The Fight
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Sundance Hits and Misses, Pandemic Edition
Yes, 2020 sucked. The worst year of our lives finally came to an end, and most independent films and filmmakers, like just about everything and everyone else, suffered. Grand Jury Prize winners were delayed, critics’ favorites were lost and buzzworthy breakouts, briefly the talk of Park City, remained in limbo, waiting for some nebulous future release date when movie theaters might re-open and vaccinated audiences might attend them. Normally, you could look back at a year’s worth of top Sundance titles, examine what became of them in distribution—as Filmmaker usually does—and glean some takeaways about the state of the marketplace. […]
by Anthony Kaufman on Feb 10, 2021 -
“If There Ever Was a Time For a Film about How Everyday Heroes Can Fight Back”: Eli B. Despres and Elyse Steinberg on The Fight
If you remain unconvinced American civil liberties are under attack at an unprecedented degree, just wait until you see what the presidential administration cooks up next week (and the week after that). As every day brings a slew of new xenophobic tweets and attacks on the United States Constitution courtesy of Donald Trump, the public display of abuse of power has never been so transparent and, frighteningly, tolerated by constituents. As immigrant families seeking asylum continue to get thrown in cages, American protestors are thrown into unmarked vans) and reproductive and LGBTQ rights are challenged and erased, the need for […]
by Erik Luers on Jul 31, 2020 -
Sundance 2020 Dispatch 3: Some Kind of Heaven, Black Bear, The Fight
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 […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 26, 2020
