Sundance review: 'Crip Camp' is a warm, insistent telling of how kids became activists

‘Crip Camp’

★★★1/2

Playing in the U.S. Documentary competition of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Running time: 107 minutes.

Screens again: Friday, Jan. 24, 8:30 a.m., The MARC (Park City; Friday, Jan. 24, 6 p.m., The Grand (Salt Lake City); Saturday, Jan. 25, 9 p.m. Resort (Sundance); Wednesday, Jan. 29, 6 p.m., PC Library (Park City); Thursday, Jan. 30, 9:30 p.m., Redstone 1 (Park City).

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At once nostalgically celebratory and politically urgent, the documentary “Crip Camp” is a beautiful example of how a small act can have huge consequences.

Directors Nicole Newnham and Jim LeBrecht start with what LeBrecht did in 1971, when he was 15 years old: He went to summer camp in New York’s Catskills. What made this remarkable is that LeBrecht was born with spina bifida, could not (and cannot) use his legs, and the camp, Camp Jened, was one of the first such facilities to cater to children with disabilities.

For LeBrecht, and many other campers, Camp Jened was a place where the kids could be kids — and hang out with other kids like them, a welcome relief from the isolation that being disabled often meant in an era when schools and businesses were unwelcoming to the disabled.

For a good 40 minutes, the movie shows us the joy these kids had going to camp. Then the story pivots, to show how summers at Camp Jened changed these kids’ worlds — and the world as a whole.

Many of the camp’s alumni left New York for the San Francisco Bay area, encouraged by one of the first adopters, Judy Heumann, a camp counselor who became an activist for the rights of the disabled. Heumann saw it as a civil rights movement, and borrowed language used from the likes of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

In 1973, activists got language into federal law to ban the federal government from discriminating against the disabled — but the law languished, with no enforced regulations to give it teeth. Four years later, a protest organized by Heumann and others led to the occupation of the San Francisco branch office of the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare. The activists’ demand was for President Jimmy Carter’s HEW secretary, Joseph Califano, to enact meaningful regulation to uphold the law.

Through warm-hearted interviews and a wealth of archival footage — the camp’s operators, being a bunch of hippies, filmed everything — that Newnham and LeBrecht thoughtfully and lovingly stitch together into a heartfelt, insistent tale that should inspire anyone to fight the good fight.

Sundance review: 'The Painter and the Thief' is a fascinating documentary with more twists than a thriller

‘The Painter and the Thief’

★★★1/2

Playing in the World Cinema Dramatic competition of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Running time: 102 minutes.

Screens again: Friday, Jan. 24, 8:30 a.m., Egyptian (Park City); Friday, Jan. 24, 6 p.m., Resort (Sundance); Saturday, Jan. 25, 6 p.m., Tower (Salt Lake City); Thursday, Jan. 30, 6 p.m., Temple (Park City); Friday, Jan. 31, 3 p.m., Redstone 7 (Park City).

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An artist never knows the form a muse will take or where that muse will take the artist — as the documentary “The Painter and the Thief” demonstrates through its fascinating twists and turns.

The story begins with Barbora Kysilkova, a Czech-born painter living in Oslo, Norway. Known for her large naturalist paintings, she had a major exhibition at an Oslo gallery in 2015, when two men broke into the gallery and stole two large canvases off their wooden supporting frames.

One thief, Karl-Bertil Nordlund, was caught quickly, but he couldn’t remember — because of the haze of his heroin addiction — where the paintings wound up. In court, Kysilkova approached Nordlund with an odd request: She wanted him to model for her. Nordlund agreed, and the rest of director Benjamin Ree’s film follows the progression of that artist/model relationship.

Through this story, which has plot twists too outlandish for a fictional film, Ree explores the give and take between artist and subject, and the weight of responsibility for a remorseful criminal and a forgiving victim. Rees presents both sides of the story fairly equally, with Kysilkova’s story and Nordlund’s dovetailing in unexpected ways all the way to a surprising final shot.

Here's what you need to know before the 2020 Sundance Film Festival starts on Thursday

The days are counting down to the start of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, set for Thursday evening, Jan. 23. And the questions mount: Where to park? Who’s going to be there? What’s worth seeing?

The answer to the last question remains a mystery, since we won’t know what movies are worth seeing until we see them. As for the rest, let your trusty Sundance sherpa, yours truly, be of some assistance.

In the pages of Sunday’s Salt Lake Tribune — and online at sltrib.com — are printed my stories in advance of the festival. They are:

• A profile of John Cooper, the festival’s director since 2010, who is retiring after this year’s event.

• A preview of the opening-night film at this year’s Slamdance Film Festival, “Film About a Father Who,” a three-decades-in-the-making about former Park City developer Ira Sachs, directed by her daughter.

• A guide of helpful tricks for navigating Sundance, particularly in Park City — parking, concessions, how to behave in a crowd, and how to deal with the overwhelming sense of FOMO the festival imbues in attendees.

• A handy list of 50 celebrities, from Christopher Abbott to Barry Zito, who are expected to appear in Park City during the festival.

• Also, from earlier in the week, announcements of Sundance’s offscreen events and the members of the juries that will decide which movies win prizes.

• And, because it bears repeating, here is the original slate of films playing at Sundance (with embedded trailers for some of them). Here are the special events, Indie Episodic, and shorts programs, and here is the roster of the New Frontier program.

Tensions between Iran and U.S. prompt a filmmaker to cancel his trip to Sundance

One of the more intriguing titles set to debut at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival is “Yalda: A Night of Forgiveness,” one of the few films from Iran to ever play in Park City.

Now, with rising tensions between Iran and the United States, the movie’s director, Mahsood Bakhshi, has announced he won’t be coming to the festival. Sundance organizers, though, say the movie will still screen.

Read more about it here, at sltrib.com.

Some movie writers are scrambling to raise money for Sundance, after being turned down for Press Inclusion Initiative travel stipends

Movie journalists who cover the Sundance Film Festival have noticed over the past few years that the other writers in their midst are becoming a more diverse group.

Some of that is by design, thanks to Sundance Institute’s Press Inclusion Initiative, which offered 51 travel stipends to journalists, freelancers and critics from underrepresented groups: Women, people of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community, and people with disabilities. And they recently informed 51 journalists that they would get stipends this year.

Here’s the problem: More people applied for the stipends this year — 317, to be precise. Those who didn’t get the stipends are now working furiously to raise money to make the trip to Park City. Here’s my article, on sltrib.com, about how it all happened.

Sundance and Slamdance make additions to 2020 line-ups

This week, both the Sundance Film Festival and the rival Slamdance Film Festival made some late additions to their 2020 line-ups:

• Sundance added “The Social Dilemma,” an inside look at how social media manipulates its users, to the Documentary Premieres section. It also added two “From the Collection” classics: Lisa Cholodenko’s groundbreaking lesbian drama “High Art” and the 2004 documentary “Born Into Brothels,” about Calcutta street kids.

• Slamdance announced its opening-night film will be Lynne Sachs’ documentary “Film About a Father Who,” a 35-years-in-the-making portrait of her father, Park City millionaire Ira Sachs Sr. Slamdance also announced its 81 short films, and some other features.

Technology is 'always changing,' and Sundance's New Frontier is 'throwing a lasso' to catch it all

Beyond the regular moviegoing experience — sitting in a theater and watch images projected on a screen — is the world of virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality and artificial intelligence.

It’s a world the programmers at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival’s New Frontier program aim to capture for 10 days, to showcase what’s going on at the intersection of art and technology.

Here, at sltrib.com, is the line-up for New Frontier, and some comments from chief curator Shari Frilot about what it takes to put it together.

Hillary Clinton and Lin-Manuel Miranda are big names on 2020 Sundance Film Festival's Special Events line-up

You may remember that Hillary Clinton, as she accepted the Democratic party’s nomination to be their presidential candidate in 2016, quoted Lin-Manuel Miranda’s lines from the end of “Hamilton.”

Fate, or the schedulers at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, is working to bring the politician and the playwright together again — at least on the festival’s Special Events roster.

“Hillary,” a four-part documentary series directed by Nanette Burstein, is a highlight of the Special Events line-up. So are two works that involve Miranda: “Siempre, Luis,” which focuses on Miranda’s father, Luis, in his advocacy for Puerto Rico; and “We Are Freestyle Love Supreme,” about the New York improv hip-hop group Miranda co-founded.

Along with the Special Events announcement Tuesday, Sundance also announced the festival’s Indie Episodic titles and the 74 short films slated to screen in January in Park City. Read all about them, at sltrib.com.

From the Bonneville desert to Kanosh, Utah provides the foreboding settings for two Sundance 2020 entries

Two filmmakers — one locally grown, the other a Californian by way of Brazil — decided Utah could provide the bleak landscapes they needed for their films, both which will have their world premieres at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.

For Edson Oda, the Bonneville Salt Flats were the right setting for “Nine Days,” a drama set in a parallel reality where an interviewer (Winston Duke) must decide which soul (embodied by Zazie Beets, Bill Skarsgard and Benedict Wong, among others) gets the chance to be born. For Robert Machoian, finding a backdrop for a marriage on the rocks in “The Killing of Two Lovers” took the crew to remote Kanosh.

I talked to both filmmakers about their road to Sundance, a journey that took each through Utah. Read it at sltrib.com.

Slamdance Film Festival has 20 films in competition, and is bringing back its 'Breakout' program for its second year

The Slamdance Film Festival is like Sundance’s scrappy kid brother, not as big but still tough, and determined to do more with less.

That’s one of the criteria for its movies: Nothing with a budget over $1 million. So its films may not draw the stars, but they have the same fiery indie spirit.

Here is the list of the 20 films in competition at Slamdance, Jan. 24-30 at Park City’s Treasure Mountain Inn. Read it at sltrib.com.