Sundance Roundup: A Sad Emoji

Persian versions of the world made their mark at Sundance, as Atropia won the Grand Jury Prize for U.S. Dramatic Competition. Set in 2006, during the height of America’s War on Terror, writer-director Hailey Gates’ funny, cynical but dramatically thin satire details the inherent ironies and hypocrisies of a real-life immersive military training compound in California meant to inure new recruits to harrowing urban warfare situations.

Alia Shawkat stars as Fayruz, one of the actors hired to play the insurgents surrounding the soldiers, and one of the few who is actually of Iraqi descent and speaks Arabic—unlike the clutch of Latino and non-Arab actors passing for Middle Eastern. She’s callously angling for a Hollywood gig, especially since so many vfx, make-up, and production design craftspeople work at the Westworld-type venue. Her Machiavellian machinations make for ripe comic moments, but the net total ends up feeling less than the sum of its parts—especially when a card at the end says that the compound is now being used as a cosplay Russian town, which seems like a potentially fascinating plot twist reduced to a throwaway footnote.

Two other films also gave voice to the Arab experience—specifically a Palestinian one. All That’s Left of You is Cherien Dabis’ sprawling but minor-key melodrama detailing three generations of one family, from their exile from Jaffa to their corrosive—and ultimately lethal—life in the occupied West Bank. It’s an absorbing and heartfelt look at how political trauma corrodes every aspect of interpersonal relationships.

Co-Existence, My Ass! takes a much funnier but no less anguished look at the Israeli-Palestinian divide through the eyes of comedian and activist Noam Schuster Eliassi, a Jewish Israeli of Arabic descent. Filmmaker Amber Fares tracks Eliassi’s journey from UN diplomat to culture-clash stand-up and occasional talking-head pundit on Israeli TV, all the while trying to find common ground among the region’s tribal differences—especially after Hamas’ attacks on October 7, 2023. The film, a thoughtful study of intolerance that’s uplifting but still firmly grounded in the sober realities of life in both Israel and Palestine, won the World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award for Freedom of Expression.

What they bought

Will audiences get to see any of these movies? Who knows, since none of them currently has a distribution deal. Despite a generally solid slate of films boasting a few crowd-pleasing standouts, this year’s edition of Sundance remained a sluggish marketplace, with only two big sales before the event’s closing awards ceremony.

The first bidding war started on Sunday night, when body-horror comedy Together debuted at the Eccles Theater and ended up with a reported $17 million deal from Neon. Michael Shanks’ curdled relationship freak-out stars real-life spouses Dave Franco and Alison Brie as an adrift unmarried New York couple who move out of the city when Brie’s character gets a small-town upstate teaching gig. Her “boy partner” Franco is a going-nowhere musician clinging to a decade-old dream of rock stardom who resents leaving his bandmates behind.

And when the duo gets lost during a nearby hike, they fall into a hidden cave holding transformative secrets that change their lives forever. Let’s just say that a suddenly magnetic attraction to each other leads to some very sticky situations. It’s a savvy study of romantic dynamics refracted through the metaphorical prism of flesh-rendered nightmares—with the kind of yuck factor that fueled countless movie-date nights for last fall’s buzzy Oscar-nominee The Substance.

The other mega-deal went to Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams, which Netflix scooped up for a payday north of $15 million. A beatific and elegiac heartache of a film adapted from Denis Johnson’s 2011 novella and visualized through a Terrence-Malick-fueled lens, Train Dreams stars Joel Edgerton as a Pacific Northwest logger born in the late 1880s who watches the American landscape transform around him over the course of his 80 years, experiencing love, loss, fatherhood, racism, personal catastrophe, professional obsolescence, and a persistent ability to survive another day.

Survival was a recurring theme through many Sundance films, including the painfully wry Sorry, Baby, a contemplative open-wound of a drama that remarkably makes space for laughter. Written, directed, and starring Eva Victor, Sorry, Baby shifts chronology to examine how Agnes processes enduring a sexual assault on a college campus where she ends up being a literature professor. Impressive as a feature debut, Sorry, Baby suffers from a few stilted moments that feel more schematic than genuine. But as a testament to someone trying her best to digest such an upending physical violation despite institutional indifference, Victor’s film speaks unshakable truths in a fresh and vital voice.

The documentary is in

Fresh and vital also feels like the best ways to describe some of the most fascinating documentaries that unspooled at Sundance this past week—works that spoke to political injustices through bold formalistic innovations. Brittany Shyne’s Seeds, Winner of the Grand Jury Prize for U.S. Documentary Competition, is a tender and affecting look at a family of black cotton farmers that has tended the same farm for over a hundred years, despite financial stress, physical deterioration, and empty promises from politicians offering help. And she elevates her classic cinema vérité techniques with luscious B&W compositions that give the hardscrabble subject matter a chiaroscuro dignity.

Even more harrowing is The Alabama Solution, Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman’s incendiary indictment of the overcrowded, understaffed correctional facilities in the southern state. Using a plethora of cellphone footage provided by inmates in the various prisons, the Alabama Solution paints a damning portrait of neglect and abuse, with rampant violence and drug use leading to multiple deaths at the hands of the correctional officers that the wardens refuse to investigate, let alone prosecute.

Taking other people’s footage to an even more eye-opening extreme is The Perfect Neighbor, a film composed almost entirely of official videos from police bodycams. Director Geeta Gandbhir chronicles a Florida neighborhood dispute between a cranky older white woman named Susan Lorincz and the minority residents across the street, including rambunctious local children who play in the empty lot next to her house. She yells at the kids and calls the cops repeatedly, while the neighbors—totally within their rights to play on property not owned by Lorincz—are respectfully defiant, dubbing her a Karen and softly mocking her outrage while correctly calling out her thinly-veiled racism.

It all comes to a head when, after threatening one of the boys, Susan gets an angry visit from that boy’s mother—and shoots her dead. Through a closed, locked, metal door. Stand Your Ground laws and white privilege give Susan a superficial veneer of protection, but local outrage and black anguish turn the tide and reveal the mental instability of an unhinged woman who refuses to see her own wrongdoing. The Perfect Neighbor gives a stunning you-are-there breakdown in real time of a situation involving regular people—without the performative taint of documentarian camera crews surrounding them—while laying bare the undeniable volatility of lax gun laws. The film won Gandbhir the U.S. Documentary Directing award.

Another non-fiction delivering a formalistic shock is the war doc 2000 Meters to Andriivka. Mstyslav Chernov’s intense follow-up to his Oscar-winning 20 Days in Mariupol once again shows Ukraine at its most vulnerable and inspiringly resilient, but this time through its soldiers as they try to capture a Russian-occupied town. The twist here, though, is that most of the footage is from GoPro cameras attached to their helmets, creating the most uncanny, stomach-churning, visceral experience of being a soldier on the front lines. Call of Duty vibes are very strong, but also instantly made trivial when the voices you hear are ones in intense pain from fresh gunshot wounds, nearby grenade explosions, and drone attacks overhead. Chernov rightly walked away with the Sundance Directing prize for World Cinema Documentary.

These films sidestepped the clichés of standard doc filmmaking by breaking new ground in how they captured life. But the wittiest documentary this week decimated those clichés by deconstructing their very essence. Critic turned filmmaker Charlie Shackleton eviscerates true-crime procedurals with Zodiac Killer Project, a doc about how Shackleton bemoans his inability to get the rights to adapt Lyndon Lafferty’s book The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up—and then describes an imaginary movie about the adaptation he would have done.

In doing so, he creates the perfect opportunity to condemn all the tired tropes of the genre that has dominated true-crime docs for the past decade: the busy opening credits, the evocative shots of actors walking away ominously from the camera—performers more commonly known as “backtors”—the close-ups of tape recorders playing audio confessionals, the digitally manipulated archival photos, and actual locations that double as stand-ins for the real-life counterparts. That police station? It’s just a local library. The exterior of a spooky house? It replaces the authentic home that isn’t really that spooky. The local church? Not the real one, but close enough.

Shackleton cries foul on the permission structure of falsehoods inherent to so much of what people take for reality these days—a candor that’s as hilarious and refreshing as it is sobering and necessary. His film, in the experimental NEXT section of the festival, won the NEXT Innovator Award. As Sundance winds to a close, with its future geographic location unsettled and its reputation for film deals far from the go-go days of yore, its programming seems as vital as ever in pointing toward the future of film.