Blog A Mini Indie peek at the festival circuit

Yes, the Sundance Film Festival's overlords may have their own luxurious theater here in Madison, but it's the Memorial Union's humble Play Circle theater that'll be hosting the local premieres of four movies fresh from Sundance this week, thanks to the Mini Indie Film Festival, running Thursday through Saturday. Decider didn't have a chance to properly review all the selections, but here's a quick guide to this sneakily prestigious (and free) film event.

Cult documentarian Joe Berlinger (Brother’s Keeper, Paradise Lost, Metallica: Some Kind Of Monster) returns with the politically charged Crude (Friday, 9:30 p.m.). The cinema verite account of Chevron’s serial abuse of Ecuador as a toxic dumping ground sheds light on an ecological atrocity that has been dubbed the “Amazonian Chernobyl."

The verite ethos continues on Saturday with unsung master Kim Longinotto’s Rough Aunties (3 p.m.), winner of Sundance’s World Cinema Jury Prize for Documentaries. Longinotto (Divorce Iranian Style) has long tracked the plight of women around the globe, and her new film follows five women’s work for South African nonprofit Bobbi Bear in counseling sexually abused children. Other picks culled from the Sundance lineup include neo-noir The Missing Person (9:30 p.m.) and Prom Night In Mississippi (Saturday, 7 p.m.), a doc about Morgan Freeman’s crusade to end segregated dances at a small town high school in the deep south.

The rest of the festival is a grab bag of tried-and-true crowdpleasers and recent veterans of Madison’s life-support art-house scene. Thursday night’s geek-friendly double feature of The King Of Kong: A Fistful Of Quarters (7:30 p.m.) and Wisconsin Film Festival favorite The Rock-afire Explosion (9:30 p.m.) should make for a pleasant nostalgia trip, albeit one with an obsessive undercurrent. On Friday, Swedish vampire flick Let The Right One In assumes its rightful place as a midnight movie, and Saturday afternoon brings the last local chance to witness the hushed wonder of Wendy And Lucy (5:15 p.m.) on a 35mm print for the foreseeable future. The fest winds down Saturday night with a midnight showing of Quentin Tarantino’s infamous Reservoir Dogs, giving viewers ample reason to gear up for his long-gestating war epic Inglourious Basterds, which is rumored to be premiering at the Cannes Film Festival in May.