I spent the final three days1 of the Sundance Film Festival in my own living room, taking advantage of the festival’s app on my beloved Apple TV device to watch films from the festival’s robust online lineup. During the quarantine years of the pandemic, when the festival only offered virtual films, not only did the online screenings feel like a lifeline to the industry and film community, but they were the festival— filmmakers, distributors, and rights holders made a collective agreement to allow the festival to stream their work for limited windows during the festival. Since 2022, that calculus has shifted in parallel with the slow return to in-person filmgoing, and in 2024, higher profile films and films with distributors planning theatrical and streaming runs for their projects now have returned to retaining their streaming rights, ending the festival’s opportunity to share those films online.
I received a few comments from folks unhappy about the price of a streaming ticket at this year’s Sundance and I want to defend their pricing here— it is an exclusive, pre-theatrical screening of a film that is premiering at the festival that comes with the convenience of watching at home. New release rentals of post-theatrical films or day and date streaming run $20-$25, so I have no issue with the calculus of Sundance’s screening cost— it less than one in-person ticket2. So, I can’t knock the festival for coming in at market price for the experience of doing at home what it costs others thousands of dollars in travel, accommodations, passes and tickets, to do in person.
Speaking of which, a few crucial things are important to note, because I have also seen a few think-pieces excoriating Sundance for the cost of attendance. It probably goes without saying but operationally, Sundance is beholden to the character and infrastructure of Park City, UT, a small town that provides limitations on spaces and venues and parking and transportation and affordable hotels and housing3, but one that also proves certain unique opportunities for connection. There is no festival shuttle filled with Industry delegates in Toronto, no Filmmaker and Industry Lounge at Cannes4— despite its costs and challenges, Sundance maintains a feeling of community that few major festivals can (or even seek to) replicate.
Of course, in a post-pandemic world, the perception of value of at-home festival screenings has shifted in terms of financial opportunity and rights, but not for those who want access to Sundance that they cannot make happen otherwise— accessibility remains a vitally important aspect of Sundance’s at-home offerings and is a true raison d'etre and that is also a good thing. The industry should be investing more in accessibility and creating opportunity for filmmakers to connect with audiences wherever they are. Still, distribution models and windowing remain the financial backbone of recouping a film investment, and those investments continue to be priority one for rights holders.
Last, I want to mention again the impact of at-home viewing on in-person screening strategies. Prior to the festival, I wrote in a footnote:
I am interested to see how this year’s festival goes. There are a couple of significant changes that will almost certainly modify the experience of the festival for industry attendees— the loss of the Yarrow, which was the largest screening venue for Press & Industry screenings, and the availability of some films on the festival’s online viewing platform likely means that seats for the films with in-person only screenings will be in much greater demand. I have carved out a lot of extra time in my schedule for lining up at The Holiday Village tent this year while trying to ensure I make time back home for online viewings. So, while I typically see about 28 or 29 films in-person from Thursday evening through Wednesday morning (roughly 4-5 films a day), this year, anticipating how I might need to spend more time in the tent, I am scaling that back— right now, I’m looking at 19 or so in-person screenings (a decrease in my in-person viewing of about 33%-ish) and then catching up by way of virtual screenings. But maybe that shifts?
In the end, it went both ways— I ended up seeing fewer films in-person than I would typically see, but not too many fewer (I saw 23) and that is all down to the scheduling of P&I in-person screenings as they relate to their online availability. There were and always have been films from which industry badge holders got shut out, and this year was no exception, so I was extra careful to line up early, which ensured I saw my highest priority in-person films. But, having the online option also took the pressure off making sure I saw films in-person that were generating strong, positive conversation and were available online. I got to see other things instead, and then caught up at home. Which, enough about the platform, let’s talk about a few of my Sundance home screening highlights…
Transgressive Judaism, Part II
A REAL PAIN
I almost feel guilty for not seeing this in-person, because it makes a perfect pairing with Nathan Silver’s BETWEEN THE TEMPLES (a film I discussed in this piece and which I was lucky to see on the big screen.) Both films are portraits of a certain type of Jewish transgression, taking the traditions and expectations of polite American Jewish identity and pushing against those culturally prescribed values to find a deeper, more personal meaning within the Jewish experience. In the case of Jesse Eisenberg’s A REAL PAIN, that transgression comes in the form of Benji Kaplan (Kieran Culkin, in yet another outstanding performance where inner pain seems to be bursting out of him like water exploding through cracks in a dam— nobody does it better), a slacker whose on-again/off-again relationship with his straight laced cousin David (Eisenberg, also and again, excellent as a nervous man who goes along to get along) is tested when they decide to visit the Polish hometown of their recently departed Grandmother. But this trip into the past and its terrible history (which includes one of the best and most moving contemporary sequences shot in a concentration camp) is also a confrontation with identity, personal meaning, and thus, the self— Eisenberg does an outstanding job of showing and not telling here, using images and plot to demonstrate how the language of polite, social engagement is incapable of articulating the deeper, more difficult truths of not only what was, but what is. A REAL PAIN (and BETWEEN THE TEMPLES) arrived at Sundance in what is an incredibly fraught moment for the Jewish people, and seeing the transgressive worldview on display in these films— their collective desire for honesty and compassion— was deeply moving for me as a viewer. These two films were easily my two favorite fiction films at Sundance, and I am certain they will be twinned in my brain forever, but there is something larger and more serious at work in A REAL PAIN, which has me re-evaluating a lot of my own thinking about how history can function to open us up, creating a present tense experience that shows us the possibilities of what is required to move forward into the future. I really loved this movie.
Verité Retains Its Cinematic Power
Let’s be honest— despite the valiant efforts of some of our greatest living documentary filmmakers ( who continue to make outstanding work), Cinema Verité and Direct Cinema5 seem to have fallen out of favor in the non-fiction marketplace, set aside for the tropes that define true crime and expert-driven talking head reportage and celebrity-controlled portraiture that not only show us a non-fiction story, but are constantly telling us what to think about it6. So, it was a pure delight to see multiple films at Sundance7 that returned to the tools of these classic documentary forms to deliver some exceptional looks into subjects and stories that deserve the space to unfold without the explicit use of now-standard commercial documentary tools. What comes around goes around…
DAUGHTERS
Angela Patton & Natalie Rae’s DAUGHTERS is the story of girls in the Washington, DC area, and their fathers, all of whom are incarcerated, who are given the opportunity to reunite for a single day to participate in a Daddy & Daughter Dance inside of a prison gymnasium. The film is a miraculous portrait of these families, following the daughters and fathers in parallel as they approach the day of the dance, but also, the mothers, whose own approaches to their children and co-parents play a large role in the nature of these relationships. The anger and resentment exist alongside love and anguish, moving through their lives, framing not only their interactions with one another, but how they seek to understand themselves, and Patton & Rae do an incredible job of using clearly established trust with their subjects to tease out the highly charged emotional stakes that culminate in the day of the dance itself, which brings all of these interpersonal complications to life in images, interactions, and character moments, moments that the greatest of fiction filmmakers would kill to achieve. But DAUGHTERS does so much more than that; instead of simply giving voice to its subjects, it is the full representation of the experience of a life changing event, a before and an after, setting aside traditional analytical documentary tools8 in favor of sharing profound insight into the possibility of hope.
UNION
Before we take a first step into this film, I need to say: I was raised in a community that was defined by the power of labor and unions, and so my perspective on Stephen Maing and Brett Story’s UNION was established well before I saw a single frame of the film, and that is: Yes please and more of this. I am happy to report that the film exceeded that initial set of expectations, diving with both feet directly (see what I did there?) into the fight to unionize an Amazon shop on Staten Island. Given the state of corporate surveillance and security, anti-union sentiment, and the radical transformation of labor law into pro-company policy, this film is a miraculous feat of access, and could not arrive at a more desperate time for those looking to learn more about why and how collective labor action can improve the lives of workers. I will say, America has provided no greater heartbreak to me than watching working people transform from fighting for their collective interests into a disinformation-soaked, fractured landscape of ginned-up social divisions, but propaganda is one hell of a drug. UNION avoids romanticizing this fight, focusing instead on the nuts and bolts of organizing, the process, and the difficult realities of trying to align a wide range of self-interest into a sustainable collective campaign for representation. The organizers and workers featured in the film are flawed human beings doing their best to stick together and make a common purpose— like all attempts at leader-driven democracy, it is a messy process, one that the film captures beautifully. Those flaws and the bruising process of organizing are part of the rich tradition of labor struggle in this country, and the same goes for UNION, with Barbara Kopple’s HARLAN COUNTY U.S.A. and AMERICAN DREAM coming immediately to mind as verité films about difficult local fights to organize American labor. UNION fits comfortably within that cinematic continuum, a meaningful marker on the long road to justice that captures just how much things have changed and why, in the age of automation and instant gratification, the need for organized labor is greater than ever.
AND SO IT BEGINS
Can a traumatized society transform itself by confronting the truth? Ramona Diaz explores this idea in AND SO IT BEGINS , a “companion” to A THOUSAND CUTS, her outstanding portrait of Nobel Prize winning Filipino journalist Maria Ressa, whose refusal to back down from reporting on the murderous excesses of the Rodrigo Duterte made her an exemplar for journalists battling authoritarian regimes around the world. In her new film, Diaz checks in on Ressa9 and her team of reporters at the news website The Rappler as they follow the first Filipino election after Duterte, which sees the independently elected Vice President Leni Robredo run a campaign of healing and social inclusion against the eldest son of former dictator Ferdinand Marcos, a candidate whose limitless wealth was achieved by his father’s theft of billions of dollars from the nation’s coffers. Filipino campaigns are a whole world unto themselves, and Diaz does an outstanding job of bringing audiences into the colorful and musical experience of Filipino elections, where candidates adapt pop songs and host rallies that look as much like music festivals as they do campaign stops. So, while AND SO IT BEGINS is something of a follow-up to A THOUSAND CUTS, it is a powerful document of politically charged verité filmmaking all its own, capturing the ways in which the spectacle of electoral politics distort the realties of a social and political landscape defined by historical trauma, institutionalized disinformation, and extreme disparities in wealth and resources, where the familiar, haunting echoes of Marcos and Duterte still reverberate powerfully throughout Filipino society.
One More Thing…
I want give a special mention to A DIFFERENT MAN, a film I *wanted* to write about in the “Transformations” section of my last post, and a movie I really liked. However, after thinking about the film in depth, I believe I need to watch it again, as some of my thoughts and understanding of the movie demand a second viewing. So, as soon as I can see it again, I will, and I’ll write more about it then!
That’s all for me from Sundance 2024. If you care to see a full list of the films I saw at this year’s festival, feel free to give a look and follow along at my Letterboxd page. Thanks for reading and supporting!
The Wednesday of Sundance was a long travel day and thus, I only saw one film, in-person, prior to departing for the airport. I pass out on airplanes, so….
No matter how many people squeeze around the TV.
The cost of housing at Sundance is unsustainable for the overwhelming majority of the filmmaking and audience population the festival seeks to serve. That said, the festival has zero control over this issue— it also pays a steep price for space and venues and staff housing and infrastructure, etc. It is worrying.
You’d be more worried about being elbowed out of the way or having the wrong color pass and being brushed aside.
The difference being: In Direct Cinema, the filmmaker tries to create a film where they have little to no impact on the screen and they seek to capture life and experience directly whereas Cinema Verité includes audience and subject awareness of the filmmaker and her or his participation (and provocations) as part of the film. For me? The lines are blurry because documentary is an art form and every artist shows up in the choices they make in their art, so truly, these are two shades of the same color, IMO.
Can you tell these films are not my favorite? They are not my favorite.
I would include NOCTURNES and A NEW KIND OF WILDERNESS in this conversation as well, which I wrote about in my previous piece covering Sundance 2024.
This film is a masterclass— it SHOWS and lets us experience the injustice of the prison system without directly TALKING ABOUT the injustice of the prison system— no PhDs taking about incarceration rates or economists talking about how generational disenfranchisement causes divergent socioeconomic outcomes— and that makes it all the more effective as a film. This movie is not a newspaper article but a love letter to the human experience.
!!*SPOILER*!! Who, in an amazing piece of access, finds out she is winning the Nobel Prize while being filmed on a Zoom call with journalist colleagues.
From what friends have told me, renting a room in a cabin in Sundance for a few days can be as expensive as a month's rent in New York or San Francisco. I've noticed an increasing number of critics only spending a brief period there rather than staying for the whole festival. I wonder what the long-term effects of this will be. I'm also curious if the online component will end up replacing theatrical distribution for many films.