Sundance Film Festival 2023, Thursday 1/26: Fantastic Machine

Fantastic Machine (Danielson & Van Aertryck, 2023)

One amazing thing you can do at Sundance is accidentally go to the wrong theater, have the wrong QR code scanned so you get in, be surprised that the film is starting later than you expected, and then be totally stunned when the Sundance programmer let's you know that you're about to see Fantastic Machine rather than Mami Wata.

Then, when you're just starting to roll with it, the delightful directors thank the audience for being so responsive and vocal in previous screenings and that each one of us in attendance is a member of "a generous people"--which you never expected to hear ever in your lifetime as a citizen of the United States--confirming that yes, you're gonna stay and see what the Fantastic Machine is.

It's a movie camera, of course! A history of it, by way of sick narration and the most iconic images ever recorded...that horse with all of its feet off of the ground, yes pictures of earth after the moon landing, yes the moment when BBC television was first broadcast. 

At each evolution of the motion-picture camera--from nickelodeon to documentary war footage to television to news journalism to YouTube--there is a moment of optimism: more information, more education, more voices heard, the possibility for more harmony as we understand our neighbors across the globe. And at each evolution the reality that follows: media conglomerates, market capitalism, isolated voices in a sea of content, "fake news," and algorithms that dictate what we see online. It's a beautiful, tragic, compelling story. 

And we're in it. In the end, we need communities that engage and discuss it, media literacy, and more community.

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Also of note was Shayda (Noora Niasari, 2023) a debut film by an Iranian filmmaker who depicts her experience as a child immigrant to Australian and her mother who moves them both to a women's shelter to escape an abusive relationship. The film allows each character to breathe: inhale...exhale. It allows us to access their space for a moment to experience both a mother-daughter relationship and a precarious journey.

A Winter Day Outside of Park City, Utah