Reid Davenport’s I Didn’t See You There, which won the Directing Award in Sundance’s US Documentary competition, is an essayistic and perspectival portrayal of the history of disability spectacle and the filmmaker’s personal experience with cerebral palsy. The first scene follows the path Davenport takes from station entrance to subway platform, as he points out that the elevators to the platforms are outside the turnstiles, meaning that the straightest route via wheelchair is one that encourages fare hopping. In voiceover, Davenport explains that he was caught once, but that hasn’t stopped him since. After a career of giving TED talks, founding […]

Derrida’s “archival turn” of the ’90s has officially taken over mainstream documentary filmmaking—a trend that has been covered in general interest thinkpieces in Indiewire as well as in academic scholarship, and one that’s proven more lucrative than I could have ever imagined. For the second year in a row, Sundance opened its U.S. Documentary competition selections with a blockbuster archival film, and National Geographic Documentary Films won the bidding frenzy for Sara Dosa’s Fire of Love with a “mid-seven figures” purchase almost a year after reports that 2021 Sundance “Day One” film Summer of Soul sold for north of $12 […]

When does a virtual film festival start? The types of film screenings, audience accommodations, parties, panels, social spaces, diversity and development programs, residencies, labs, medical procedures and contingency plans film festival organizers are responsible for keep spiraling. The International Film Festival Rotterdam warned all attendees in late December that its 2022 edition would be entirely virtual, while the Berlinale recently confirmed the festival’s focus on in-person screenings would proceed as planned next month, without exception for press, but with a slightly expanded, all-virtual European Film Market. In this climate, Sundance announced a scant two weeks before the festival’s opening night that […]

As I hinted in my first entry on Sundance 2021, I’ve spent a couple hours a day on the festival’s browser-based New Frontier space, which houses all 14 projects in the New Frontier selection, a space for watching select films in VR and Film Party, an online proximity-based video and audio chat space. There’s also a digital ferry from the Gallery to IDFA DocLab’s do {not} play platform, which was for IDFA (the world’s largest documentary festival and marketplace, held in Amsterdam in November of every year) what Film Party is to Sundance. Navigating the Sundance digital platform through my […]

The mother-daughter duo in Amalia Ulman’s debut feature-length film El Planeta don’t live in the shabby glamour or reclusive dependency of Grey Gardens’ Beales, but they’re no less compelling in their affection for each other and occasional squabbles. I do find it strange my mind went to Grey Gardens, given this film represents almost its complete opposite. It’s pretty clearly fictional and scripted, though Ulman plays the main character, Leonor (or Leo for short), her real life mother Ale Ulman takes on the role of María, Leonor’s mother, and Leo has to cope with the same physical injury Ulman and […]

The Sundance Institute has been running producer and director labs since 1981, even before taking over and renaming the former US/Utah Film Festival in 1985. In that sense, the projects coming out of the Feature Film Program (whose founding director, Michelle Satter, is still in charge), Indigenous Program and Documentary Film Program are just as important a marker of Sundance’s effect on the US film ecosystem as the platform provided by the festival. When I programmed film festivals, I tracked their press releases as closely as official lineup announcements. This year, 16 projects in the festival were officially supported by […]

This year, at least tacitly, Sundance is providing the infrastructure, or at the very least supplementing the marketing for events, panels, and film after-parties, that used to circle the periphery of private condos or invite-only events—the festival is the conduit, not the exclusive platform. My Sundance 2021 started not on opening night but in the weeks and months leading up to it, via viewing links shared in advance with many programmers and industry members. Long before that, due to the festival’s mostly-virtual nature, Sundance’s team had lots of news and announcements to share. In summer 2020, they revealed the festival’s hybrid […]

Previously, when attending a premiere heavy festival like Sundance, I was usually lucky enough to be present as part of a team of programmers. We divided the screenings between all of us to cover as many of the films as possible. (There are spreadsheets and rating systems involved.) Watching films as a freelancer, I realized over the first few days at Sundance that I was playing it safe by watching films by filmmakers I was already familiar with for the guarantee that at least the film would appear finished at the screening. For programmers working at festivals like Sundance, what […]

As I hinted at in my first dispatch, co-creation has been buzzy in documentary circles of late, with gatekeepers and filmmakers both interested in finding ways of working that challenge the decision-making processes of nonfiction filmmaking. This year’s Sundance was also chock full of filmmakers who started out in documentary and have recently moved into fiction; Canon even sponsored a panel featuring Matt Heineman on this very topic. One of these films was Yalda, a Night of Forgiveness, an ingeniously conceptualized, impeccably acted and tightly shot single location piece, it both buys into and subverts crucial elements of thriller, reality […]

Leaving Art House Convergence, I met up with some good folks from New Orleans (where I lived for three years), who were generously sharing their condo with me. We all got dropped off at the festival headquarters in Park City on “Day One” of the festival and headed in to pick up passes, though none of us walked away with one on Thursday. Industry passes issued through the Press & Inclusion Office program couldn’t be picked up until Friday, my housemates learned, while I spent my time in the line at the press office. On-site credential applications are subject to […]