The 2020 Sundance Film Festival has concluded and, even though I am incredibly sleep deprived, I had such a great time! I was able to see 16 films in 10 days at five different venues and I really enjoyed all of them. My first film was The Perfect Candidate which was filmed in Saudi Arabia. Despite many restrictions on her freedom, a young woman (Mila Alzahrani) practices as a doctor in a small clinic but access is difficult because the dirt road leading to it frequently floods. She tries to get the road paved but no one pays attention to her. When she accidentally signs up to run in a municipal election, she decides to pursue it, against all odds, in order to get the road paved but, instead, she earns the respect of everyone in her life. I thought this film was a very charming story of female empowerment and I really enjoyed the amusing scenes where her sisters help her with her campaign. My second film was Worth which is a true story about the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund. Kenneth Feinberg (Michael Keaton) is a powerful New York lawyer tasked with assigning a value on the lives lost in the 9/11 terror attacks for compensation purposes to keep families from suing and potentially crippling the U.S. economy. At first he uses an actuarial formula and then he realizes that he needs a more personal approach when he begins meeting with the families. Keaton gives a very affecting performance, especially when he is sparring with Charles Wolf (Stanley Tucci) who lost his wife in the attacks. My third film was Promising Young Woman which I really liked. Cassie Thomas (Carey Mulligan) is a med school drop-out who now lives with her parents and has a dead-end job in a coffee shop. When a former classmate (Bo Burnham) comes back into her life, he stirs up memories of the incident that derailed her and awakens a need for revenge. The ending is not at all what I was expecting but it had the crowd at my screening cheering out loud. It is a quirky and subversive take on the traditional revenge story and, even though it has some bizarre tonal shifts, it is fantastic. My fourth film was Dream Horse with my students (go here for my review and here for a review written by one of my students). My fifth film was Surge which was difficult to watch but, upon reflection (and a Q&A with the director Aniel Karia), I have decided that it is brilliant. Joseph (Ben Whishaw) is an airport security officer who lives alone in London. Living in an urban environment has anesthetized and isolated him and, after an incident with his parents and an incident at work, he experiences a psychotic breakdown in which he wanders the city without inhibition. The tension builds and builds with hand-held camera work, pulse-pounding sound design, and a frenetic performance from Whishaw (it reminded me of something the Safdie Brothers would do). My sixth film was the documentary Time which tells the heartbreaking story of a woman named Sibil Fox Richardson who fights for over twenty years to get her husband released from a life sentence in prison (it is implied that the excessive sentence was imposed because he is black and poor). Home videos of family life recorded for her husband over twenty years are interspersed with her tireless crusade to free him. The interviews with their six sons are incredibly poignant, especially since they all grew up to be stellar young men despite their hardships. At first I felt like Sibil was playing to the cameras but a moment of vulnerability after a court clerk informs her that a judge hasn't had time to write the decision brought me to tears. My seventh film was the documentary Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind. This is a loving tribute by Natasha Gregson to her mother with newly discovered home videos and interviews with close friends and family members. Both her personal and professional lives are explored and the overwhelming message for me was that her death left an incredible void in the lives of those who knew her best. My eighth film was the documentary Coded Bias and I was able to take my nephew Sean to see it with me. Joy Buolamwini, a woman of color, was working on a project at MIT and discovered that the facial recognition software she was using had difficulty recognizing the faces of females and people of color. Upon further investigation, she discovered that many algorithms used as "gatekeepers" for getting approval for a loan, applying for college, or getting an interview for a job are similarly biased and, even worse, erroneously track people perceived to be a threat. This documentary is incredibly thought-provoking and a little unsettling. My ninth film was another documentary called Spaceship Earth. This tells the story of the Biosphere 2 experiment where eight scientists attempted to live in a self-sustaining environment for two years with the hope of possibly using these structures in space. I found it fascinating how a group of idealistic people came together to try to improve the world and how they were undermined by their own publicity. My tenth film, Nine Days, was definitely my favorite of the festival. It is a beautiful and thought-provoking exploration of what it means to be human. On another plane of existence (an isolated house in a desert), a man who was once alive (Winston Duke) interviews a group of souls given temporary existence over a period of nine days in order to choose one of them for the privilege of being born. He tests them to see if they can handle the pain and sorrow of life but he is ultimately reminded by one of the candidates (Zazie Beetz) that there is also happiness and beauty to be found in life. I loved this film so much and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since I saw it! My eleventh film was The Glorias which I also really enjoyed. It is a biography of the feminist Gloria Steinem but what sets it apart is that there are four actresses who portray her at various times in her life (Ryan Kiera Armstrong as a child, Lulu Wilson as a teenager, Alicia Vikander as a young adult, and Julianne Moore as an older adult) who frequently interact with each other while traveling on a Greyhound bus through her memories. The inside of the bus is filmed in black and white while the world outside is in color (an homage to The Wizard of Oz). I think this motif works very well and I was captivated by the performances of Vikander and Moore. My twelfth film was Sylvie's Love, a lovely old-fashioned movie about a romance between a woman engaged to someone else (Tessa Thompson) and a Jazz musician (Nnamdi Asomugha) in the 1950s. They go their separate ways but, when they are unexpectedly reunited later in life, they realize they still love each other. Thompson and Asomugha have great chemistry and the soundtrack is fabulous! My thirteenth film, Tesla, was my most anticipated film in the festival because I find Nikola Tesla to be endlessly fascinating and I was excited to see Ethan Hawke portray the enigmatic genius. It begins by telling the same story as The Current War, but from Tesla's point of view, and then it portrays his obsession with developing wireless technology and even inserts smartphones and google searches to emphasize that he had envisioned the future we live in now. It gets pretty weird (Tesla sings a karaoke version of "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" by Tears for Fears) with dramatic low lighting, theatrical backdrops, and a narrator (Eve Hewson) who breaks the fourth wall but I found it intriguing and I suspect it will become a cult classic. My fourteenth film was The Go-Go's, a very straightforward biopic about the first all-female band to play their own instruments and have a number one record (this is mentioned multiple times), including their meteoric rise, pressure to duplicate the success of their first record, drug addiction, and squabbling over publishing rights. As a child of the 1980s, I loved the Go-Go's and it was very nostalgic hearing this music (I tried not to sing) once again. They've still got the beat! My fifteenth film was Ironbark, a true story about a Soviet spy starring Benedict Cumberbatch. Oleg Penkovsky (Merab Ninidze) is a high-ranking science officer in the Soviet Union who is horrified by the build-up of nuclear weapons and wants to give classified information to the West. Because Penkovsky is so prominent, the CIA and MI-6 don't want to compromise him by using known agents so they recruit businessman Greville Wynne (Cumberbatch) who knows very little about spy craft. It is very atmospheric with lots of Cold War intrigue and Cumberbatch gives a riveting performance. I am a fan of spy thrillers so I loved it! My sixteenth and final film was the Taylor Swift documentary Miss Americana. I am a huge fan of Taylor Swift and, even though this was already streaming on Netflix by the time of my screening, it was so much fun to watch this with a large and rowdy crowd! This documentary chronicles a transformative period in Swift's career in which she sheds her "good girl" persona, makes her voice heard about social and political issues, and writes the music for her album Lover. I really loved the image of a 13-year-old girl squaring her shoulders to walk out on to a stage for the first time at the beginning juxtaposed with her confident return to the stage after the album release at the end. Whew! It was a crazy ten days but I loved seeing movies that might not necessarily get made without this festival and I loved talking about these movies with people from all over the world (I talked to a family from London while in line for Ironbark!).
