B. Ruby Rich reports from the 2012 Sundance Film Festival and admires Beasts of the Southern Wild (Benh Zeitlin) and 5 Broken Cameras (Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi).

When the Sundance Film Festival debuted in the 1980s, it entered a landscape dominated by a small corps of well-established A-list film festivals: New York, Chicago, San Francisco. A scrappy upstart, it quickly crashed the VIP room with the help of Robert Redford’s celebrity