A few days after arriving in Park City, critic Ty Burr found the mood “restrained.” Reporting for the New York Times on the awards handed out last Friday evening, Kyle Buchanan referred to the forty-first edition of the Sundance Film Festival as “muted.” The word the NYT’s Manohla Dargis has decided to go with is “weird.”
The contributing factors were many, but the Los Angeles fires topped the list. “Sundance and the mainstream industry have always been codependents,” writes Dargis, “and when the mainstream feels unsettled, you can feel the anxiety in the air. Making matters worse is that the conflagration in California is just the latest crisis facing the movie world, which continues to grapple with the aftershocks of the pandemic and back-to-back strikes, along with its self-inflicted wounds.”
Then there’s the matter of the move. Sundance will return to Park City as its home base just once more next year. The festival may then stay in Utah, making Salt Lake City its primary hub, or it may head to Boulder, Colorado, or Cincinnati, Ohio. Filmmaker’s Scott Macaulay notes that “‘what’s your vote for Sundance 2027?’ joined the perennial ‘So, how long are you here?’ as the festival conversation starter.” It’ll be weeks, maybe months, before an announcement is made, and the uncertainty seems to have contributed to the overall hum of anxiety.
Buyers were cautious, biding their time before closing their deals. Several critics, in dispatches and on podcasts, noted that there were few—if any—breakout must-sees in the lineup. But they found plenty to like, and so, too, did the juries.
U.S. Dramatic Competition
That doesn’t necessarily mean that they liked the same films. U.S. Dramatic Competition jurors Reinaldo Marcus Green, Arian Moayed, and Celine Song awarded their Grand Jury Prize to Atropia, written and directed by Hailey Gates, a model, actor (Uncut Gems), and former Viceland journalist. Atropia is “a deadening jumble of ideas, tones, motivations, and genres that just doesn’t coalesce into much of anything,” finds the Guardian’s Benjamin Lee, and Filmmaker’s Vadim Rizov would likely agree: “I just don’t get whatever this is supposed to be.” But the film does have its champions.
Alia Shawkat stars as Fayruz, an aspiring actress looking to jump-start her career by playing one of dozens of inhabitants of a mock Iraqi town built for combat training during the height of the War on Terror in the mid-2000s. “Think Arrested Development if it were directed by Peter Watkins,” suggests Film Comment’s Devika Girish. “The uneasy alliance of war and the movie-making machinery is laid bare: flattened depictions of real people and places pave the way for dehumanizing violence. I found the film both very funny and a bit frivolous, as its well-observed ironies eventually dissolve into a kooky love story—between Fayruz and a handsome soldier playing a terrorist in the village but bristling to return to his duties in Iraq—that trades satire for simple absurdity.”
Rashad Frett won this competition’s Directing Award for Ricky, which “addresses the multiple challenges faced by ex-cons with sensitivity, nuance, and—best of all—a lack of preachy judgement,” as Nick Schager puts it at the Daily Beast. Comedian Eva Victor, probably best known for the videos she’s posted on social media, won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award for the first feature she’s written and directed, Sorry, Baby. This is “a meticulously crafted wonder, the most auspicious debut I’ve seen here this year,” writes Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson. Victor stars as Agnes, a victim of sexual assault, and there’s “so much here that could tilt into cloying Sundance cliché, but Victor gently guides her film away from that edge.”
James Sweeney’s Twinless won both an Audience Award and a Dramatic Special Jury Award for Acting given to Dylan O’Brien. Playing twins in flashback sequences, O’Brien is “a knockout,” writes Benjamin Lee, “delivering two lived-in performances at opposite ends of the spectrum, one as superficially heterosexual as they come and the other, embodying a familiar gay type, commanding and electric and maybe a little dangerous too.”
In first-time writer-director Carmen Emmi’s Plainclothes, the winner of a Special Jury Award for Ensemble Cast, a cop assigned to lure and arrest gay men falls for a target. For the Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney, “very fine performances from Tom Blyth and Russell Tovey keep you glued to this sexy, sad, authentically gritty drama.”
U.S. Documentary Competition
Seeds, a collective portrait of Black farmers in the American South and the first feature directed by cinematographer Brittany Shyne, won the U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Documentary presented by jurors Steven Bognar, Vinnie Malhotra, and Marcia Smith. “With the patience of a sower,” writes Lisa Kennedy for Variety, “Shyne lets the lives of her subjects unfold gently over two hours. She filmed for nine years, following farm families as they went about their hardscrabble labor, as well as the work of the community. Although there are urgent economic and political challenges facing these families, this isn’t muckraking cinema. Instead, the filmmaker hews to the quotidian, the weekly, the annual. Shot in black and white, this portrait of a people is affecting and achy.”
The Directing Award went to Geeta Gandbhir for The Perfect Neighbor, which utilizes bodycam footage and interviews to map the tensions between Susan Lorincz, a white woman, and her neighbors, most of whom were Black, and one of whom she shot and killed. As Vadim Rizov points out, the case was “so open-and-shut that she was convicted in Florida by an all-white jury. Choosing a case whose merits aren’t up for debate is one of the first smart moves in this ideologically airtight presentation, which reappropriates footage automatically recorded for entirely different purposes in service of, among other things, an unexpectedly slow-burn neighborhood portrait.”
Parker Laramie won the Jonathan Oppenheim Editing Award for his work on Anthony Benna’s Audience Award winner, André Is an Idiot, a diary-like chronicle of the last three years in the life of ad exec André Ricciardi. “Get yourself a fucking colonoscopy,” urges a title card. The film is “a much lighter experience than its logline might suggest,” writes IndieWire’s David Ehrlich, “but its buoyancy in the face of oblivion is the source of its power: If this guy was cheated out of another few decades on this planet, how dare we—who make so much less of every moment—just sit on our asses instead of getting them probed?”
Archival footage of Selena Quintanilla, the “Queen of Tejano Music,” is “the heart and by far the best part of the puffy documentary Selena y Los Dinos, an easy-to-watch celebration of her legacy as a musician and a cultural figure,” writes the Hollywood Reporter’s Caryn James. The jury agreed, presenting a Special Jury Award for Archival Storytelling to director Isabel Castro.
Another Special Jury Award went to Reid Davenport, who won a Directing Award at Sundance in 2022 for I Didn’t See You There. In Life After, Davenport investigates the story of Elizabeth Bouvia, a disabled woman who, in the early 1980s, sought the right to die. He also “challenges an able-bodied audience’s preconceptions about the lives of disabled people as well as upends the expectations of how documentaries are supposed to unfold,” writes Esther Zuckerman at IndieWire.
World Cinema Dramatic Competition
Jurors Ava Cahen, Wanuri Kahiu, and Daniel Kaluuya gave their World Cinema Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic to Rohan Parashuram Kanawade’s first feature, Cactus Pears, which Ritesh Mehta at IndieWire calls a “queer Marathi language romantic drama with the mottled, lingering emotional punctuation if not always the verbal pithiness of a haiku.” Thirty-year-old Anand (Bhushaan Manoj) returns to his village from Mumbai to mourn the loss of his father and bonds with an old friend, Balya (Suraaj Suman). Cactus Pears is “a gentle slow-burn that occasionally becomes electric,” finds Siddhant Adlakha at Variety.
Alireza Khatami won the Directing Award for The Things You Kill, in which a Turkish literature professor returns home from the U.S. and plots to avenge the suspicious death of his mother. At Slant, Derek Smith writes that “Khatami—whose last film, the terrifying Terrestrial Verses, was an examination of the ways Iran’s authoritarian regime controls the lives of its citizens—crafts a narrative that’s ultimately surprising and subtly enigmatic in its examination of the nature of masculinity and the stranglehold that notions surrounding it have on a family, and nation, determined to uphold the status quo at all costs.”
Georgi M. Unkovski won a Special Jury Award for Creative Vision for DJ Ahmet, which Carlos Aguilar calls a “music-soaked, delightfully humorous, and unpretentiously stylish debut set in a remote North Macedonian village” in his review of this Audience Award winner for Variety. Catherine Léger won a Special Jury Award for Writing for Two Women, directed by Chloé Robichaud and starring Karine Gonthier-Hyndman and Laurence Leboeuf as neighbors and neglected wives looking to spice up their sex lives. “Two Women is a titillating, vibrant send-up of societal expectations that goes down easy despite its brashness,” finds Lena Wilson at the Playlist.
World Cinema Documentary Competition
The World Cinema Grand Jury Prize: Documentary presented by jurors Daniela Alatorre, Laura Kim, and Kevin Macdonald went to Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni’s Cutting Through Rocks, a portrait of Sara Shahverdi, the first elected councilwoman in her Iranian village and, as Lauren Wissot describes her at IndieWire, “a woman who’s spent most of her life flouting gender norms and giving the finger to convention. The former midwife is also a vocal advocate for the empowerment of women and girls, which includes access to education and an end to child marriage. And, of course, she’s also an advocate for the right to ride a motorcycle, her greatest passion of all.”
Ukrainian journalist and filmmaker Mstyslav Chernov, who brought 20 Days in Mariupol to Sundance two years ago, won the Directing Award for 2000 Meters to Andriivka, “another full-tilt, you-are-there plunge into the living hell of war, this time from the perspective of Ukrainian soldiers on the frontline,” as Guy Lodge describes it at Variety. “Andriivka is a less tersely journalistic and more pensively devastating work than Mariupol: a film of its moment, and an agonizingly extended moment at that.”
Mr. Nobody Against Putin, a collaboration between director David Borenstein and high-school teacher Pavel “Pasha” Talankin and the winner of a Special Jury Award, exposes “how the Russian school system is being weaponized to promote the war,” writes Stephen Dalton at Film Verdict. This “timely documentary offers a highly personal, emotionally charged insider’s view of how Putin’s ongoing imperial aggression is proving corrosive and divisive on the domestic front.”
A Special Jury Award for Freedom of Expression went to Coexistence, My Ass! Director Amber Fares and writers Rachel Leah Jones and Rabab Haj Yahya have centered what Tomris Laffly at Variety calls an “urgent, eye-opening, and enormously compassionate documentary” on a standup routine by comedian and activist Noam Shuster-Eliassi. “A passionate leftist advocate for equal rights for both Palestinians and Jews, Noam is tracked for the first two thirds of this engaging film as she tries to change hearts and minds through comedy,” writes Leslie Felperin in the Hollywood Reporter. Then October 7 turns everything upside down. “Ultimately,” writes Felperin, the film is “left bereft, like Israel and Palestine themselves, with no easy conclusions or closure.”
Michelle Walshe and Lindsay Utz’s Prime Minister, the winner of the Audience Award, is a “disarming and intimate documentary,” finds Caryn James. During her six years as New Zealand’s leader, Jacinda Ardern “gained worldwide attention and praise for her handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and a shooting at a Christchurch mosque that killed fifty-one people, and she put progressive programs into place, including serious gun control laws . . . Prime Minister’s portrait of Ardern is so persuasive it might make you wish you could vote for her.”
NEXT
Launched in 2010, the NEXT program showcases “bold works distinguished by an innovative, forward-thinking approach to storytelling.” Sole juror Elijah Wood presented this year’s Innovator Award to Charlie Shackleton’s Zodiac Killer Project, which to Jason Bailey “feels like it could become the Walk Hard of true-crime docs.” Shackleton claims that his original intention was to base a miniseries on the 2012 book The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up: The Silenced Badge, in which Lyndon Lafferty purports to reveal the true identity of the notorious serial killer. When the rights slipped away, Shackleton decided to turn his unrealized project into a feature-length presentation.
“The movie isn’t just an extended pitch deck,” writes Slate’s Sam Adams. “As Shackleton narrates the sequences he wishes he could have shot, he illustrates his vision with clips from dozens of movies among the recent wave of true-crime documentaries that have flooded Netflix and HBO, mounting a subtle but sharp critique of the genre’s slick amorality and its increasing laziness.”
Joel Alfonso Vargas’s Mad Bills to Pay (or Destiny, dile que no soy malo) won a NEXT Special Jury Award for Ensemble Cast. Juan Collado plays Rico, a nineteen-year-old who lives with his mother (Yohanna Florentino) and sister (Nathaly Navarro) and has impregnated his sixteen-year-old girlfriend, Destiny (Destiny Checo). Vargas “pulls fantastic, charged performances from his actors, especially Checo, who at first plays Destiny like a kept woman, before revealing the maturity of a girl forced to grow up far quicker than her baby daddy,” writes Robert Daniels at RogerEbert.com.
Tabatha Zimiga, a divorced horse trainer, lives with her teenage daughter and what the Hollywood Reporter’s Sheri Linden calls “their ragtag extended family of blood relations and friends” on a ranch on the outskirts of the tiny town of Wall, South Dakota. They play themselves in Kate Beecroft’s East of Wall, the winner of the Audience Award. “Like the seemingly godforsaken terrain, the movie takes a while to reveal its potent beauty,” writes Linden. “But it signals from the get-go, bolstered by a dynamic selection of kick-ass contemporary tracks (including two by Shaboozey), that this is no old-school West.”
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