Kevin Smith hasn’t gone away just yet. You may remember that – speaking in this newspaper and elsewhere – the rotund film-maker had been threatening to hang up his megaphone. It transpires that Smith has signed a deal at the Sundance Film Festival – which runs until Sunday – to “present” a series of films by independent film-makers under the title Kevin Smith and SModcast Presents.

“I honestly cannot wait to start finding flicks to take out on the road,” Smith bellowed on his blog. “Live action, animation, big budget, micro-budget, comedy, drama, horror . . . Come join the circus!”

Elsewhere at Sundance, business has been steady,

if unspectacular, at this year’s celebration of quasi-independent fare.

Fox Searchlight (among the canniest of boutique studios) has closed a $6 million deal to distribute Ben Lewin’s The Surrogate, a study of Mark O’Brien, the American poet who lived 40 years in an iron lung, featuring John Hawkes in the lead role. Focus Features has bought For a Good Time, Call . . . ,

a comedy concerning phone-sex operatives.

This activity noted, there doesn’t seem to be a great deal of money slewing around. So Robert Redford, founder of the event, did his best to cheer up the attendees. “We’re suffering from a government in paralysis and it’s all pretty grim,” the crinkly one said. “But the happy thing is that here, for this week, we’re going to see work from artists. And even though their work may be reflective of these hard times, there is no paralysis here.”