The Fanning fury and now the film

PARK CITY, UTAH — By early Thursday evening, Deborah Kampmeier had arrived from New York after spending 29 straight hours putting the finishing touches on "Hounddog," perhaps the most eagerly anticipated film of this year's Sundance Film Festival. Operating on two hours of sleep, she was still smarting a bit from the criticism leveled by religious activists who had not seen her Southern gothic tale but object to the rape of the character played by 12-year-old Dakota Fanning. Mostly, though, she sounded happy to be able to share her long aborning project with the world.

"I am hoping that this film is going to touch a lot of people," she said. "When you go to a theater and you see the truth, you feel less alone in the world." As for the critics, who have tried to unleash a milder version of the opprobrium hurled at Mel Gibson before "The Passion of the Christ" came out, she has decided to turn the other cheek. "I have to say I have started to feel very sorry for these people who are out to silence this," said Kampmeier, who wrote, produced and directed the film. "These are really wounded people, just like the characters in the film."

The film is set in rural Alabama in the late 1950s. Fanning plays Lewellen, a motherless child who is obsessed with Elvis Presley and does a mean impersonation of him. Her father (David Morse) is a creepy, abusive farmer for whom Lewellen's love is so complex it borders on hatred. Her grandmother, a blowsy Piper Laurie, is an angry and suspicious woman who tosses firecrackers into her garden for pest control and is obsessed with the wickedness of the flesh.

"There's plenty of time for you to grow up and be evil," she tells Lewellen as she inspects her after a bath. "I just want you to be good while you can."

Robin Wright Penn -- does anyone do wounded vulnerability better? -- plays the woman who becomes Lewellen's ray of hope, and Afemo Omilami is the wise farm hand who nurses the damaged young women around him back to emotional health. A transformative history lesson is provided by jazz and blues singer Jill Scott as Big Mama Thornton, whose Leiber and Stoller-penned hit "Hound Dog" was a hit in 1953, then nearly forgotten after it was eclipsed by Elvis' recording. (In Kampmeier's view, another example of how women's voices have been silenced.)