By Ella Taylor

The Sundance Film Festival began early for me: Crawling to LAX through our first torrential rains in years, I got into a spirited debate with my Iranian cabdriver about who was the better filmmaker, Abbas Kiarostami (Through the Olive Trees) or Mohsen Makhmalbaf (Kandahar).

Both are pretty great, but I wondered what my well-informed driver did for a living back in Tehran — Guerrilla filmmaker? Censor to the mullahs? — and admired his good cheer about driving a cab for the sake of his children's future.

The ticketing lines at both LAX and Salt Lake City were infested with Hollywood types bellowing into their cell phones in preparation for the snowy streets of Park City. And in that festival town, too, agents and producers, actors and other celebrities are several feet deep, screaming their incredibly busy schedules for (preferably) all to hear.

The nice thing is that the frigid temperatures act as a social leveler: Stuffed like sausages into our thermals, padded parkas, snow boots and ski caps, we all look alike, or so I flatter myself. You can't tell the difference between the celebs and the B-list — a motley crew, that last, composed in part of sleek marketers, die-hard festivalgoers, and hungry-eyed publicists on the lookout for reporters, bloggers and film critics doing what we do best — griping about not getting into the screenings we wanted, not scoring the coveted all-entry press pass and kvetching that the festival has sold out to the devil studios.

(Critics are especially testy kvetchers these days, now that so many of us have lost our full-time jobs in the collapsing newspaper business. We comfort ourselves by sneering in the direction of the gifting suites, where stars keep a leery eye out for lurking paparazzi as they furtively creep out with loaded swag bags.)

As always, there will be long and loud debate over whether the fest has lost the indie roots to which it committed under founding father Robert Redford. As always, programmers will insist they're going ever more boldly indie — and that's possibly even true, if the measure is the rising buzz about technology and the New Wave of digital film.

Meanwhile, I look at the schedule and see the usual delightful mix of crowd-pleasers, social-issue weepies, dweebodramedies for the youth of today (yes, there is a film called