Sundance 2024
I found myself at Sundance again this year. The same group from last year rented an even bigger house and invited more people. Last year, I was mostly excited by the exclusivity of it: the chance to see films before big releases, to go into each screening with no expectations.
I was on the fence about going again because that exclusivity holds less allure for me. I’ve already had “the Sundance experience”. It’s not like any of the movies I saw were widely seen. The Eternal Memory got an Oscar nomination, but it’s a documentary, so still no one has seen it. I will be years (sometimes decades) late to most of the movies I see, and I’m good enough at avoiding spoilers and reviews that being quick to see new movies doesn’t matter that much to me.
I think I went again out of momentum. I did it last year, and I’m still young enough to get a discounted festival pass. What I enjoy and value about the festival didn’t hit me until halfway through this year. I saw:
Tendaberry
Tendaberry was a hard one to watch (not least because I had gotten up early for a flight this morning, and I had to fight the first half hour to keep my eyes open). It’s one of those films where bad things just keep happening to the protagonist, Kota. She has such amazing chemistry with her boyfriend that you wish the film could just be about them and their relationship. At least it makes it that much more devastating when he has to go home to Ukraine to care for his father shortly before Russia attacks. After that, her life falls apart in every conceivable way.
It’s the most atmospheric or poetic film that I saw, partly because there’s a lot of literal poetic voiceover, but also because it’s less one story than many connected vignettes.
If it is a poem, it’s a love poem to Brooklyn or maybe to Coney Island. Nelson’s archival footage is certainly a highlight, as is one tracking shot of a moth.
Every Little Thing
Every Little Thing was also hard to watch but in an infuriating way. It’s a documentary about Terry who has voluntarily run a hummingbird rehab hotline in LA for about 20 years (Based on her book, Fastest Things on Wings), so of course there are many beautiful slo-mo close-ups of hummingbirds. It follows a few hummingbirds brought in by “finders” until they ultimately are set free in LA or buried in the mass hummingbird grave in Terry’s backyard. I learned a lot about hummingbirds, but the infuriating thing to me—granted, not a big animal person—is that Terry is by far the most interesting part of the documentary, and yet it only covered her background and personality enough to spark curiosity. Someone at the Q&A had to ask how she got into hummingbird rehab which feels like a big ball for a documentary filmmaker to drop. To give everyone the benefit of the doubt, Terry seems much more comfortable talking to hummingbirds than humans, so maybe she was the one to push the focus away from herself and onto the birds.
Rob Peace
Rob Peace was the film I was most excited to see based on the synopsis: a guy sells drugs to finance his molecular bio degree at Yale based on a true story. The story certainly turned out to be the best part. It wasn’t bad, but it felt just like ten other biopics. It’s a solid movie and the one I would be most likely to watch with my parents.
The acting was the most notable, especially Jay Will in his debut role. I can’t speak to how faithful or hagiographic this is, but rather than code switching between his neighborhood in Newark, St Benedict’s Prep, the Yale water polo team, and the lab, he is always fully himself. According to friends at an earlier screening, Chiwetel Ejiofor confirmed this was an intentional casting and directorial choice.
That self-possession makes it all the more tragic when Rob resorts to saying “I am the way you think I am.” in a last ditch effort to save face. It’s a barrel-bottom plea you use when there’s nothing to be done but gesture at some dead or fantastical self who comes across well to others. Not even in the way you want but in the way they want to see you.
Daughters
That line from Rob is second only to everything Aubrey says in Daughters.
My favorite people to people-watch are fathers with their daughters. Fathers are the true amateurs of parenting, both in the regrettable fact that they rarely have as much responsibility or experience as more professional mothers, but also in the etymological sense that they are there (taking their daughters out) because they love it and are just happy to be there. Case in point: coming home from SeaTac once, a father and 3(?) year-old daughter got on the train. At every stop, she asked if this was their stop, and he explained that they had to stop at all these other dots on the map before getting off. Then he started reading her Frog and Toad but apologized to her when he had to stop because he was feeling motion sick.
Daughters is a documentary about a dance for incarcerated men and their daughters organized by Girls For A Change. It follows a few fathers starting from the 10-week fatherhood group required to attend the dance and their daughters, ages 5-18 who have as wide a range of feelings and ways of coping with their fathers’ absences as you’d expect. All credit to Angela Patton, the founder of GFAC, for insisting on letting the fathers and daughters tell the story.
Didi
The morning I saw Didi, the director, Sean Wang, got an Oscar nomination for his short doc, Nai Nai and Wai Po, so there was a lot of good energy in the theater. Even so, it was my 3rd screening of the day, and while he credited inspirations, Superbad and Eighth Grade, I didn’t know if I could make it through another whole movie.
That said, the family dinner scene had me hooked straight away. It might be one of the best single scenes I’ve seen. It’s sharp and hilarious and establishes the family dynamics so smoothly. The beginning had me a bit worried that it would be a 00s nostalgia-fest, but the discontinued products didn’t steal attention. It’s hard to play screens well on camera, but I (and everyone else) viscerally empathized with Chris’s cursor and his typing, deleting, and retyping (although my AOL Instant Messenger was Google Buzz).
To focus on that single aspect is to vastly undersell it. Chris, his family, and his milieu feel so real and fleshed out. It covers everything about life between middle and high school. One person I watched it with said it felt unfocused or unpolished. But how else could you convey the “discomfort and punkness of being 13” (to try to paraphrase the director)? All the characters feel like they have things going on in their lives other than saying lines on cue. Another friend described it as the first non-corny Asian American movie he’s seen.
The day before I was talking with someone about saying “knock on wood” and how I assumed everyone just used it as a turn of phrase. It’s not always trivial to tell the difference between that and real superstition. I think all teenage boys must have the same understanding of the question, “How are you doing?” One of the many joys of Didi was watching Chris hear that question, think of everything that was going wrong, almost open up, then remember that it’s phatic, and say “Good”.
The Outrun
I selected The Outrun because it stars Saoirse Ronan, and boy did I get what I signed up for. At least half of the runtime is her listening to music and looking pensive on windy Orkney coasts.
This movie falls firmly in “not for me” territory. One volunteer we ran into on a shuttle said it was her favorite by far, and a couple other friends thought it was really good. They said it was “a nice portrayal of addiction and rehabilitation” and it felt “like seeing someone at a regular AA meeting”. Having recently read Infinite Jest, I was empathetic to and interested in that aspect. But when Rona’s sober, she reminds me of Frances Ha in that her motivations are totally opaque to me and nothing she does makes any sense.
I’m trying not to look at Letterboxd reviews before writing these, but I just saw one that reminded me that every so often there’s a documentary break where Saoirse narrates the first few sentences from different Wikipedia articles (she is in an environmental science grad program). There’s also one jarring and out-of-place animation sequence.
Girls State
I worried Girls State would either be the same as Boys State or that it would be heavy-handed about the (spoiler: gaping) inequality between the programs. I guess I should trust filmmakers more. This time, they were in Missouri which was hosting Girls and Boys State on the same campus for the first time. That highlighted the disparity and made it a hot topic of conversation. Again, everyone they selected to follow was compelling (Emily had the best character arc of anyone at Sundance). NJCL documentary next?
G.N.A.R. (2011)
This was not an official Sundance film but a rental house exclusive screening put on by the skiers in the house looking for fun things to do on the slopes. GNAR is the “Gaffney Numerical Assessment of Radness” which is a way to assign arbitrary points to doing certain stupid, puerile, sometimes dangerous things while skiing (and then telling a stranger you’re the best skier on the mountain). I thought I’d include it anyway since 1.) I watched it during that week, 2.) It embodies the spirit of independent filmmaking (it has a home video quality and is available for free online), and 3.) It’s my blog. I liked it, and I make the rules.
I want to establish that right away. I like it, and it’s the stupidest movie I’ve ever seen, and I liked it because it was stupid. I’m about to pull a move here and act like it’s actually high-brow. Keep that wax in your ears, and don’t let me fool you.
The points system of GNAR was developed by a few friends trying to have more fun while skiing. You get points for being the first person on the chair lift for the day, for calling your mom while on a run, and for finding a Pro skier and telling them you can’t believe they’re a pro when you’re way sicker than them. GNAR, the film, follows the first “Game of GNAR” where around 20 (genuinely impressive) skiers went to then-Squaw Valley to see who could rack up the most points in a week. The prize fund was $25,000. The heartwarming part is that, when they all get banned for skiing naked, they collectively decide to spend the prize money on a road trip to spread GNAR (and get banned from other resorts). This would be impossible today because all the resorts have been bought by two corporations.
Besides goofing off, the spirit of GNAR is to bring the fun back to skiing. It’s a game and you’re not supposed to take it that seriously. It reminds me of how much time I spent as a kid trying to have fun without getting caught, running up the down escalator and trying to hide as many people as we could in the slides at the pool before the lifeguard told us to stop. Picasso said we stop being artists when we grow up. Keith Johnstone said we stop seeing the world so vividly. Some NYT columnist said we forget how to play.
There is an inevitable trade-off between fun/irreverence and safety/propriety. (The inventor of GNAR, Shane McConkey died in a ski-BASE jumping accident). Traditionally, it’s the humans on the side of fun and the corporations on the side of covering themselves legally. But it seems like lately a lot of people have jumped ship on fun (or rather carefully walked down the gangplank).
Stress Positions
When I read through the Sundance program trying to put together my schedule, I assume everything is a serious drama or experimental film. I was pleasantly surprised, 9 films into my week, that Stress Positions is a comedy. And not just any comedy, somehow the first non-corny movie I’ve seen about the pandemic.
The plot wouldn’t even make sense if I tried to describe it (which is exactly what caught my eye about the synopsis). It’s not so much about a sequence of events as it is about a group of sanctimonious people being horrible to each other. This dynamic lends itself to my favorite type of scene: the group conversation where everyone’s talking over each other and constantly trying to steer the topic back to their own interest.
There is a lot of narration. It’s hard to fault such a committed choice. My one problem was that sometimes I was still thinking about the previous scene and forgot to listen to the voiceover. It creates an unusual tone because all the characters are so kooky, but the voice over is really sincere.
Agent of Happiness
Agent of Happiness was simultaneously the biggest disappointment of the festival and exactly what I expected. Maybe I’m spoiled, but I’ve come to expect Sundance films to subvert my expectations somehow, and this one didn’t at all. Like Some Kind of Heaven, it’s a doc about a few unhappy people in a supposedly happy place—happy according to the government instituted Gross National Happiness. Some Kind of Heaven works because it’s about a hedonistic paradise but shows people’s experiences that cast doubt on that image. But Agent of Happiness doesn’t because it takes place in a relatively poor country. If not for GNH, I wouldn’t expect people there to be especially happy. It felt like they just found a few down-on-their-luck people and said, “look how sad these people are”. I’m more curious about how people there are as happy as they are (one of my favorite moments was early on when they surveyed a woman outside her hut and she mentioned that their cow just had a calf, so they were really happy).
Like Every Little Thing, there were questions that were asked and answered in the Q&A which should have been addressed in the movie itself. It mentioned that Amber’s citizenship was taken away because it was relevant to the subplot about him finding a wife, but it never explained anything about the refugee situation.
Someone also asked what the filmmakers thought of GNH, which is a weird question to need to ask. One of the directors said that the implementation of the survey was clearly flawed, but that it was good that the government claimed to prioritize national happiness. Bhutan is a beautiful country, and it took full advantage of the landscape.
(No fault of the film, but it was also the worst theater experience—even worse than the 3 films I was right in the front row for. This one was in a flatter theater, so everyone’s head is in the way of the captions, and you have to move your head around to read the longer ones, but you can also see everyone in front of you looking like little charmed cobras trying to read the captions as well. That and the guy next to me checked his phone no fewer than 60 times, often multiple times per minute.)
Skywalkers: A Love Story
For the last screening in Utah, we went home and watched Skywalkers with a bunch of people.
A few years ago, a friend told me he liked to watch videos of people climbing on tall buildings. He liked to make his hands sweat. He showed me a few examples, and I thought, “no thanks. That is a niche I’m not interested in exploring any more deeply.” As it happens, “rooftopping” is not so small a niche. Skywalkers documents two popular Muscovite rooftopping influencers who say the most ridiculous things. They’ll be on a crane hanging off the top of a 1000 ft building, wearing Vans, saying things like, “Careful, it’s a little slippery.” and “It’s swaying so much.” Or later having a full argument about their relationship. I genuinely enjoyed this, but, like a bad horror movie, I think if I didn’t watch it with a group of friends, I would have been kind of scared.
Kneecap
I watched Kneecap online after getting back from Utah. It was really tough to follow. We should have had captions on from the beginning rather than just the last third. I assumed they’d only be necessary for the Irish, but the accents, slang, and politics are strong enough that it was hard to follow without them. The other thing that made it hard to follow was the editing. It was like Scott Pilgrim meets Another Round. Based on the prerecorded Q&A, the band really is that fun and irreverent.
I mostly ignore what everyone says about big budget movies only being sequels, prequels, superhero movies, not because it’s necessarily untrue but because it’s such an unbelievably cold take. I would much rather spend 90 minutes watching a movie I like than complaining about all the movies that I don’t.
“Independent” is also a word I don’t give much thought to. Like “organic” food, my mind elides it as a meaningless cheat word with a positive connotation that people can stick on basically anything they want. At best it’s uninformative or underspecified like “indie music”. Anyone can make indie music, and it’s easy to find and listen to, so the fact that it’s indie doesn’t tell you much. At least it’s much more accessible to make music than film.
Film is elaborate enough that even these small production value films have long credits. It takes a lot of different people with a lot of different skills to create a good film. As I understand it, it takes a lot of money to distribute films too, so people with money only choose to help distribute something they are confident will appeal to a broad audience. Thus the state of the art. (I’m lumping the big name auteurs, Scorsese, Nolan, Tarantino, Anderson, in with the superheroes. Not because I don’t like them, but because they have a similar familiarity. It’s financially safe, and whatever story they tell will be through their own particular kaleidoscope).
Sundance is exciting because the films there feel so close to the creative vision of the filmmakers, like the stories are so hyper-specific and could only have been told by those people. Whether I liked it or not, each film I saw was something I don’t think I would have normally seen (I certainly don’t usually watch many documentaries).
Overall, I had a good festival experience. Last year, I was there for almost a full week but worked. This time around, I was only there for 4 days of PTO. I did pack the days in more fully, but that also meant I missed out on a lot of hanging out in the house with other people. One of the benefits of going with a group is that you get to hear about more good films than you can see. I left Sundance wanting to see Thelma, Love Lies Bleeding, and I Saw the TV Glow.
I’m just young enough to sneak in with the cheaper pass, so there’s a good chance I’ll go again next year.