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 […]

In one of those freak festival viewing coincidences that don’t really mean anything, Sunday started with two movies in a row opening with the sound of a reiki bowl. The higher profile one, Shirley, marks multiple firsts for Josephine Decker: first directed from someone else’s screenplay (by Sarah Gubbins, adapted from Susan Scarf Merrell’s novel), first period piece and—most crucially to my mind—first without DP Ashley Connor. The subject is Shirley Jackson; I’ve read two of her short stories (I’m not proud of that) and would be curious to hear how this plays for knowledgeable admirers. Adaptation or no, visually this is […]

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 […]

The Villages—a planned retirement community approximately 130,00 strong in Florida—has, its happiest residents say, “everything”: an orthopedic clinic, karate classes, a bank, etc. There’s overlap here with limited American ideas about what, exactly, the Good Life might look like as cruelly/accurately imagined in Alexander Payne’s Downsizing, whose community for the shrunk-down to live out the rest of their lives is a strip mall adjacent to character-less suburban sprawl. Lance Oppenheim’s Some Kind of Heaven, which explores The Villages through three subjects, isn’t here to either celebrate or roast a community established, as its founder explains in archival footage, to suggest a kind […]

Despite looming industry crises such as the DOJ moving to end the Paramount consent decrees, years of slumping box office sales and the ongoing proliferation of streaming giants offering consumers content in their own homes, arthouse cinemas and independent festivals appeared to be thriving—if one looked only at the surface of Art House Convergence. Now in its 15th year, the annual AHC convenes representatives from art house cinemas, film festivals, service providers and independent distributors for three and a half days in Midway, UT, right before Sundance. Most of the attendees are representatives from US-based organizations. Though they comprised a […]

There will be time and occasion, I’m sure, during this year’s Sundance Film Festival to go big picture: to attempt to take the temperature of independent film in 2020, once again fuss over what that designation could possibly mean at this point and so on. But let’s skip that for now: for this year’s first dispatch, I have the rare of pleasure of leading with enthusiasm, and I’d like to lean into that. Barflies mistranslate William Blake’s exhortation to see the world in a grain of sand as “study the human condition through endless hours sitting at the bar”—if in […]

In the very first scene of The Social Network, Rooney Mara tells Jesse Eisenberg that he may go through life thinking that girls don’t like him because he’s a nerd, but “that won’t be true. It’ll be because you’re an asshole.” That line rang through my head all through Visar Morina’s Exil, Komplizen Films‘s first Sundance world premiere, and was directly echoed near its end by Sandra Hüller—star of Komplizen co-founder Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann, here the long-suffering wife of Albanian immigrant Xhafer (Misel Maticevic), who’s convinced he’s being discriminated by German society. “Did it ever occur to you that it’s not because you’re […]

Always a bellweather for the health — artistic as well as business — of the American independent film scene, the Sundance Film Festival began yesterday in Park City, Utah, preceded by more than the usual amount of pre-fest news and drama. On the positive front, Sundance 2020 is something of a launch party for a new documentary financing and production company, Concordia, formed by filmmaker Davis Guggenheim and former Participant Media production president Jonathan King, in partnership with Laurene Powell Jobs’s Emerson Collective. One quarter of the Documentary Competition slate boasts the Concordia logo. And then distressingly there’s Oprah Winfrey’s withdrawal as […]

Each year Filmmaker asks all the incoming feature directors at Sundance one question. (To see past years’ questions and responses, click here.) This year’s question: Whether capturing or creating a world, the objects onscreen tell as much of a story as the people within it. Whether sourced or accidental, insert shot or background detail, what prop or piece of set decoration do you find particularly integral to your film? What story does it tell? (Check back daily during the festival — new answers are uploaded each day throughout the festival.) “It is An Object That Should Not Belong to That World”: Maite […]

“Essentially, cinema is dead, and this fellowship is bringing it back to life,” went part of the on-stage intro for the showcase screening at this year’s Borscht. “The people that most of you know are old, and we’re young, and I think we’re more exciting.” At the screenings I attended, Borscht co-founders Lucas Leyva and Jillian Meyer repeatedly, shamefacedly noted that they’d started the festival (and attendant collective of the same name, the screening of whose work is the fest’s top priority) with the intent of never showing the films of anyone over 30—only to, alas, themselves cross that decade […]