If a festival can be summed up in one word, then the word for this year’s Sundance Film Festival is weird. That was the adjective that drifted through my mind as I circled in and out of screenings, chatted with other attendees and scanned local headlines. Weird could apply to some of the selections in the event, which ends Sunday. But it wasn’t so much the lineup that struck many of us, it was the festival, the pre-eminent American showcase for U.S. independent cinema and beyond. The vibe felt off, we murmured, the energy muted.
For good reason, too. The fires in Los Angeles County were still burning when Sundance opened on Jan. 23. Park City, Utah, is a long way from the Hollywood sign, but Sundance and the mainstream industry have always been codependents, and when the mainstream feels unsettled, you can feel the anxiety in the air. Making matters worse is that the conflagration in California is just the latest crisis facing the movie world, which continues to grapple with the aftershocks of the pandemic and back-to-back strikes, along with its self-inflicted wounds.
Adding to this Great Movieland Unsettlement is Sundance’s search for a new home. Last year, the festival announced that it was exploring alternatives to Park City, where it has been held for decades. Among the stated reasons is that the event has outgrown the resort town, which has a population of just over 8,200 and an infrastructure that remains ill-equipped to handle such a large annual inundation. Every year, tens of thousands of movie lovers swarm into Park City, straining resources and local patience. Now, after a search, Sundance has settled on three alternatives: Cincinnati; Boulder, Colo.; and Salt Lake City, where the festival already screens movies, with some events remaining in Park City.
Questions about where Sundance will land percolated throughout this year’s event, which features the usual great and good, bad and blah selections. Among the standouts is Geeta Gandbhir’s documentary “The Perfect Neighbor,” which tracks how friction between a white woman and her multiracial neighbors in Florida turned progressively heated and then horrifyingly lethal. Consisting largely of imagery culled from police body cameras and interrogation interviews, it offers up a horrifying look at everyday racial animus and stand-your-ground laws. It also underscores, as the white woman makes one 911 call after another, that there’s nothing funny about the prejudices and pathologies of a so-called Karen.
The documentary “The Alabama Solution,” from Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman, makes similarly effective and sustained use of nontraditional source material. In this case, most of the visuals in “Alabama” consist of cellphone videos that were surreptitiously shot by inmates documenting the gruesome conditions of Alabama’s notoriously deficient prison system, as well as their own gutsy efforts to improve them. Like the body-cam material in “The Perfect Neighbor,” the cellphone images in “Alabama” are visually degraded yet prove hauntingly powerful because they’re familiar and intimate. When the camera shakes as it scans a blood-slicked floor, it is partly because the inmate capturing this terrible scene is, too.
Kahlil Joseph’s essay movie “BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions” proved another highlight. As formally inventive as it is intellectually exciting, it uses both Joseph’s life and the W.E.B. DuBois-inspired encyclopedia “Africana” as jumping-off points in a far-reaching exploration of peoples of African descent. Anchored by that posthumously completed work and by an astonishment of found and original material, the movie playfully, often touchingly surges and leaps across time and borders. The results bring to mind a comment that the historian Nell Irvin Painter made in reference to the work of the scholar Saidiya Hartman, who’s in Joseph’s movie: “The past changes according to what questions we ask.”
Some titles were less than the sum of their parts, and there were too many kooky comedies, though various actors kept me rapt. Chloë Sevigny popped up here and there, including alongside Alia Shawkat and Callum Turner in “Atropia,” a satire in a serious vein from Hailey Gates about an actress and a soldier who meet in a training program that pays performers to playact war with American troops. (The program is based on real American military training facilities.) “Ricky,” an uneven drama from Rashad Frett about a man trying to find his way after prison, is anchored by an achingly vulnerable turn from Stephan James, one of the leads in Barry Jenkins’s 2018 movie “If Beale Street Could Talk.”
On Monday, Jenkins was onstage at the festival, and the audience was on its feet. He is one of the producers on “Sorry, Baby,” a sometimes bruising, sometimes bitingly funny, impressively assured directorial debut from the comedian Eva Victor, and one of the few U.S. dramatic competition titles to stir up genuine excitement this year. Victor stars as Agnes, a professor at a small college grappling with the aftereffects of a sexual assault she endured as a student. As the story shuffles between past and present, Victor movingly — and with jolting deadpan humor — explores power, depression, retribution and the succor provided by friends, a sweet cat and a horny neighbor. Agnes isn’t all right but she’s also wonderfully human.
One of the pleasures of the neo-western “Rebuilding,” from the writer-director Max Walker-Silverman, is a deeply rooted sense of place that connects it to the festival’s tradition of showcasing regional cinema. Set in Southern Colorado and partly based on his family’s own history, it centers on a rancher (Josh O’Connor) who finds new ground and community in the wake of a catastrophic fire. With a FEMA trailer camp standing in for a wagon train, it offers up a critique of rugged individualism and a vision of the West — and the larger country — that is finally at odds with the ideological thrust of, say, Taylor Sheridan’s “Yellowstone.”
The romance of the West is part of the romance of Sundance, and one reason “Rebuilding” and its neo-western hero fit seamlessly into this event. It’s been a while since Robert Redford, who founded the Sundance Institute in 1981, introduced the festival in person. Now 88, he remains the institute’s president but has stepped away from the event, its biggest public shebang. Even so, in his role as a consummate inside outsider — the Hollywood star who rode into the wilderness in the name of art and independence — he remains inextricably part of the event’s identity. The same holds true of Park City, a former mining town turned destination hot spot where Stagecoach Drive meets Wagon Wheel Way amid old-timey touches and McMansions.
Sundance might have outgrown Park City long ago, but it was still a shock when the festival announced that it was leaving. The news has generated a spectrum of opinions, including from the Republican governor of Utah, Spencer J. Cox. During a recent news conference, he said, “I think that it would be a huge mistake for Sundance themselves to move.” Cox added, “I think it would be really a death knell for Sundance,” but that the state will “be fine.”
Such talk seems baseless and self-serving. Sundance will also be fine. It remains the most important film festival in the United States and among the most vital, and not because of its proximity to Hollywood. Sundance is a brand, but it’s also an ideal, one that cleaves to the belief that there’s more to film than the Oscars and the box office, even if the festival does drone on about storytelling. Through great years and less so — and this year’s event isn’t its best — it has helped introduce a wealth of talented filmmakers. This is where Steven Soderbergh’s “sex, lies and videotape” had its premiere in 1989; it’s also where many first heard the name Ava DuVernay when she won a directing award in 2012 for “Middle of Nowhere.”
One pressing challenge for the Sundance Institute is how it can continue to nurture talent, showcase new movies and strengthen its future while insuring that its various initiatives and marquee film festival remain “a safe space” for all, as one of its trailers puts it. In 2024, Utah passed a bill barring transgender people from using bathrooms that align with their gender identity in public schools and government-owned buildings. In December, Ohio lawmakers passed what The Ohio Capital Journal called “a wave of anti-L.G.B.T.Q. bills.”
In a brief interview via Zoom on Wednesday, I asked the festival’s acting chief executive, Amanda Kelso, how Sundance will be able to to serve what it often calls underserved communities, particularly given escalating anti-trans laws and rhetoric, including from the White House.
“Sundance is committed and will continue to be committed to supporting storytellers of all of all walks of life,” Kelso said. “We aren’t going to change that at all, no matter where we go.”
She added: “Very bluntly, this goes back to the freedom of artistic expression that we feel so strongly about. I can’t see a world where we’re changing that approach.”
These are comforting words, yet outside the Sundance bubble — in airports and in streets, in supermarkets and in bars — it is unclear if even heartfelt good intentions will be enough.
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