While Sundance and Slamdance will take front and center stage this month in Utah, the SLC Film Center is offering a trio of documentary films in a week of free, public screenings that will include appearances by two of the film’s directors.

Objectified

‘Objectified,’ directed by Gary Hustwit, opens the series Friday, Jan. 8, at 7 p.m. at the Salt Lake Art Center on West Temple adjacent to the downtown convention center. Hustwit, whose first film ‘Helvetica’ about the so-named typeface echoed his deep amateur passion for graphic design, sets out to satisfy his curiosity about industrial and mechanical design in this 2009 documentary.

Focusing on the designers of toothbrushes, plywood chairs, clocks, razors and other gadgets of our 21st century lives, Hustwit aims at understanding the underlying structures that define how consumer products are made and used. As he explained in a blog post:

‘The term objectified has two meanings. One is ‘to be treated with the status of a mere object.’ But the other is ‘something abstract expressed in a concrete form,’ as in the way a sculpture objectifies an artist’s thoughts. It’s the act of transforming creative thought into a tangible object, which is what designers in this film do every day. But maybe there’s a third meaning to this title, regarding the ways these objects are affecting us and our environment. Have we all become objectified?’

Salon’s Stephanie Zacharek suggests Hustwit’s film has met these objectives. ‘The movie is particularly honest in the way it deals with the fact that cool stuff makes us want it — and designers are always coming up with ways to make newer cool stuff, only speeding up the cycle of consumption,’ she wrote in a 2009 review. ‘All respectable designers have to be thinking about sustainability, and they know it.’

Orgasm Inc.

When ‘Orgasm Inc.’ was premiered at Toronto’s Hot Docs Film Festival last spring, 600 audience members each received a free vibrator and the candidly funny documentary ever since has enjoyed an energetic run at screenings throughout the United States and Canada. While director Liz Canner peppers the film with abundant humor, the theme is more sobering as she explores the marketing dynamics that drive pharmaceutical companies to ensure new devices, drugs, and therapies will bring them untold millions of dollars in profit.

The film is based around the campaign to get Food and Drug Administration approval for a female version of Viagra designed to treat female sexual dysfunction. Canner takes a job editing erotic videos for use in drug trials as part of her preparation for the documentary filmmaking, starting out with the rather innocuous premise that her film will be about the science of pleasure. As she goes deeper into her work and research, she discovers the much more insidious aspects of the marketing aims that compel pharmaceutical mega-firms to manipulate their work primarily for financial, rather than scientific and clinical, gains.

Canner will attend the SLC screening which will be held Wednesday, Jan. 13, at 8 p.m. at the Westminster Vieve Gore Auditorium. The evening includes a 7:30 p.m. reception and a post-screening Q&A with Canner.

Show Business: The Road to Broadway

One of the most well-known producers of Broadway, film, and television, Dori Berinstein marks her film directorial debut with this 2007 documentary that offers a close look at the process of realizing in full the staging of a Broadway theatrical production, most specifically four musicals. While Berinstein is already working on her third feature film, this documentary continues to attract substantial audiences at screenings throughout the country, particularly those who are passionate about theater and are anxious to see an insider’s perspective on the triumphs and stresses involved.

The film, which will be screened Thursday, Jan. 14, at 7 p.m. in the City Library Auditorium, covers the genesis of “Caroline, or Change,” “Taboo,” “Avenue Q” and “Wicked” through the 2004 Tony Awards. Berinstein will attend the SLC screening and will participate in a Q&A after the film is shown.

It’s dramatic core perhaps is best described by San Francisco Chronicle’s Mick LaSalle:

‘The feeling is hard to describe, but “ShowBusiness” gets it: the terror, the insularity and the exhilaration. In the weeks before opening, a show becomes its own world. People working on it do nothing but live inside it, rehearsing by day and performing by night, recalibrating the show in the hours between a preview’s end and the start of the next morning’s rehearsals. Within such an enclosure, both intense affections and resentments are likely to bloom. Everyone is exhausted. Everyone is scared. Everyone is ambitious, and the possible outcomes range from overnight success to career-destroying disgrace. And it all comes down to one show on one night, in which every participant has to be great, or else the whole thing collapses.’

The trio of screenings completes SLC Film Center’s January schedule, truncated because of the major film festivals. However, the center’s February screenings include new entries for the Spanish Language Film and Body Image series. For more information, see here.