Sundance Features
-
“With Animation I Can Reach Beyond What’s Just in Front of Me”: Writer/Director Geoff Marslett on his Sundance Animated Short The Phantom 52
A restless trucker (credited as the titular “Phantom”) tugs his wheels across the highway and calls out to fellow drivers over his CB radio. No one else is on the road and no one reciprocates his cries via electronic airwaves. Eventually, the endless road gives to an endless ocean and the big rigs of the freeway morph into the whale varieties of the water. Whale calls, clicks, and songs reverberating over long distances in the ocean stand in for the Semis CB radios. But our Phantom’s whale calls out at a 52hz frequency, and no whale hears at 52hz, so […]
-
Sundance Notebook: Euro Horror, a New Cult Sensation, and Park City’s Party Hierarchy
I know we’re in high elevation here at Sundance but it still freaks me out when I go to buy coffee and also have the option of buying a small personal oxygen tank. It makes me feel like we’re preparing for some kind of apocalypse, when, in fact, people are only preparing to ski and watch movies. The altitude is tiring though, I slept so deeply the other night that I missed whatever fun my roommates had, which, judging by the drying swimsuits and empty Corona case, was plenty. There are 14 people in my condo on the outskirts of […]
-
Dispatches from Park City — Tuesday, Jan 29th: The Farewell, American Factory, Luce and More
Welcome to Day Six of Sundance. The $70 parking lot sign has been marked down to $50, the first-weekend scrum of parties is history and Main Street is emptier. Time to get down to serious viewing in the days that remain. Sundance routinely programs about 120 features. (112 this year.) My personal best—four screenings a day, seven or eight days straight—is about 30 films. The math tells me that I see a quarter of Sundance each year. In other words, no two people see the same Sundance. What follows are notes on films I feel are notable. Lulu Wang’s The […]
-
Sundance Notebook: Sexuality on Screen, Herzog in the Snow and America’s Shameful Past… and Present
Lobbies and shuttles are the office water cooler of Sundance. 10:00 AM phone pitches for movies about baseball aren’t uncommon, and neither are frantic PR people. Yesterday someone on their phone was very much upset about the fireplace in their condo not working, while others I encountered were extremely concerned about how to get the Jewish community of Wichita to the movies. I also hear countless recommendations for how films should have ended, from critics and locals alike. *** Fuck You Short, Shorts Program 3 Anette Sidor / 2018, 15mins. / Sweden Young actors sharply take on the power dynamics […]
-
“The Harder Life Was for Us, the Stronger the Images Were:” Director Hassan Fazili on the Perils of His Flight-from-the Taliban Doc, Midnight Traveler
As headlines blare possible peace talks between the U.S. and the Taliban, and with its intersection of politics and filmmaking, Hassan Fazili’s Midnight Traveler, which premiered this week at the Sundance Film Festival in World Documentary Competition, is bound to be one of the festival circuit’s most discussed pictures this year. (It travels next month to the Berlin Film Festival.) Midnight Traveler charts the Fazili family’s escape from the Taliban after Fazili became the group’s target due to his controversial documentary Peace. Fazili, with the help of his filmmaker wife Fatima and daughters Nargis and Zahra, filmed the story of […]
-
“I Make Stories to Chase that Freedom”: Five Questions for Selah and the Spades Director Tayarisha Poe
When we put together our 25 New Faces list for 2015, Tayarisha Poe was one of our most exciting discoveries. Selah and the Spades: an overture was the product of restless days at what Poe describes as a dead-end job at a digital tech firm. The anger she felt at the stultifying work transmuted into the story of a teenage girl — and classic anti-heroine — running a crew at her private school. Four years later, Selah has leapt from the web page to the screen in Poe’s feature debut, premiering today in the NEXT section of Sundance. As Poe […]
-
“Must Political Solidarity be Unconditional?”: Rachel Leah Jones and Philippe Bellaïche on Their Sundance Doc, Advocate
Long a lightning rod, Lea Tsemel is an idealistic Jewish lawyer who has spent the past five decades defending political prisoners. Or she’s the terrorist’s go-to barrister, rarely turning down a case no matter how heinous the crime. Like most things in Israel, the perspective depends on which side of the occupation you’re on. Veteran filmmakers Rachel Leah Jones and Philippe Bellaïche understand this reality all too well, having followed Lea Tsemel’s career closely for the past 25 years. And now with their Sundance-premiering Advocate they’ve created an in-the-trenches portrait of this unapologetic firebrand, trailing Tsemel as she juggles high-profile […]
-
“Sometimes Restraint and Holding Back Yields a Far More Meaningful Result…”: Luke Lorentzen on Sundance Doc Midnight Family
Poetically composed and effortlessly segueing between graveyard-shift stillness and chaotic rides through the darkened streets of Mexico City, Midnight Family is a unique cinematic gem. Director Luke Lorentzen spent nearly three months embedded night after night in a private ambulance run by the Ochoa family, an all-male team who race to the scenes of accidents hoping both to save lives and get paid by those they aid. Filmmaker caught up with the award-winning director to discuss this rare glimpse into an incongruous underworld characterized by equal parts heroic acts and monotonous labor prior to the doc’s January 27th premiere at […]
-
“We Viewed Simply Telling a Young Black Love Story as a Radical Act”: Five Questions for Premature Director Rashaad Ernesto Green
“Possessor of a sneaky sort of charm that hides his utter tenaciousness, Rashaad Ernesto Green, a promising directorial talent from the Bronx, makes movies that get under your skin with what, upon reflection, seems like relative ease.” That’s Brandon Harris from Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces of 2010 writing about writer/director Green in the months before the premiere of his debut feature, Gun Hill Road. That Sundance 2011 pic — a tough and empathetic drama about an ex-con grappling with his son’s transition — more than attested to all the promise we spotted in Green’s early shorts, one of which, 2008’s […]
-
“I Have a Naive Conviction That Images Serve a Potentially Positive Purpose”: Beniamino Barrese on The Disappearance of My Mother
Not many filmmakers have a mom who’s an iconic model from the ’60s, photographed by the likes of Irving Penn and Richard Avedon, a muse to Warhol and Dali. Far fewer have one that kept that past hidden. Indeed, it wasn’t until director/cinematographer Beniamino Barrese made a youthful discovery — a stash of portfolios containing Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar covers tucked away inside a locked wardrobe — that he got an inkling that Benedetta Barzini was more than just the radical, outspoken, intellectual mother he’d been filming since he got his first camera at seven. And with The Disappearance of […]
