The Brooklyn Paper file / Jori Klein

Redford at BAM last year.

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Robert Redford wouldn’t talk. Even though his Sundance Institute is bringing movies that premiered in January at the celebrated film festival in Park City, Utah, to the Brooklyn Academy of Music — now through June 10 — the man who once played a hard-working journalist in “All the President’s Men” did not want to chat with the local press.

We thought Redford would appreciate “The Chase,” but the movie star positioned himself “A Bridge Too Far,” keeping us from getting “Up Close and Personal.” It’s a shame too, because everyone else involved in the project was more than happy to respond to our (far from) “Indecent Proposal” for an interview.

Oh, well, maybe it’s just “The Way We Were.”

Florence Almozin, curator at BAMCinematek, gladly chatted with GO Brooklyn about how she picked films that would resonate in Brooklyn. “I want to go after interesting directors and small films,” she said. “I don’t want to go after big budget films that will open everywhere.”

Showing at this year’s “Sundance at BAM,” the second such event, will be “Padre Nuestro,” a thriller filmed in Brooklyn, and “Banished,” by Prospect Heights resident Marco Williams. Additionally, Steve Buscemi’s new flick, “Delirious,” will show, but unfortunately, the Park Slope actor caught a bad case of the Redfords, too.

With Redford not available to comment, John Cooper, Sundance’s director of programming, stepped in. This is Brooklyn, so naturally we were skeptical as to why our readers should pay good money for already-seen (though still, officially, unreleased) movies.

“We find the [Sundance Film] festival is a great platform, but the films we support are worth giving to another platform and another audience,” he said. “It seemed more logical to create a continuum of support for these films at this time.”

If that’s the case, we pestered, why not move the entire festival from Park City to Brooklyn? Surely, Kings County is better equipped to deal with such things as skiing injuries (great hospitals!), traffic (we already have gridlock, so the locals won’t even notice that the film festival is in town!) and movie stars (we have plenty of paparazzi to keep the celebs’ faces in the papers for weeks!).

We sensed that we weren’t being too persuasive, but Cooper left the door open.

“We have a history of being the most important festival in America, [so] it’s not out of the question to continue to evolve this program,” he said.

©2007 The Brooklyn Paper