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PARK CITY, Utah -- Dear you:

Just thought I'd drop you a line to let you know what you've been missing here at the Sundance Film Festival.

If you follow the celeb-obsessed online and TV coverage, you might already know that Ashton Kutcher showed up at his "The Butterfly Effect" premiere in a cowboy outfit (some sort of Butch & Sundance joke), that the inexplicable Paris Hilton and boyfriend Nick Carter were doing the public squeezy-squeeze and that Al Gore bopped around town for the second straight year.

To be honest, I didn't see any of them, though I did see Jane Fonda ask Sally Field, "Sally, would you hold my vagina for me?"

OK -- guess I'd better explain that one. Fonda was performing one of Eve Ensler's "Vagina Monologues" at a reception for the documentary "Until the Violence Stops," about the movement to curb violence against women. One of the party favors was a lollipop in a telltale anatomic shape, and Fonda, introduced by Ensler as a "vagina warrior," handed hers to her fellow two-time Oscar winner in the audience before her R-rated reading.

Anyway, the festival really isn't about the celebrities. Here it's the stars, for once, who are basking in reflected glory -- that of a festival devoted primarily to low-wattage independent films.

The festival remains the only place where people will wait 4 1/2 hours in a frigid tent to line up for a no-name American indie that likely will be greeted with massive public indifference when it finally opens commercially.

And where else do people get excited, really excited, about documentaries? Sundance has been promoting docs for years, and over the last year -- with the successes of "Bowling for Columbine," "Winged Migration," "Spellbound" and Sundance prize-winner "Capturing the Friedmans" -- the public has begun to catch up.

This may be the most docs-heavy year yet. For the first time, the festival opened with one: "Riding Giants," a lively history of big-wave surfers directed by Stacy Peralta, who brought the similarly zippy skateboarding documentary "Dogtown and Z-Boys" to the fest three years ago.

Non-fiction must-sees

And many of the movies generating the most you-gotta-see-this enthusiasm are in the non-fiction category. Morgan Spurlock's "Super Size Me" does what Michael Moore does best but without the ambush tactics; it's an alternately hilarious and distressing personal/political documentary in which the personable filmmaker eats nothing but McDonald's meals for 30 days and screws up his health in unimaginable ways.

On the flip side, Matt Mahurin's highly entertaining "I Like Killing Flies" is about the smallest of eateries, an endangered Greenwich Village hole-in-the-wall run by a colorful, foul-mouthed, amazingly versatile cook. And that feature was preceded by a special treat: the 20-minute short "Just a Clown," about New York's No. 1 birthday-party clown David Friedman.

This is basically the movie that director Andrew Jarecki was planning to complete when Friedman told him of his family's dark skeletons and the filmmaker switched gears to make "Capturing the Friedmans" instead.

The festival's biggest laughs so far have come in Chris Smith, Dan Ollman and Sarah Price's documentary "The Yes Men," another indication of this festival's increased political content. It's about pranksters who pose as World Trade Organization representatives and deliver wildly satirical speeches (such as a proposal to recycle human waste to make McDonald's burgers for Third World countries) that somehow are taken seriously by the corporate crowd.

There's been no shortage of twisted behavior on display at Sundance 2004. Want to see two teen-idol pop-star brothers who have the hots for each other? Check out Christopher Munch's "Harry and Max." On second thought, don't.

Ray McKinnon's "Chrystal" also includes one of the all-time absurd seduction scenes, as Billy Bob Thornton's remorseful ex-convict (another one?) stimulates his broken-necked wife (Lisa Blount) while musing about trying to replace their dead child with a new baby. Despite its star power and occasional lyrical moments, "Chrystal" doesn't yet have a buyer (at least as I write this), perhaps thanks to its multiple moments of unmotivated nastiness.

Meanwhile, distributors are said to be cautiously circling Nicole Kassell's "The Woodsman," a drama starring Kevin Bacon as a pedophile. "Deadline," Katy Chevigny and Kirsten Johnson's documentary about ex-Gov. George Ryan and the death penalty, also is on the radar, though one interested distribution exec told me the fact that the movie's hero is potentially jail-bound could make it much harder to promote.

Otherwise, there was a bit of a feeding frenzy -- or "burst," as Fine Line president Mark Ordesky called it -- early in the festival. Lions Gate snapped up Chris Kentis' "Open Water," a tense, low-frills thriller about a scuba-diving couple left out in the ocean by their dive boat. Think "Blair Witch" at sea.

"Garden State," directed by and starring "Scrubs" star Zach Braff, may have received a mixed reception out here, but Fox Searchlight and Miramax teamed up to buy it for a reported $5 million (i.e., a lot of money). Fox Searchlight also supposedly paid close to that for Jared Hess' "Napoleon Dynamite," an occasionally laugh-out-loud comedy, about a gawky high school nerd (Jon Heder), that plays like "Welcome to the Dollhouse" without the discomfort or "Rushmore" without the emotional depth.

`Motorcycle' train wreck?

For some reason, Walter Salles' "The Motorcycle Diaries" had some distribution folks and online reporters using words like "train wreck" to describe its advance buzz. Then it premiered and was instantly considered the festival's best film, a beautifully shot, not-too-preachy tale about 23-year-old future revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara's consciousness-raising road trip through South America. Focus Features won the bidding war for that one.

As expected, Peter Biskind's gossip-heavy book "Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance and the Rise of Independent Film" has been a popular topic of discussion, though as much for its various factual errors as the unflattering portrayals of Miramax co-chief Harvey Weinstein and Sundance founder Robert Redford. Nonetheless, Dolly's Books on Main Street had run out of copies by the weekend.

Redford, who appeared in his first Sundance film, Pieter Jan Brugge's low-key kidnap thriller "The Clearing," opened the festival with his usual "the festival is for filmmakers" spiel before wryly concluding, "Later on tonight I'll be joining Harvey Weinstein for a book-signing party."

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