Another year and another film festival have come and gone. In the case of the Sundance Film Festival, there was no shortage of excellent films, innovative festival production, and overall satisfaction for cinephiles from across the film society. The Sundance Film Festival’s business is simple: Bring the people what they want. And that they did that this year with over 100 films screened for audiences in two weeks.
According to the Sundance Film Festival website, these films were selected from 15,855 submissions, including 4,061 feature-length films. 99 of those 4,061 were selected, and two movies from previous Sundance Film Festivals were presented, having caught a second wind with audiences they were not initially intended for.
The rest of the films screened at Sundance were from the ever-popular “Short Films” section, where 64 Short Films were exhibited for audiences’ consideration. Along with these 64 short films, 4 Indie Episodic Projects also made their debut at the festival, and all movies were allowed to be viewed both in person or online, an attraction that became popular during the pandemic that has stuck around afterward.
The Sundance Film Festival began in 1978 in Salt Lake City, Utah, and originally carried the name “Utah/United States Film Festival,” according to Encyclopedia Britannica. Of course, the famous Robert Redford served as the festival’s first chairman of the festival board. After a few years of close to financial disaster, Redford intervened by changing the host venue from Salt Lake City to the nearby ski resort town of Park City.
Upon my arrival to Park City, snow blanketed the sidewalks, streets, and snowplows ran daily, something this California-born and raised native had never seen before. Not to mention the freezing temperatures that an excellent coffee would counteract, shout out to the Clockwork Cafe, a nearby coffee shop near three of the host theaters.
In 1985, Redford’s “Sundance Institute,” coincidentally his neighboring film school, took over the reins of the festival, and six years later gave the festival its now famous name, “The Sundance Film Festival.”
As two separate entities, the Sundance Institute merely runs the Sundance Film Festival when it commences every late January, a great time for film lovers to mix and mingle with snowboarders and resort habitants. But for the other eleven months of the year, the Sundance Institute still does what it was created to do: to help filmmakers realize their artistic expressions.
“Storytellers broaden our minds: engage, provoke, inspire, and ultimately, connect us.” — Robert Redford, President and Founder of the Sundance Institute.
The very line that reads above is on the “About us” page of the Sundance Institute, where it also goes on to inform how the institute was founded to “foster independence, risk-taking, and new voices in American film.” Artist programs that the Sundance Institute offers include aspects of film education such as labs, fellowships, grants, and other programs that push for film students (no matter the age, we can all be film students), to encourage their filmmaking abilities.
But in returning to the festival, many films were shown from many different categories. Those categories for this year, at least besides the annual U.S. Dramatic, U.S. Documentary, World Cinema Dramatic, and World Cinema Documentary Competitions, included the NEXT category, defined as “pure, bold works distinguished by an innovative, forward-thinking approach to storytelling” and the “Midnight” category defined as “films that will keep you wide awake and on the edge of your seat.”
This is where I intervene to criticize this last aspect of the Sundance Film Festival for their definition of the “Midnight” category. The film I saw from this section, Run Rabbit, Run, allowed me to fall asleep and sit so far back in my chair that one would think I was attempting to flee the building. And as soon as the credits rolled, that is precisely what I would do.
Director Daina Reid (The Handmaid’s Tale, Ready for This) forgot to add the thrilling aspects to this “thriller” and directed most of the film as if the audience were watching another one of her Emmy-Award-winning TV shows. Reid forgot the essential part of a film festival: treating every film like a film. I will give Reid the benefit of the doubt and say that the screenplay was supremely shoddy, with more plot holes than actual holes in the production design of the family home of leading actress Sarah Snook’s character. But as a director, when your previous leading lady, Elizabeth Moss, took the chance to run from the material over “scheduling issues,” I think everyone should have seen it coming.
The other two films I would end up seeing did not have the same effect, nor did they have the same storyline that I, or the audience, had ever seen. However, with leading ladies, an increasingly more common theme amongst independent storytellers, The Persian Version and A Thousand and One, not only had audiences in tears but had their attention as both became award winners at the festival.
The Persian Version, winning the Audience Award in the U.S. Dramatic category, told a personal story from Iranian-American director Maryam Keshavarz in which the life of an immigrant family can not only hold secrets but reveal them more lovingly and thoughtfully than initially intended. A true “crowd pleaser” in all walks, by the final archetypal dance to none other than Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,” the audience not only desired to move to the beat of the music, but enjoyed the callback when previously in the film, groans were uttered to the most overplayed, and dated 80’s tune.
A Thousand and One again did what any good and thoughtful film and artist would do, and that is the telling of a personal story, this time of characters related to a time in New York City when drug and crime epidemics ran side by side, especially for the black youth of the area. A mother, brilliantly played by Teyana Taylor, recently released from jail finds and improperly adopts her son (played by both Aaron Kingsley Adetola and Josiah Cross) back from the foster youth that he had previously been abandoned to, only to find out that the ever-changing landscape of New York may prove more challenging and more complex than imagined. This soul-crushing, yet at times, and more importantly, the uplifting directorial debut from A.V. Rockwell would go on to win the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival in the U.S. Dramatic category.
A Thousand and One has been picked up by Focus Features and will be released nationally as soon as Tuesday, March 28th.
Of course, the most remarkable aspect of my visit to Salt Lake City and Park City was viewing these three films in giant auditoriums filled with film connoisseurs such as myself, reacting and discerning our feelings about each movie in specific and personal ways. A film screening should be an individual action, both for the viewer and the presenter. Although I showed up on the second week of the festival when all the filmmakers had already left, those who were there for premieres were able to hear directors, writers, producers, editors, actors, and filmmakers, in general, speak about their projects and explain these personal acts for themselves.
This not only gives the audience and filmmaker a better chance to know one another but to understand the material in the way it was meant to be understood–with one’s thoughts and biases and flaws and attractions turned up to a maximum volume, for public consumption to pick apart and to understand and to communicate with.
Filmmakers give a part of themselves each time they offer up a project, and no one quite possibly understands this more than the Sundance Institute. Maybe that’s why they provide such support and understanding and genuinely believe in “engaging, provoking, inspiring, and connecting” independent filmmakers to deliver the future of cinema.
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