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Sundance 2025: Omaha, Seeds, The Dating Game
Still from Omaha. Courtesy of Sundance Institute. A Brigham Young University graduate and longtime Utah resident, Cole Webley’s repeatedly testified how much it means to have his debut feature premiere here after years of rejected shorts. The Utah runs deep in Omaha, whose opening minutes seem to take place in, if not the exact neighborhood, a dead ringer for the suburban setting of fellow BYU alum and screenwriter Robert Machoian’s The Killing of Two Lovers. One morning a father (John Magaro) wakes adolescent daughter Ella (Molly Belle Wright) and even younger son Charlie (Wyatt Solis), piles them and adorable golden retriever Rex into the car, and gets out of town just as the sheriff’s office shows up to repossess his house. This journey of economic desperation, which might be called Wendy and Lucy and Also Two Kids, swiftly deposits Rex at an anonymous small-town SPCA, an abandonment obviously massively upsetting for both dad—cagey about where the family’s going beyond “Nebraska”—and his kids, who justifiably love their beautiful canine. Minutes before, they were in the salt flats, with Ella teaching her little brother how to fly a kite as Rex ran along them and Christopher Bear’s score offered a generic C-major churn of uplift; now, everybody’s crying. What to do? Drive to a hotel, where the kids get into the pool and yet another C-major cue hits as they’re photographed swimming underwater.
Two moments of prefab signifiers for “lyricism” within ten minutes of each other might be considered excessive, but it establishes Omaha’s rhythm throughout: instead of the Pixies’ fabled LOUD-quiet-LOUD, it’s HAPPY-sad-HAPPY, regularly cutting to Magaro in his beard of poverty and penance, a country singer doppelgänger mournfully staring into the distance. What Omaha wants to render is very clear (“a road trip through a sad and beautiful America”), but its poetry and emotional oscillations are mechanical and familiar, complete with epiphanic heads held out the window as the wind blows. An hour in, we finally learn what this is all building to, which was less morbid than I expected. I assumed that Magaro’s father was consistently motivated by economic desperation, though the ending vaguely implies mental illness; in either case, no retroactive poignance is assigned to a first hour that’s consistently temporizing.
Seeds is deliberately attenuated for more justifiable reasons, proceeding at the slowed metabolism of deep country life. Brittany Shyne’s longitudinal study of southern Black farmers begins by establishing literal proximity to the film’s subjects, her single-shooter camera awkwardly held at an expediently canted angle in the backseat of a car heading to a funeral. Trading formal precision for warmth and intimacy and eschewing music entirely for the first hour of its entirely-too-long 125 minutes, Seeds is a rarity in the mainstream American doc ecocsystem, and hence the kind that’s prized by a certain type of curator for its conspicuous integrity in what it doesn’t do. Refusing to lard reaction shots with a score, eliminating title cards or name identifiers, Seeds forces viewers to sort out what they’re seeing on the subjects’ own terms.
The film alerted me to a recent battle over getting the USDA to actually distribute funds first allocated in 2021 to Black farmers for historical discrimination. (If I’m reading the news right, those funds were finally paid out August of last year, albeit fewer of them than previously earmarked). In elderly Willie Head Jr., Shyne is blessed with a protagonist who—as a farmer de facto advocating for himself on a regular basis—organically drops stats into conversation; this allows us to learn in a convenience store parking lot conversation, rather than title cards or news clips, that Black farmers held 65.5 million acres of land in 1900 but only 1.5 million now. The choice of that exchange to serve as an information drip is consonant with the many shots of one person standing and chatting outside a pickup window to the driver inside, but that lovingly captured mundanity is ultimately counterproductive, in part because a lot of nothing in this case does end up feeling like too much nothing. While it’s refreshing that Seeds doesn’t embrace the artificial structure of a “fight for justice” with triumphant highs and lows, that determined anti-sensationalism also works against the political urgency which moves from background to foreground over the running time.
The title is a readymade metaphor for conservation of agricultural tradition, wrestling images of American farming away from the connotative de facto whiteness they tend to have in the States, shining a light on upholders of a lineage as imperiled as seed diversity. Formally, Seeds peaks early with a head-on shot of a gigantic John Deere cotton picker in action, rows of fluff growing larger in the reflection of its approaching cabin. The vehicle gets unnervingly close as the camera tilts down before the picker finally stops; the considerable, bass-heavy noise it generates contrasts with the great silences of rural daytime country. Ideologically, the film peaks later as farmers in a car crowd around a fliphone speaker for a call with a particularly slimy government official, who tells them that while he understands their frustration with the lack of payout, Sen. Raphael Warnock is advocating very hard for them and will hold USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack “accountable” at a hearing in a few weeks’ time—in other words, nothing’s been done but it’s not really anybody’s fault. The farmers aren’t having it, explaining clearly and slowly that they voted for Biden without questions, and now they want actual support. At this precise moment, you can practically see the DNC losing the election in real time.
A much more overtly commercial project, Violet du Feng’s The Dating Game seems carved out of a mountain of footage that could have been assembled in any number of ways; the path of least resistance is generally chosen in this case. Opening title cards explain that as an ongoing legacy of China’s now-discontinued One Child policy, men substantially outnumber women, creating obvious imbalances. Per its game-show-referencing title, The Dating Game has a premise you can imagine being iterated for many seasons’ worth of 30-minute episodes: seven days, three differently hapless men, one dating coach. One of the would-be courters is in his late 30s, the other two in their 20s; coach Hao basically tells them to go out into the world and hit on anyone remotely attractive by asking for their WeChat info, a strategy which repeatedly and cringe-inducingly does not work.
Dating Game’s biggest fascination is how entirely different its gender discourses are from the hyper-online American norm. When one of the young men complains that back in his parents’ day, all you had to do was be nice to a woman to win her over and now that’s not the case anymore, you can hear an echo of “self-proclaimed ‘nice guys’ are actually toxic incel monsters” discourse—but it’s pretty clear that he’s not talking about being “owed sex” or anything in the MRA lane. This has to be one of the least romantically or carnally-charged movies ever about the search for companionship; what’s at stake seems to be more the desire for someone to help navigate a hyper-capitalized society, a partner who would hew equally closer to the business connotations of that label than the romantic side. Halfway through, the movie switches presentational tactics, interrupting its previously linear/focused narrative for sidebar segments with greater context for this particular Loneliness Epidemic. A gratifyingly jawdropping one drops us into a CCP-hosted mass speed dating ceremony, which goes as awkwardly as might be imagined on the scale of a Moonie mass wedding with less purpose. That these segments only appear midway suggest a sudden lack of confidence in the main subjects, a counterproductive structural asymmetry; I kind of wish the film had gone Full Streamer and dropped a new segment every 15 minutes just to break it up.
When I see a movie like this, one that has lots of well-framed verite footage with clearly more where that came from, it’s hard not to imagine the different, possibly superior ways it could have been assembled. I mean no disrespect to primary editor John Farbrother, who completed the assignment he was given, when I say that this isn’t my ideal approach. Example: early on, coach Hao takes his charges around the city for a number of photo opps to beef up their dating app profiles. One of the young men is taken to a stairwell where he repeatedly jumps in the air for these photos, a moment presented as part of a busily-scored montage of similar activities; I could have looked at that shot for much longer, as the chillier arthouse version of this movie would have allowed. But Dating Game doesn’t want anyone to get bored, and for the film’s purposes that’s probably the correct move; hence, among other things, Chad Cannon’s score, which has the overly-busy feeling of library music that was actually purpose-written, the kind of cues you tend to hear in streamer limited series whenever drone shots (of which there are many generic ones here) establish a new location. All of this sounds like I didn’t enjoy the film, though I actually kind of did for the novelty of its premise, specificity of its dilemmas and endearing panic of its subjects. It is, nonetheless, a representative package of what mainstream-aspirational doc filmmaking (division of overt entertainment) looks like in 2025.
