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Once again, in its continued tradition running 40 years strong now, Sundance films exactly do not fit into that tiny range of experience that capital seems to require of us to replicate itself. I'm probably off course by making this over-simplified conclusion at the outset of this post, yet do find that the requisite skills neoliberal culture seems to value above all others, including working overtime, war mongering, and stepping over others to get ahead, can be boiled down to the rather simplistic and leave us empty. No wonder people are unhappy even when they "make it": we're starving for more on spiritual, physical, and intellectual levels.
Sundance films explore the realms outside of our window of restricted vocations, interactions, and culture. The categories Sundance films explore aren't inherently complex, but since they're just a bit outside the norm, it's a breath of fresh air.
Monday Jan. 22, 2024
Malu (2024) was delivered by Brazilian director Pedro Freire who explained before the screening I attended that back in the day, when he rented films from video stores, he grew to love Sundance films because the laurel stamped on each film's cover ensured that the story would at the least be well scripted and well acted--his two favorite things--and that he wept when he found that Malu was selected for the festival this year. The film traces the story of a woman pitted between her 20-something daughter and conservative aging mother. Malu lives straddled between the past (failed communist revolution) and the future (unrealized dream of creating a theater company) with neither emotional nor intellectual reserves to manage the present in spite of the charm and gravitational pull of her personality.
Malu director and cast, Sundance, 2024
In the evening I attended the Midnight Short Film Program--Sundance’s violent and un-categorizable fare--featuring 6 of the 53 short films submitted to Sundance out of 12,098 (including one of mine lol). The buzz of the crowd even before entering the theater was palpable. Once inside unfiltered anxiety, fear, and joy melded together throughout the welcome, screenings, and Q&A session. My favorite film of the fest--the singular "The Rainbow Bridge" (Simakis), which comically and nearly savagely presents a pet owner who discovers how to connect with her dying pet on a celestial plane so that she can say goodbye in a language they can both understand--typified the collection of films here with loglines that search engine algorithms can't quite quantify.
Sundance programming is at it’s best when the out of this world meets a community there for it. I left the theater after the Midnight Shorts wondering “do I know too little or do I know too much?” and before settling on “probably neither," the realization that followed on its heels was “anything is possible." It's a certainty the films revealed by pulling ideas out from under the rug where concepts of infinite possibility can unwittingly be swept.
Tuesday Jan. 23, 2024
Love Machina (Sillen) documents the love story of Bina Rothblatt, currently in the process of downloading her memories into an AI system, and her partner Martine. The idea is that if we can create eternal versions of ourselves, then maybe we can love our partners forever. But part and parcel are questions surrounding consciousness, sentience, and immortality--not to mention the structural and systemic biases built into the foundation of systems and platforms from which AI is being built.
Winner (Fogel), featuring the pitch-perfect performance of Emilia Jones (who plays Ruby in CODA), tells the story of Reality Winner, a woman who at great personal cost sent private NSA documents to mainstream journalists which proved Russia interfered with the United State's 2016 elections. The film shows important events that preceded and those that followed this explosive event covered in the press, based on a smart, well-paced script.
Presence is Soderbergh’s horror-drama of a spirit which haunts a house from the perspective of the haunting presence. Once the idea that first-person point of view will be used exclusively to tell the story, and after a handful of lines fall flat in the first 20 minutes or so, the film is an intriguing whodunit and quite enjoyable. The music is what particularly stands out in a film which rewards patient attention.
Wednesday Jan. 24, 2024
Never Look Back (Lawless) traces the radical life of the singular, remarkable camerawoman Margaret Moth, war correspondent extraordinaire. Extraordinaire in this case refers to a person instilled with a will to live with fearlessness which, while perhaps not replicable, does indeed provide a model of living to the fullest to inspire each individual within their own capacity. And Margaret Moth had the coolest 80s jet black punk hair, just saying.
I had tickets at the beginning of the festival to the Napoleon Dynamite 20th anniversary screening yet nearly thought of giving them away (because I've seen it so many times!). But as the date approached I kept thinking: what if the cast and crew are there? And they were! Director Jared Hess stated via a recorded message that at the film's first screening at Sundance 20 years ago there were no opening credits--the film just opened with Napoleon standing in front of his house.
It was so awesome to re-live the film with so many passionate fans. We clapped for each new character introduced and voiced multiple cheers for Napoleon's antics and groans for Uncle Rico's behavior. It was an unforgettable night for all. Even the principal and Trisha were there! I may or may not have cried during the screening. And after the screening I may or may not have been photographed with Lafawnduh (Shondrella Avery) kissing my cheek, but I’m not the kind of guy who gets kissed on the cheek after a film screening and then tells.
Thursday Jan. 25, 2024
Richard Linklater returned to Sundance with Hit Man, staring Glen Powell (Top Gun: Maverick) and Adria Arjona (Andor), which I think of as a modern-day Fight Club (Fincher, 1999) in terms of the way the main character lives two identities. In this case, and based on an actual story, a college professor spends his off hours (I’d like a professor gig that has enough time for a part-time job, just saying) as an undercover contract killer for his city’s police department. The false identity Glen Powell's character creates bleeds into his “real life”-- the result? He has to pay for the repercussions of his transgressions, or does he?
And so, are we re-entering an age of schizophrenic films just as we did at the end of the late 1990s, pre-9/11? At that time my supposition is that Generation X had endured sufficient time to take stock of the effects of global capital on the local psyche--and within this space for introspection filmmakers represented their meditations across cinematic genres. And Linklater was in the thick of it then, so maybe like those of us who experienced the late 90s he persists in producing what was then part of our daily lives: picking up the pieces of psyche’s fractured by the impact of living to make money in a society that, no matter how we went about doing so, we could not seem to escape the realization that we were contributing to structural and systemic inequality.
Does Hit Man reveal the return of the repressed or are we at a new juncture in time--that is to say, is 2024 a moment when we have had enough time (since the pandemic, since Black Lives Matter, since Me Too) to take stock of all that we've inherited and all that persists, or is this the 1990s returning in a new dress? (And just as with today's return of 1990s fashion, accompanied and intermixed with the 80s and 00s haphazardly?)
Little Death (Begert) channels Fight Club directly during the first half--it's like watching Fight Club if it were written from a right rather than left-wing ethos and with the assistance of AI. The second half (thankfully) is something altogether different--the film radically changes course, as if two separate movies were crammed into one--which was Little Death's best quality.
So when I say "mind-altering Sundance" films in this blog's title, it’s not that these films are beyond the possible range of human experience in terms of gender, race, and class; rather, our cultural range of experience is limited and Sundance proves that. Moreover, their films become the new normal during the time folks are in attendance. The window gets cracked open a bit wider.
Park City photography © by James Wicks, 2024