But there’s one thing Kielbasa won’t have to worry about: slipping on slushy snow and bumping into a metal barricade, as he did one night in January at the chilly Sundance Film Festival in Utah. That stumble on Park City’s Historic Main Street was about the only misstep made by the fast-moving Kielbasa during a week at America’s most prestigious film festival.

He and several other staff members went to Sundance in part to scout for features and documentaries that they could present in Sarasota. But because Sundance is the film industry’s version of a political convention (with some Super Bowl-style hype thrown in), Kielbasa also spent time networking, schmoozing and spreading the word about the Sarasota festival. At film screenings, lunches and late-night parties with techno music pulsating, Kielbasa chatted with actors, producers, publicists and distributors. One night, he even cornered powerful studio head Harvey Weinstein, who left the encounter with a Sarasota Film Festival postcard in his pocket.

I spent the week shadowing Kielbasa and his colleagues, wearing my borrowed ski parka, gloves and hiking boots, which never seemed to ward off temperatures that dropped to the single digits at times. Here is my Sundance diary.

Because of an ice storm in Atlanta (a harrowing experience for a nervous flier like me), I arrive in Salt Lake City mid-afternoon, nearly three hours late. It’s a half-hour ride into the Wasatch Mountains to Park City, a former silver-mining town and now a popular ski resort with a permanent population of 7,000.

During the 10-day festival, the streets are a lot more crowded than the slopes. More than 50,000 people, including 1,000 journalists from around the world, will attend Sundance screenings.

All 1,000 reporters seem to be in front of me in the slow-moving line for press credentials at festival headquarters. But I get my badge in time to hear Sundance founder and president Robert Redford introduce the opening-night film, the documentary Chicago 10.

The movie deals with the Vietnam War protesters who were prosecuted for leading a massive anti-war rally in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic convention. Debuting only a week after President Bush announced a "surge" of American forces in Iraq, the documentary couldn’t be more current.

"This film is about another time when young people raised their voices in protest of what they felt was wrong and put themselves in harm’s way," Redford says from the stage of the 1,270-seat Eccles Theatre, a high-school auditorium that’s one of eight venues for Sundance films.

It’s 7 degrees as I wait for a shuttle bus to take me to a press/industry screening at 8:30 a.m. I catch the bus near the townhouse where I’m staying on the outskirts of Park City. It belongs to some friends who, wisely, are in their winter home in Naples this time of year. I’m fortunate that they invited me to stay in their comfortable Park City home, because hotel rooms must be booked a year in advance at festival time. Rooms start at $300 a night and escalate to $700 a night at the posh Stein Erickson Lodge.

At 11 a.m., I join Kielbasa at a screening of Away From Her, a poignant film that stars Julie Christie as a woman struggling with the onset of dementia. The film has already been booked for the Sarasota festival, but Kielbasa hasn’t seen it yet. We are both moved by this understated work and agree that it should resonate with Sarasota audiences.

Kielbasa and I head for lunch on Historic Main Street, a six-block long stretch of colorful 19th-century buildings that have been converted into restaurants, cafes and galleries. During the festival, corporate sponsors take over some of the buildings. Part of the Kimball Art Center becomes the Entertainment Weekly CafÈ, for example. There are also an AOL Cyber Lodge and the Delta Air Lines Sky Lodge.

This is only the second time Kielbasa has been to Sundance because, until last year, Sundance and the Sarasota festival overlapped.

"The entertainment industry is relatively small, so it’s important to show your face here, to make contacts," Kielbasa says. "I’ll run into somebody from [the specialty film studio] Fox Searchlight, for example, and then I’ve got a connection the next time we call Fox Searchlight for a film."