Sundance Film Festival 2022
-
“The Tragedy of Martha is That Her Story Had Been Hijacked So Thoroughly by the White Men Around Her”: Anne Alvergue and Debra McClutchy on The Martha Mitchell Effect
Per Wikipedia, “The Martha Mitchell effect refers to the process by which a psychiatrist, psychologist, mental health clinician, or other medical professional labels a patient’s accurate perception of real events as delusional, resulting in misdiagnosis.” Per Sundance, Full Frame, Hot Docs, and ultimately Netflix, The Martha Mitchell Effect is one must-see doc. Running at just under a brisk 40 minutes, Anne Alvergue and Debra McClutchy’s all-archival short – which recently screened at the virtual Full Frame in the NEW DOCS section and is set to play in the Persister Shorts: Mother’s Day program at the hybrid Hot Docs – spotlights the […]
by Lauren Wissot on Apr 26, 2022 -
“120 Years of the Male Gaze On Our Backs”: Nina Menkes on Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power
“Perception is not whimsical, but fatal.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson Movies turn viewers into willing participants looking to break through the screen—the “fourth wall”—and temporarily adopt the POV of the camera and taking on its surveying gaze. Your own emotional response may vary—excitement, titillation, utter boredom—but the camera’s eye is your own, if only for the duration of the film. In her landmark essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” written in the 1970s, scholar and filmmaker Laura Mulvey introduced the concept of the “male gaze,” arguing that the camera’s eye was inherently male and could often be misogynistic in its depiction […]
by Erik Luers on Feb 4, 2022 -
Sundance 2022 Critic’s Notebook: I Didn’t See You There, Jihad Rehab
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 […]
by Abby Sun on Jan 30, 2022 -
“How Do We Make This Feel Like It Needs to be Longer?” Carey Williams on Expanding Emergency From Short to Feature
They admit it looks bad: with plans to indulge in a legendary night of partying, college buddies Sean and Kunle (RJ Cyler and Donald Elise Watkins) briefly stop in at their apartment and come across an unconscious white girl passed out on their living room floor. Either extremely drunk or maliciously roofied, the girl suddenly regains semi-consciousness, only to vomit everywhere and pass out again. Along with their other roommate, video-game obsessed stoner Carlos (Sebastian Chacon), Sean and Kunle panic as they weigh the pros and cons of helping a person they do not know in such a compromised position. […]
by Erik Luers on Jan 29, 2022 -
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 […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 29, 2022 -
“The Biggest Challenge Facing Producers and the Film Industry at Large Is an Unhealthy Relationship to Labor”: Producer Jesse Hope on A Love Song
Max Walker-Silverman’s A Love Song pits a pair of reconnected childhood sweethearts—both now widowed—against the backdrop of an intimate American West. Shot in rural Colorado in the midst of the COVID pandemic, the film required precautions in excess of what was stipulated in then-new union guidelines, necessitating everyone involved to enter and form a “bubble” for the duration of production. First-time producer Jesse Hope discusses the difficulties and rewards of such an approach and how his experience working on sets with directors like Quentin Tarantino and the Coen brothers prepared him to take the reins. Filmmaker: Tell me about the […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 28, 2022 -
“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 […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jan 28, 2022 -
“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 […]
by A.E. Hunt on Jan 27, 2022 -
Sundance 2022 Critic’s Notebook: The Mission, Utama
The beginning of Tania Anderson’s The Mission transported me from my virtual festival cocoon to Utah’s snowy slopes and the towns below; the ambient Mormonism emanating from those surroundings is a shadow structure of any IRL Sundance. Anderson’s debut feature documentary invites viewers to observe the nice-seeming young men and women dispatched from there to proselytize on behalf of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. The opening introduces four main subjects—two male, two female—preparing to separate from their families for a two-year term, beginning with nine weeks of missionary training camp in Provo. From there, they’re sent to Finland, whose total […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 27, 2022 -
“Originally I Had a 200-Page Script”: Ricky D’Ambrose on The Cathedral
Ricky D’Ambrose’s second feature, The Cathedral, begins in the mid-’80s, with a narrator outlining the history of the Damrosch family: father Richard (Brian d’Arcy James), mother Lydia (Monica Barbaro) and son Jesse (Hudson McGuire as an adolescent, Robert Levey II as a pre-teen, William Bednar-Carter as a teenager). The film begins shortly before the latter’s birth and continues into the mid-aughts, outlining an often difficult Long Island upbringing. Richard casts a dark shadow over Jesse’s upbringing. The years’ passing is concretized datewise by a plethora of broadcast news footage—a new element for D’Ambrose’s work in a feature full of them. I […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 26, 2022
