Views on the Sundance Awards

This year, the only film in any of the four main competitive programs to score with both jurors and the public was Alex Pritz’s The Territory, which won a special jury award for documentary craft and was the audience’s choice for best film in the World Cinema documentary competition. Seven features premiered in the Next program of “bold works distinguished by an innovative, forward-thinking approach to storytelling,” and two awards were presented, one by juror Joey Soloway and the other by the audience. Chase Joynt’s Framing Agnes won both.

Working with trans actors Zackary Drucker, Angelica Ross, Jen Richards, Max Wolf Valerio, Silas Howard, and Stephen Ira, Joynt reenacts a series of interviews with trans people recorded and transcribed at UCLA in the 1960s. Agnes, the most prominent of the interviewees, was a transgender woman who was the subject of a case study that sociologist Harold Garfinkel conducted in 1967. In the Los Angeles Times, Justin Chang notes that “these stylized re-creations are interspersed with personal ruminations from the actors on what it feels like to imagine and inhabit another trans person’s experience. Dizzyingly prismatic yet unfailingly lucid in its examination of the many layers of gender, sexual, and racial identity, Framing Agnes releases wave after wave of insights over its fleet seventy-five-minute running time.”

Talking to Nicolas Rapold last Wednesday, Amy Taubin noted that “the only great film that I’ve seen so far at the festival” was Nikyatu Jusu’s first feature, Nanny, which went on to win the grand jury prize. Anna Diop plays Aisha, an undocumented Senegalese immigrant who is hired by a well-to-do Manhattan couple to look after their daughter. Jusu tells Filmmaker’s Natalia Keogan that any echoes in Nanny of Ousmane Sembène’s Black Girl (1966) were not consciously intended but that she has “felt like there’s been an ancestral presence with this film.” While Aisha dreams of making enough money to bring her own young son over to the U.S., she begins experiencing frightening visions of strange creatures.

Jury members Chelsea Barnard, Marielle Heller, and Payman Maadi gave the directing award to Jamie Dack for Palm Trees and Power Lines. As A. A. Dowd puts it at the A.V. Club, Dack’s first feature “provides a grim answer to the question, ‘How would last year’s Red Rocket play if it was a deadly serious drama told from Strawberry’s perspective?’” Lea (Lily McInerny), seventeen and bored, is lured into a relationship with Tom (Jonathan Tucker), a man twice her age. “The unaffected performances and stark bobbing-camera aesthetic recall Eliza Hittman, though the unsparing neorealism of Palm Trees and Power Lines makes that Sundance alum look like John Hughes by comparison,” writes Dowd. In the Guardian, Adrian Horton salutes the “all-female creative team” behind this “remarkably sharp-eyed and bruising debut.”

K. D. Dávila won this year’s Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award for expanding her and director Carey Williams’s 2018 short Emergency into a feature-length college comedy that for Sean Burns “feels like a slyly contemporary sociopolitical spin on The Wages of Fear.” Black students Kunle (Donald Elise Watkins) and Sean (RJ Cyler) and their Latino roommate, Carlos (Sebastian Chacon), discover a white girl passed out on the floor in their living room. Calling the police is not an option. “Kunle and Sean’s easy, fraternal relationship buoys the film, which feels as much like a meditation on two friends wrestling with their differing world views as it is about the illusion of safety for Black people in America,” writes the Hollywood Reporter’s Lovia Gyarkye.

Gyarkye is a little less taken with Bradley Rust Gray’s blood, the winner of a special jury award for an uncompromising artistic vision. The story of a photographer (Carla Juri) who travels to Japan and finds herself becoming romantically drawn to the friend of her late husband makes for “a beautifully observed film that never arrives at its desired emotional destination,” writes Gyarkye. In Variety, Tomris Laffly finds blood “too understated to leave a memorable trace,” and Daniel Gorman at In Review Online calls it “a character study that never finds any character.”

Another special jury award went to the ensemble cast of 892, Abi Damaris Corbin’s film based on the true story of Brian Easley. A Marine veteran who served in Iraq, Easley entered a bank in Georgia in 2017, announced that he was carrying an explosive device, took hostages, and demanded the $892 owed to him by the Department of Veterans Affairs. John Boyega’s “complex, unfussy turn” as Easley is “matched by most of his costars,” writes Screen’s Tim Grierson. Nicole Beharie is “particularly effective as a bank manager trying to remain calm under impossible conditions.” The late Michael K. Williams plays Bernard, “a seasoned hostage negotiator who knows how to connect with Brian,” and the “easy rapport” between the two men suggests that they “understand something profound about one another. Williams transcends his character’s clichés, effortlessly convincing us that Bernard wants to save this young man—even if Brian himself is ready to die.”

Long before the prizes were announced, critics were calling Cha Cha Real Smooth a crowd-pleaser, and sure enough, it won the audience award. Cooper Raiff wrote, directed, produced, edited, and starred in his first feature, Shithouse, which won the grand jury prize at SXSW in 2020, and he’s at it again here, playing twenty-two-year-old Anthony, fresh out of college, a charmer and a party-starter who feels drawn to the mother (coproducer Dakota Johnson) of an autistic daughter (Vanessa Burghardt). It’s not for everyone. At Little White Lies, Hannah Strong finds that Cha Cha Real Smooth has “all the narrative scope and self-awareness of a self-insert fanfic published on Blogspot.” But A. A. Dowd argues that Raiff is “an ace at writing naturalistic screwball banter, and a supremely likable leading man: extroverted but self-deprecating, his default impulse to enthusiastically validate people colliding sometimes with his inability to resist a caustic quip.”

Jurors Garrett Bradley, Joan Churchill, and Peter Nicks awarded the grand jury prize to The Exiles, in which directors Violet Columbus and Ben Klein accompany firebrand documentarian Christine Choy on her mission to track down three leaders of the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests who fled to the U.S. The Exiles is “a palimpsest of erratically overlapping perspectives,” writes Jessica Kiang for Variety. “The results are untidy and unbalanced, but derive considerable energy from that eccentric approach.” The Hollywood Reporter’s John DeFore agrees that The Exiles is “a mixed bag as a piece of storytelling,” but “the film’s greatest value for American viewers in 2022 is the truth it conveys to those hoping to preserve (or, let’s dare to dream, improve) a democracy facing immediate and very grave threats.”

Reid Davenport, the founder of Through My Lens, a nonprofit with a mission to amplify the voices of people with disabilities, won the directing award for I Didn’t See You There. “Composed entirely of hand-shot footage from his particular vantage point,” writes Guy Lodge for Variety, “it’s an evocative first-hand perspective on the challenges of living as a wheelchair-user in an America that still treats disability as an afterthought—but an elusive reflection of an artist who never really introduces himself to us.” Paste movies editor Jacob Oller finds that the film “hums with a hypnotic affinity for architectural patterns and urban textures, the visual infrastructure highly attractive to Davenport since it allows him to immerse us in his point of view without being the view himself.”

Erin Casper and Jocelyne Chaput won this year’s Jonathan Oppenheim Editing Award for their work on Sara Dosa’s Fire of Love, a portrait of vulcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft that incorporates much of the footage the couple shot over the years before they died together in 1991 while filming eruptions in Japan. “I truly admire how Fire of Love constructs a fable about how we should all trust scientists, presented within the trappings of a love story,” writes Abby Sun for Filmmaker. “Its taste makes up in execution for a lot of the twee stylings; the voiceover performance from Miranda July lends weight to the film’s narrative ruminations and the score—by Nicolas Godin, one half of the French band Air—is magnificent.” National Geographic Documentary Films, which won a furious bidding war, will release Fire of Love later this year.

Directors and producers Paula Eiselt and Tonya Lewis Lee won a special Impact for Change jury award for Aftershock. Focusing on two young women whose deaths due to childbirth complications were preventable, the film addresses an alarming imbalance. Black and Native women are “two to three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women in this country,” notes Susannah Gruder at IndieWire. “Despite its heartbreaking subject matter,” Aftershock “ends up being surprisingly optimistic in its portrayal of empowerment and perseverance, and those who believe that reproductive justice is attainable for all.”

In Descendant, the winner of a special jury award for creative vision, Margaret Brown tracks a community’s efforts to reclaim their history. Africatown in Mobile, Alabama, was founded by West Africans transported to the U.S. in 1860 on the last known—and illegal—slave ship, Clotilda. The New Yorker’s Richard Brody finds that Brown, “a white filmmaker from Mobile, elides the personal element—her connection to the subject and the area’s residents, the relationships on which the film depends. Nonetheless, the overwhelming force of history and the pressure of ongoing injustices energize her filming; the movie delivers an emotionally jangled, collage-like rush of purpose and urgency.”

Sundance attendees voted to give Daniel Roher’s Navalny not only the audience award but also the Festival Favorite award for which all eighty-four features in this year’s edition were eligible. Given that no news is broken in this blow-by-blow account of the poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, it’s the telling and not the tale that has won over viewers. The film “details in cogent, stressful, riveting fashion just how scared the Kremlin is of Navalny, arguably the biggest threat to Vladimir Putin’s power at home,” writes Adrian Horton. Now heading to CNN+ and HBO Max, Navalny features “several exceptional set-pieces that could just as easily have involved Jack Ryan or George Smiley in supporting roles,” suggests the Hollywood Reporter’s Daniel Fienberg.

In Utama, Alejandro Loayza Grisi’s debut feature and the winner of the grand jury prize, a young man urges his grandparents, an elderly Quechua couple in the Bolivian highlands, to leave their home for the city as a severe drought drains the region of water. For Filmmaker’s Vadim Rizov, Utama is “a fairly tedious harangue about the end of a traditional way of life and destructive ecological change,” but most reviewers have been more forgiving. “Shot in artfully composed and vibrantly colored widescreen by DP Barbara Alvarez (The Headless Woman), it resembles a cross between a minimalist Sergio Leone western and a series of photos by Sebastião Salgado,” writes Jordan Mintzer in the Hollywood Reporter. “And yet the story . . . is more than just a coffee-table-book view of indigenous culture; it’s a powerful and cautionary tale of survival in a dying world.”

Another couple, Irka and Tolik—far younger, and in fact, expecting their first child—must decide whether to stay or leave their home in Klondike. On July 17, 2014, just above their modest farm in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine, Russian separatists shoot down a Malaysian Airlines passenger plane, killing nearly three hundred people. The war in Donbass is heating up, but Irka refuses to be evacuated. At the Film Verdict, Jay Weissberg finds Klondike, for which Maryna Er Gorbach has won the directing award, to be “beautifully filmed yet tiresomely obvious.” But Guy Lodge writes in Variety that in this “potent film, shot in unbroken, unblinking takes that observe obscene violence and destruction with cold candor, Irka’s resistance to warfare is at once fierce and futile.”

The jury—Andrew Haigh, Mohamed Hefzy, and La Frances Hui—gave a special award for innovative vision to Martika Ramirez Escobar for Leonor Will Never Die. “The twenty-nine-year-old Philippine filmmaker has packed her first feature with high-octane fistfights, family melodrama, and even a Jacques Demy-like song-and-dance sequence peppered with references to Xavier Dolan and Spike Jonze,” writes Clarence Tsui at the Film Verdict. “If the premise of a screenwriter jumping into her own story to denounce the villain she helped create sounds merely Kaufman-esque, just wait until Ramirez Escobar appears as herself on screen, talking to her (real-life) editor Lawrence Ang about how to bring the whole story to a close.” For Katie Rife at the A.V. Club, this is “the kind of colorful and imaginative movie you hope to champion as a critic.”

Teresa Sánchez won a special jury award for her performance as the owner of a tequila factory on the verge of going under in Juan Pablo González’s first fictional feature. “A regular in Nicolás Pereda’s films, Sánchez’s stone-faced, initially almost anti-charismatic performance propels Dos Estaciones,” writes Vadim Rizov. In Screen, Jonathan Romney finds that the film “mixes imposing but cleanly executed realist visuals with acute observational finesse.”

At IndieWire, Natalia Winkelman describes Alli Haapasalo’s Girl Picture, the winner of the audience award, as “a conventional yet enormously likable story of three teenagers in Finland working out their feelings about love and sex.” Brianna Zigler at the Film Stage finds it “sweet, tender, and frequently amusing,” and for Lena Wilson at the Playlist, even when it’s “a bit too neat, it’s still totally irresistible.” Girl Picture now heads to the Berlinale’s Generation program.

Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes, the winner of the grand jury award, is “a vital and transfixing work of urban ecology about two Muslim brothers who share an uncommonly holistic perspective of the world around them,” writes IndieWire’s David Ehrlich. Saud and Nadeem have devoted their lives to rescuing the birds of prey—specifically, black kites—falling from the thickly polluted sky over New Delhi. For Daniel Fienberg, All That Breathes is “one of the more dreamily provocative documentaries I’ve ever seen.”

Danish filmmaker Simon Lereng Wilmont won awards at festivals in Amsterdam, Göteborg, and San Francisco for The Distant Barking of Dogs (2017), which focused on the life of a ten-year-old Ukrainian boy near the frontline of the war. Now he’s won the directing award for A House Made of Splinters, which has brought him back to Ukraine, where, as Robert Daniels writes at RogerEbert.com, “not all casualties appear on the battlefield.” Children from broken homes are given temporary refuge—the limit is nine months—while the system figures out what to do with them. The film is “an affecting diary of life continuing in the worst of circumstances, disrupted equally by sorrow and fleeting joy,” writes Guy Lodge for Variety.

Snow Hnin Ei Hlaing spent six years working on Midwives, shooting in her hometown in western Myanmar, where the predominantly Muslim Rohingya people are among the most severely persecuted in the world. Her subjects are Hla, a Buddhist who runs a makeshift medical clinic, and her Muslim apprentice, Nyo Nyo. Presenting a special jury award for excellence in verité filmmaking, Dawn Porter, who served on the jury with Emilie Bujès and Patrick Gaspard, called Midwives a “surprising story of female self-determination in the face of militaristic oppression, directed with a rigor that demonstrates the resilience of filmmaker and subjects alike.” Lauren Wissot interviews Snow for Filmmaker, noting that she tells “a tale of clashing ambitions, tough love tinged with casual racism, and the highs and lows of motherhood, all set against the backdrop of societal expectations, competing armed forces, and ultimately a military coup.”

Finally, we come back around full circle to The Territory, a jury and audience favorite. The story begins in 2018, the year that Jair Bolsonaro was elected president of Brazil and declared that “there won’t be one inch of Indigenous land left” by the end of his time in office. The Uru-eu-wau-wau people living in the Amazonian rainforest first came into contact with outsiders in 1981, and they have been battling corporate-backed loggers, ranchers, and farmers over control of their land ever since. “The film’s sympathies are clear,” writes Sheri Linden in the Hollywood Reporter, but “its strength lies in the way it offers intimate access to people on several clashing sides of the situation, making for a complex, layered, and thoughtful examination.”

Director Alex Pritz worked closely with the Uru-eu-wau-wau, some of whom shot sequences and are credited as coproducers. In Variety, Guy Lodge notes that “anybody hoping for a comfortingly inspirational takeaway from The Territory may be disappointed. Instead, this short, sharply crafted Sundance premiere makes an impact with both its bleak, blunt messaging and its muscular formal construction, as the turf war in question takes on the heated urgency of a thriller.”