Walter Thompson/Xingu Films

From left, Julia Garro, Eleonore Hendricks and Melonie Diaz in Dito Montiel's "Guide to Recognizing Your Saints."

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Back then, he said, the festival was so eager for press attention that it would arrange to pick up visiting journalists at the Salt Lake City airport and drive them into the mountains for a monastic week or so of small, serious films, many unlikely to be seen anywhere else.

He might as well have been harking back to the days of the silver mines. The small, serious movies are still here, some never to be seen again, though these days a great many — the majority in the American dramatic and documentary sections — are shot on high-definition video rather than on film. The setting is now a mobbed, sprawling, media-saturated mini-metropolis, complete with traffic jams and parking nightmares, shuttle buses as packed as Tokyo subway cars, overpriced restaurants with two-hour waits for a table and important people hammering on their Blackberry keypads in darkened movie theaters. In other words, to those of us parachuting in from New York or Los Angeles, it feels a lot like home. Even so, the friendliness of the locals, especially the volunteers who load us onto the buses and shepherd us through the lines into screenings, is positively shaming.

So no more complaints, and no more nostalgia. To appreciate the Sundance Film Festival, 10 days winding up Sunday, as it is, you must embrace its contradictions. Here, the most high-minded artistic and moral aspirations coexist with hype, corporate self-congratulation and a ravening hunger for money and attention. All the values and pathologies that define the movie industry, — and perhaps American culture in general — are concentrated into a bitter, dizzying espresso shot.

To take one example (and speaking of coffee), Starbucks is one of the festival's many sponsors this year (as is The New York Times). It is also the target of a muckraking documentary called "Black Gold," which looks at the poverty and exploitation of the workers and farmers who harvest and process the beans in Ethiopia used by Starbucks. That the festival feels free to program an indictment of one of its patrons is evidence of a healthy — or at least an unavoidable — paradox. Movies, documentary and otherwise, that deal with social inequality and economic injustice are a staple of the festival, whose underwriters and attendees are among the most affluent people and organizations in the world.

Sometimes this convergence can yield surprising results. "God Grew Tired of Us," directed by Christopher Quinn, is a documentary about a group of young men who fled civil war in southern Sudan and lived for years in a refugee camp in Kenya. The film follows a few of these "lost boys" to Pittsburgh and Syracuse, where they adjust to a life that is infinitely safer and more comfortable than what they had left, but hard in its own ways. After one screening, one of the film's subjects, John Bul Dou, whose calm resilience is at the heart of the film, talked about his efforts to raise money to help the thousands of lost boys still in Africa. A member of the audience handed him a check for $25,000.

Utah is among the most reliably Republican states in the union, which lends a certain piquancy to the fact that the surest way to elicit boos from a Sundance audience is to put George Bush's face on the screen. Al Gore was here, warmly received and celebrity-spotted at a few parties; Ralph Nader, meanwhile, was the subject of a probing and informative documentary called "An Unreasonable Man." As ever, political subjects pervaded the documentary categories, nearly always addressed from a left-of-center perspective. It would be nice, if only for variety's sake, to encounter a pro-war or pro-death-penalty documentary here, but that seems unlikely. Some of the topics included the recent Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, the unsettled state of the border between the United States and Mexico, the cruel vagaries of the criminal justice system and the sufferings of wounded soldiers returning from Iraq.

All matters much in need of illumination, from whatever angle. And, in any case, it is not such a bad thing for an event like this to have a point of view. Documentary filmmaking is, at the moment, a mode of argument, and it is possible to learn a great deal from films that forgo objectivity in favor of polemic.

"The Death of the Electric Car," for instance, a work in progress by Chris Paine (shown out of competition), is a prosecutorial examination of the role of oil companies, the automobile industry and the Bush administration (them again) in stymieing the development of emission-free electric vehicles. The film does give some time to the other side, but its intentions are overtly activist, and its interviews with scientists, engineers, regulators and executives provoke as well as inform.

The Sundance audience, one of the most passionate I've ever encountered here, was certainly fired up by the story of a promising technology quashed, in the filmmaker's view, by greed and timidity. As the film chronicled General Motors's shutdown of its electric car line — the company reclaimed every single vehicle it had sold, and destroyed almost all of them — a woman behind me exclaimed, "That's crazy!"

But pointing the camera need not always involve pointing a finger. James Longley's "Iraq in Fragments" is the latest entry in the crowded field of documentaries from that war. It is also one of the best, partly because it is more concerned with exploring daily life and individual destinies than with articulating a position. The title has several meanings, referring both to Mr. Longley's collagist method and to the communal fractures that threaten the country's stability. It takes the form of a trilogy, with one section devoted to Sunnis, one to Shia and one to Kurds, but it also reminds us that we generalize about those groups at our peril. Whether you think the war is right or wrong, "Iraq in Fragments" is a necessary reminder of just how painful and complicated it is.

Which brings us to another paradox, one not unique to Sundance. Film festivals are artificial ecosystems, sealed off from the rest of the world, in which you can encounter a new painful and complicated reality on screen every two hours. A good laugh can seem as rare as a parking space or a restaurant table, which may be why comedies attract inordinate attention, as well as big money. So far this year, the noteworthy deals have been Fox Searchlight's purchase of distribution rights for "Little Miss Sunshine," Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris's crowd-pleasing family road farce starring Greg Kinnear, Toni Collette and Steve Carell, and Warner Independent's pickup of "The Science of Sleep," Michel Gondry's whimsical, trilingual surrealist romance with Gael García Bernal and Charlotte Gainsbourg.

But in the American dramatic competition, trouble — especially the trouble facing young people in small towns and tough neighborhoods — predominates. The earnest, closely observed coming-of-age story is one of Sundance's defining genres, represented this year most notably by Dito Montiel's "Guide to Recognizing Your Saints" and So Yong Kim's "In Between Days."

Mr. Montiel's film, his first, is both an autobiography — the main character, played as a young man by Shia LaBeouf and in later life by Robert Downey Jr., is named Dito — and a mostly successful attempt to breathe fresh life into the "Mean Streets" tradition of volatile neighborhood drama. The film succeeds not just because the material is so close to the director's heart, but also because his loose, fluid directing style and his easy way with actors make it feel lived in, rather than merely familiar.

"In Between Days" is a quieter film, a wisp of a story about a young Korean girl living in a wintry American city and trying to figure out her feelings about her best friend, a boy named Tran, and herself. Ms. Kim generates an extraordinary sense of intimacy without seeming invasive or prurient, and without insulting the audience or the character with too much explanation. It's a small, serious film that shows great promise and that may have a hard time being seen outside this festival. So maybe not much has changed, after all.

Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times

Becca Ayers, left, and her sister Heather in Midtown Manhattan.

In many respects the Kohen sisters function as a couple. They have a joint credit card for apartment expenses and do each other's laundry. When one of them works late, the other has dinner waiting. Ten months ago the two gave up their separate places to move into a two-bedroom apartment in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, not so much to save on rent, but for companionship.

"If I won the lottery tomorrow, I'd probably buy a really big apartment, and we'd probably still live together," Jamie said. "I would just pay all the bills."

In a time when adults are delaying marriage and rents are sky-high in many cities nationwide, many siblings in their 20's and 30's are moving in together rather than bunking with college friends or strangers. The perks of these arrangements run the gamut from eating the leftovers in the fridge without a second thought to receiving help from parents when putting up shelves. But siblings also say they like the security of knowing that their brother or sister won't cheat them on bills, and many find that living together gives them a sense of having a home, not just a bedroom in an apartment. (Yet it's often what happens in the bedroom that can make having a sibling as a roommate awkward.)

The exact number of siblings in their 20's and 30's who room together is unknown, but the 2000 census showed that the number of households shared uniquely by siblings increased by nearly 33,000 from about 700,000 in 1990. Eve Hyatt, a real estate agent in Boca Raton, Fla., has seen more siblings shopping for apartments together in recent years, something she also noticed while working in Chicago.

"This is just one way to be creative to combat the high cost of real estate all over the country," Ms. Hyatt said.

While siblings have sometimes lived together in middle or old age out of necessity, some psychologists and researchers of sibling relationships say that young adult brothers and sisters who become roommates could be laying the foundation for a lifelong support system. Siblings are often close as children, become distant during adolescence and then increasingly reliant on each other as adults, through parenthood, career changes, divorce and old age, said Victor Cicirelli, a professor of psychology at Purdue University.

Kristin Meyer, 27, who lives in Brooklyn with her sister, Alessandra, 24, said she wanted to have her personal photos in her living room. "The only way to do that was to live with my sister," she said.

Bunking with a sibling instead of a stranger from Craigslist can also provide a rare source of stability when jobs and relationships are in flux. Unfamiliar roommates "can be distracting," said Valerie Maholmes, who works for the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. "You have to deal with differences in upbringing, values, how to manage a home, finances and other things." Siblings, however, are more likely to share common ground.

"You wash your dishes when you're done because that's how you grew up," said Patrick McNamara, 27, who has shared a Brooklyn address with his brother Dave, 30, for more than five years. "When people come from a different perspective, that's when it gets hard."

Not all siblings can cohabit peacefully as adults. Michael Jadach, 28, who lives with his brother Steve, 30, in Philadelphia, said he would never consider sharing a home with his other brother, John, because they often don't see eye to eye.

Self-selection assures that sibling-roommates are probably on solid footing to begin with, said Michael D. Kahn, an author of "The Sibling Bond."

And when they don't get along, siblings tend to resolve conflicts swiftly and bluntly. "I threw a bottle of Fantastik at her," Kristin said of a recent time Alessandra angered her by using Windex to clean their kitchen table.

Don Hogan Charles/The New York Times

Fred Bancroft, a dealer, with a 19th-century work by Thomas Fearnley.

George Wachter, director of Sotheby's old-masters paintings department worldwide put together the sale and called it "The Dealer's Eye," offering 73 paintings, drawings, watercolors and decorative objects culled from dealers' stock worldwide. The idea was that there would be no secrets and no gambles: buyers were furnished with a complete history of each work, including the seller, and each work was ready to be hung, saving the buyer the expense of cleaning, restoring and framing.

As the salesroom filled with dealers and a smattering of collectors, more than 20 Sotheby's officials attended to clients who chose anonymity by bidding by telephone. George Gordon, an old-masters painting expert from London who was the afternoon's auctioneer, cheerfully tried to pull bids out of the audience.

But often he met stony faces. Only half the offerings sold, bringing in a total of $5 million, below the $7 million-to-$10 million presale estimate. This was, however, only a small portion of two days of back-to-back old-master auctions at Sotheby's, Thursday and yesterday, which brought more than $70 million.

The lots included in "The Dealer's Eye" was everything from garden-variety Dutch landscapes and flowery still lifes to scenes of dead birds; there was even an 18th-century portrait of a poodle (which did not find a home). The dates ranged from the 14th to 19th centuries, and prices were purposely kept low.

The estimates started at $10,000 to $15,000 — for a watercolor of a green parakeet by a little-known 17th-century Dutch master named Pieter Holsteyn the Younger — and moved up to $400,000 to $600,000 — for an Italianate landscape of a shooting party by the Baroque Dutch painter Philips Wouwerman.

All the pictures had been cleaned and framed, and vetted by an international group of professionals that included Scott Schaefer, curator of paintings at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles; Frits Duparc, director of the Mauritshuis in The Hague; and Simon Levie, a former director of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. The catalog provided the provenance of each work, and the dealer who was selling it.

So what happened?

"The estimates and the quality have to be right," said Robert Noortman, a dealer from Maastricht, the Netherlands, who was sitting in the front row watching closely as seven of his works came on the block. "I sold all of my pictures."

Joan and Hy Bloom, collectors from Montreal, snapped up "A Guardroom Interior With Sleeping Soldiers" by Jacob Duck, a 17th-century Dutch master, for $204,000. "We've been doing this for 10 years, and our interest is only growing," Mrs. Bloom said. But she added that purchases were made from love, not by finding "a product that's nice and ready to go."

Throughout the afternoon, tastes tended to gravitate toward 17th-century Dutch paintings; as with the sale's most expensive work, "An Italianate Landscape With a Hawking Party" by Wouwerman, which sold to an unidentified telephone bidder for $553,600. A pair of pastoral landscapes by Franceschini brought $486,400. Grimmer works that dealt with religious scenes or war subjects tended to go unsold.

Mr. Wachter offered a positive spin on the results. "It attracted new buyers who we hope will frequent Sotheby's old-master paintings sales again," he said. "The dealers that did well were happy. The ones that didn't realized either the estimates were too high or the pictures they chose were not right for the New York market."

The sale's results were encouraging enough for Mr. Wachter to want to try again. "In the end we all learned there's a market for this," he said. "We did it well, but we can do it even better. And next year we will."