The Sundance Film Festival has concluded for 2019 and I had such a great time! I am incredibly sleep deprived but I saw some amazing films and had some wonderful conversations with film aficionados from all over the world (including a couple from Sweden and a really cool girl from Toronto). I was able to see fifteen films this year including two with students! My first film was a documentary called Stieg Larsson: The Man Who Played With Fire which intrigued me because I am a huge fan of the Millennium series of books. It chronicles Larrson's job as a journalist as he relentlessly investigated neo-Nazis and the extreme right in Europe, wrote books about the subject, and founded a magazine called Expo. This suggests that he is every bit as interesting as his character Mikael Blomkvist. I found it fascinating and alarming that so many extreme groups exist in Europe. My second film was Adam, a comedy about a naive and inexperienced high school student (Nicholas Alexander) who convinces his parents to let him spend the summer in New York City with his older sister (Margaret Qualley) who is hiding the fact that she is a lesbian from them. He attends a party with his sister and her LGTBQ friends and meets Gillian (Bobbi Salvor Menuez). He immediately falls in love with her but she is a lesbian and she thinks that he is transgender. Hilarity ensues as he tries to keep up the ruse. This film is really funny and what I liked most about it is that a cisgendered heterosexual male is the outsider whose character arc involves learning how to accept others. My third film was To the Stars which is set in a rural town in Oklahoma during the 1960s. Iris Deerborne (Kara Hayward) is an incredibly repressed teenager who is bullied by her mother and all of the kids at school. Her life changes when she meets a new girl from the city with a secret (Liana Liberato). It was shot in black and white which made it quite moody and atmospheric and, while it did become heavy-handed at times, I enjoyed this coming of age story. My fourth film was another documentary called David Crosby: Remember My Name. It is a brutally honest portrait of a man living with regrets with an amazing soundtrack! As a fan of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young I really loved it! My fifth film was a free midnight screening of Honey Boy. The script was written by Shia LaBeouf about his own experiences as a child actor with an abusive father. Lucas Hedges plays Otis, a young actor on a downward spiral when several DUIs and a drunken tirade land him in court-mandated rehab. He is forced to confront his past through a series of flashbacks with Noah Jupe playing the young Otis and LaBeouf brilliantly playing his own father. It is a beautiful and heartbreaking film and I am so glad I got to see it (even though I might be getting too old for these midnight screenings on school nights). My sixth film was The Souvenir, a huge hit with the critics which I found to be a bit boring. Julie (Honor Swinton-Byrne) is a young and inexperienced film student from a wealthy and privileged background struggling to find her voice. She meets an older and charismatic man named Anthony (Tom Burke) and they begin a tumultuous affair. Julie eventually discovers that Anthony is a heroin addict and their doomed relationship helps her find her voice as a filmmaker. This film is incredibly episodic and vague and, even though many scenes are incredibly beautiful, sometimes they seem rather pointless. I think it requires more engagement than I was willing to give it. My seventh film was a student screening of The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind (go here for my review). I really loved this film and so did my students. My eighth film was Them That Follow, an incredibly atmospheric coming of age story about a young girl in rural Appalachia. Mara (Alice Englert) is a devout member of a snake-handling Pentacostal community who is about to enter an arranged marriage but is secretly in love with a nonbeliever. She must choose between her beliefs and the man she loves. It starts very slowly but, when it gets going, it is very intense (audience members at my screening gasped out loud multiple times). My ninth film was Midnight Traveler. One of my colleagues in the English department asked me to chaperone his field trip to another student screening (he chaperoned my field trip, too). This documentary chronicles the harrowing three year journey that filmmaker Hassan Fazili and his family, including two young daughters, take from Afghanistan to Europe seeking asylum after he receives a death threat from the Taliban. The students were incredibly affected by everything this family had to go through which is truly heartbreaking. My tenth film was The Last Black Man in San Francisco, a story about a young black man (Jimmie Fails) and his obsession with a Victorian house built by his grandfather. It is a fresh, original, and quirky exploration of identity, friendship, gentrification, and urban violence. I really liked it but it might not be for everyone. My eleventh film was Clemency, which is my favorite film of the festival. It is a powerful story about the death penalty (to which I am vehemently opposed) and how it affects those who are required to carry out executions. Alfre Woodard stars as warden Bernadine Williams who conducts these "procedures" dispassionately and by the letter of the law until she suffers from PTSD over a botched execution. She then becomes emotionally involved with Anthony Woods (Aldis Hodge), the next inmate scheduled for execution who may well be innocent. Both Woodard and Hodge give brilliant and affecting performances which reduced me, and the entire audience, to tears multiple times. I highly recommend this amazing film. My twelfth film, Top End Wedding, is about a young woman's search for her mother and, ultimately, her own identity before her wedding. I'm not usually a fan of romantic comedies but I had to see this film because it stars Gwilym Lee (who played Brian May in Bohemian Rhapsody)! It is fairly typical of the genre but it is quite funny and I enjoyed the setting in Australia. My thirteenth film was Brittany Runs a Marathon, another favorite of mine. Brittany (Gillian Bell) spends her evenings partying at clubs, her mornings recovering from hangovers, and her afternoons going late to her dead-end job as a ticket taker at a theatre. She goes to a doctor to get a prescription for adderall but, instead, is told that she needs to lose weight or face serious health consequences. She decides to start running and, eventually, to train for the New York Marathon. This film is not just about Brittany's journey to run a marathon but it is also about her journey learning to love herself and I think it is not only funny but also incredibly inspiring. I loved it! My fourteenth film was Official Secrets which tells the true story of Katharine Gun (Keira Knightley), a whistleblower who leaks a classified document to the press hoping to stop the Iraq War. I liked this film for its important story about an ordinary woman willing to face catastrophic consequences in order to follow her conscience as well as its stellar cast (the aforementioned Knightley, Ralph Fiennes, Matthew Goode, Matt Smith, Jeremy Northam, and Rhys Ifans). My fifteenth and final film was Love, Antosha, a documentary about the late actor Anton Yelchin. It begins when his parents, professional ice skaters Irina and Viktor, decide to leave the Soviet Union to give their infant son a better life in the United States. We learn that Anton suffered from cystic fibrosis, was not just a precocious child actor but a dedicated student of film, and was an accomplished photographer and musician (all of which I did not know before this film). There are very touching interviews with many of his co-stars (most notably Chris Pine, Jennifer Lawrence, Martin Landeau, and Jodie Foster). It made me miss him all over again! Fifteen movies, ten days, five venues, two student screenings, and zero sleep produced countless memories! I loved every minute!
Note: It's nice to know that I have good taste! All of my favorite films won awards this year: Clemency won the U.S. Dramatic Grand Jury Prize, The Last Black Man in San Francisco won the U.S. Dramatic Directing Prize, Honey Boy won the U.S. Dramatic Special Jury Award for Vision and Craft, Brittany Runs a Marathon won the U.S. Dramatic Audience Award, and The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind won the Alfred P. Sloan Prize. Good stuff!
