professor Steve Kurtz rolled over in bed to find his wife lying next to him--dead. He called 911, and the authorities who arrived immediately began asking questions about the bacterial samples and biological equipment in his home. Finding an invitation to an art exhibit containing Arabic letters was apparently the last straw. The FBI took Kurtz away in handcuffs, sealed off his home, and detained him as a suspected bio-terrorist. He would spend the next 22 hours in custody.

Meanwhile, agents in HAZMAT suits stormed in to confiscate his computers, books, and research. The technicians sequestered his cat in the attic for several days without food or water. The agency also confiscated Hope Kurtz's corpse, which they autopsied twice before conceding that the suspect had not contributed in any way to his wife's death. The FBI continued to investigate Kurtz' work and life, and over a year later, he was indicted on federal charges of mail and wire fraud, in connection with the bacteria he had purchased for his Mass MOCA exhibit. He and his longtime collaborator, research scientist Dr. Robert Farrell, are still awaiting trial. They each face up to 20 years in prison.

"I heard about [the story] and dropped everything," says filmmaker Lynn Hershman-Leeson, whose Strange Culture is screening as part of the New Frontier sidebar here at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival. The experimental documentary places Kurtz's story within the larger context of post-9/11 paranoia, with its potentially devastating impact on civil rights. Hershman-Leeson, a Sundance veteran, is quite comfortable situating her latest film as a work of activism. "I felt this was the most important thing I could do," she says. "It was just critical to our society."