Sundance Features
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“My Shooting Process Involved a Mix of Planned Setups and Spontaneous Captures….”: Silje Evensmo Jacobsen on Her Sundance-debuting A New Kind of Wilderness
Silje Evensmo Jacobsen’s A New Kind of Wilderness is a film structured in a way I’ve not seen before. With a title that likewise could apply to the psychic space into which the audience is thrust, the rural Norway-set doc is an intimate, first-person narrated, cinematic essay from a director whose story it is not. Indeed, straight from its bold opening, the viewer is left abruptly disoriented, forever second-guessing whose eyes we are actually looking through. It’s a deft structural feat that in turn emotionally transports us into the shoes of the free-spirited, forest-dwelling – and above all grieving – Payne family, five […]
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“Being a Latina Immigrant Offered Me Personal Insight Into the Culture That Influenced and Inspired This Great Artist”: Carla Gutiérrez on Her Sundance-Premiering Frida
Though 2024 marks seven decades since the passing of Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón, it often feels as if the ubiquitous artist never actually died (or lived) at all. A feminist/Chicana/indigenous/disabled/nonbinary icon ahead of her (if not outside the concept of) time, Frida Kahlo has long been celebrated as more phantasmagoric myth than flesh-and-blood painter (as opposed to her corporeal hubby Diego Rivera). Indeed, the visage that first radiated from her own canvas has since reverberated — and been commercialized — down through the ages. (One of many ironies in the lives of the staunchly communist couple who traveled […]
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The Art of Angling: The Making of Rose Troche’s Classic Microbudget Lesbian Love Story, Go Fish
1994’s Go Fish, Rose Troche’s smart, punked-out work of guerilla filmmaking, combined a playful take on lesbian dating with discursive dialogues around gender politics and the cultural history of gay female representation. Part of the late ’80s and early ’90s low-budget boom of what critic B. Ruby Rich dubbed New Queer Cinema—films such as Poison, Swoon, The Hours and Times, Born in Flames and The Watermelon Woman—the Chicago-set Go Fish finds hip college student Max (Guinevere Turner, also the film’s screenwriter and producer) in a romantic rut and set up by friends with a hippie-ish older lesbian, Ely (V.S. Brodie). […]
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A Look Back at Sundance 2023: Remote Viewing, Favored Cameras, Standout Films
Some set their calendars by January’s Sundance, which like clockwork kicks off each new year of indie releases. For me, these 11 intense days of nonstop screenings are a rich bounty that takes time to digest. Ergo my slow coverage, below. Usually I manage to see about 30 of the 120 features Sundance typically selects. This has always worked out to a quarter of the program. What are the odds someone else saw the exact same combination? My dictum for years now has been that no two people see the same Sundance. Even the most diligent reviewers and audience members […]
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“We’re Making Cinema Now, a Universal Language”: Kenneth Dagatan on In My Mother’s Skin
Antonio (Ronnie Lazaro), a Filipino comprador for the Japanese Imperial Army, harasses a well-to-do family for the whereabouts of gold bars. He suspects the patriarch, Aldo (Arnold Reyes), a “great merchant importer,” of stealing some from the kōgun (Imperial Army) and hiding them somewhere among their cavernous colonial home or surrounding property. Flanked by two armed Japanese soldiers, Antonio leaves the family with a threatening impression and suggests his patience will wear thinner upon subsequent visits. Left alone, Aldo’s wife Ligaya (Beauty Gonzales) asks her husband whether he took the gold. “I will never do anything to put the family […]
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“This ‘Space Problem’ Became Our Problem”: Ido Mizrahy on The Longest Goodbye
With NASA under “presidential orders” to land humans on Mars by 2033—and the industry titans of Silicon Valley rushing to make space exploration sexy again (not to mention cash in on that lucrative action)—it might be a good time to stop and ask not when our long-mission astronauts will launch, but rather who should be going and how they will survive. And not just physical survival, but mental and emotional, for even the Trekkiest among us may give pause before signing up for a years-long journey that requires relentless isolation, being stripped of any semblance of privacy and deprived of […]
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Nanny, The Exiles, Navalny Win Top Prizes at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival
Nikyatu Jusu’s horror drama Nanny and Ben Klein and Violet Columbus’s documentary The Exiles won yesterday the two top U.S. prizes at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. Nanny took the U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic while The Exiles was awarded the U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Documentary. About the former, juror Chelsea Barnard said, ““For this Grand Jury Prize we celebrate a movie that flooded us with its compassionate and horrifying portrayal of a mother being separated from her child. This film cannot be contained by any one genre —it’s visually stunning, masterfully acted, impeccably designed from sound to visual effects, and […]
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“When Building a Team Around Your Film, Don’t Forget to Build Your Own”: Nikkia Moulterie on Producing the Sundance Horror Drama, Nanny
The Sundance Dramatic Competition entry Nanny, a horror story about an immigrant domestic child-care worker in New York who’s saving to bring her own young son over from Senegal, is the first feature produced by New York-based Nikkia Moulterie. It’s her reunion with writer/director Nikyatu Jusu after producing the writer/director’s excellent 2019 short, Suicide by Sunlight, and it follows a decade-long career producing shorts, UPM’ing features and producing commercials and music videos. Below, Moulterie discusses the way she met and bonded with Jusu, the challenges of producing a feature during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the advice she’d give to new producers […]
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“Security Considerations on this Film Were Everywhere, All the Time”: Snow Hnin Ei Hlaing on Her Sundance-Debuting doc Midwives
With grace and humility, Midwives, the feature debut of Snow Hnin Ei Hlaing, puts a nuanced human face on a complicated conflict long flattened by the Western press. Back in 2012 the director returned to her birthplace in Rakhine State, an area of Myanmar now infamous for the ethnic cleansing of its Rohingya population, yet also a place where Buddhists and Muslims lived in harmony at the time Snow was growing up. There she met two equally complicated women: Hla, a Buddhist midwife and the hardened business-minded owner of a medical clinic, and her young apprentice Nyo Nyo, a dreamy […]
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“Even in Asian American Progressive Circles, People Have Not Heard This Story”: Eugene Yi and Julie Ha on Their Sundance-Premiering Documentary, Free Chol Soo Lee
Those who knew Chol Soo Lee, or saw his image printed on the posters, stickers, and t-shirts of the 1970s Pan-Asian American movement to release him from jail, often remarked on his stunning beauty. “What a good-looking kid. I mean real good-looking kid,” chirps investigative reporter K.W. Lee, recalling their first encounter at San Quentin Prison in Free Chol Soo Lee, a new Sundance documentary that tells the story of a young man falsely convicted of murder, the symbol he became, and the activists who rallied for both. Later in the film, investigative reporter, Josiah “Tink” Thompson, asks the witness […]
