Followers of local movie production already have heard that Lawrence filmmaker Kevin Willmott&#8217;s new drama, &#8220;The Only Good Indian,&#8221; is going to the Sundance Film Festival unreeling Thursday through Jan. 25 in Park City, Utah.</p><p>But it turns out that there&#8217;s more to the Kansas-Missouri connection at Sundance &#8217;09:</p><p><strong>&#8226;&#8220;Stay the Same Never Change&#8221; </strong>is the first feature-length film by video artist Laurel Nakadate. It was shot in Kansas City with a local cast in the summer of 2007 with funding from Grand Arts and was shown at the gallery last spring.</p><p>It will be presented in Sundance&#8217;s non-competition New Frontier category devoted to &#8220;experimentation and the convergence of film and art.&#8221;</p><p>The Sundance program notes describe &#8220;Stay the Same&#8221; as &#8220;weird and delightful &#8230; an audacious effort that burns with such originality and honesty that it seems destined to become a festival discovery &#8230; a nonlinear yarn that skips among various vignettes depicting the solitary existence of distantly connected young women, Nakadate&#8217;s film exudes a warm sense of humor as it peers into the loneliness of the girls and their desperate attempts to find affection.&#8221;</p><p>&#8226;<strong>&#8220;The Nature Between Us,&#8221; </strong>written by Roeland Park resident Trey Hock, is a five-minute short that mixes live action with computer animation.</p><p>Hock attended Pembroke Hill High School, got his undergrad degree from K-State and then studied film at Savannah (Ga.) College of Art and Design, where he met the half-dozen friends who with him created Team G, a filmmaking cooperative.</p><p>&#8220;Nature&#8221; (directed by Team G member Will Campbell) unfolds in a colorful, deliberately artificial set representing an alley where young people hang out. One of them uses a video camera to record his friends&#8217; activities and to chronicle the cliques that make up their society.</p><p>&#8220;Then this videographer drops his camera and finds he&#8217;s accidentally recorded a tiny society of blobby creatures living on the ground,&#8221; Hock said. &#8220;The idea is to juxtapose this totally fake reality represented by &#8217;80s and &#8217;90s teen comedies against this &#8216;real&#8217; universe of animated characters.&#8221;</p><p>This is the second time in two years that a Team G project has gone to Sundance. Last year the cooperative scored with the short &#8220;Execution of Solomon Harris.&#8221; Hock was its associate producer and casting director.</p><p>&#8220;We&#8217;re pretty excited to be in Sundance two years running,&#8221; Hock said. &#8220;Totally pumped.&#8221;</p><p>Hock said he frequently flies to Los Angeles to meet with other members of Team G and to work on their projects.</p><p>&#8220;We&#8217;re like this band of people who like doing the same thing. We&#8217;ve never had letters of incorporation and no contracts except for individual projects. You could end up doing almost anything on one of our films, from writing to directing to acting to crew work.&#8221;</p><p><strong>&#8226;</strong><strong>&#8220;Dirt: The Movie&#8221; </strong>is a feature documentary with a segment filmed in Salina, Kan.</p><p>Inspired by William Bryant Logan&#8217;s book <em>Dirt: the Ecstatic Skin of the Earth</em> and directed by Bill Benenson and Gene Rosow, the film (according to the Sundance program) &#8220;offers an important and timely look at the vital relationship between those of us on Earth and something that is easy to take for granted &#8212; the soil upon which we tread.&#8221;</p><p>The film employs the testimony of farmers, physicists, preachers, anthropologists and children, as well as animation and acted vignettes, to tell the story of dirt &#8212; where it comes from, how we view it, how it sustains us and the ways in which it has become endangered.</p><p><strong>&#8226;</strong><strong>&#8220;The X-Rated Grandma,&#8221; </strong>from Lamar, Mo.-based filmmaker Jack Truman, will be featured in a special online component of the Slamdance Festival, an alternative fest that runs concurrent with Sundance.</p><p>&#8220;Grandma&#8221; is a collection of seven short films about Truman&#8217;s mother, Opal Dockery, a former exotic dancer and phone sex conversationalist. Some of the films are straight documentaries; others are only posing as documentaries. Part of the fun, apparently, is figuring out which is which.</p><p>Slamdance will stream segments from &#8220;The X-Rated Grandma&#8221; and other festival films on <a href="http://www.indieroad.net/slamdance">www.indieroad.net/slamdance</a>.</p><p>An earlier Truman film, &#8220;Phone Sex Grandma,&#8221; premiered at the 2006 Slamdance Fest.