What happened at Sundance: Utah films shine, a new director is named, and a fire burns

Now that it’s all over, time for a look back at the events I covered and the stories I wrote for The Salt Lake Tribune and sltrib.com during the 2020 Sundance Film Festival:

• The opening-night film, the documentary “Crip Camp,” gave a group of disabled-rights activists a well-earned moment in the spotlight.

• Pop star Taylor Swift got a standing ovation after the premiere of her eye-opening documentary, “Taylor Swift: Miss Americana.”

• A documentary short, “Church and the Fourth Estate,” examines accusations of sexual abuse levied against Boy Scout leaders linked to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — and how a small-town newspaper was attacked for publishing stories about the charges.

• Hillary Clinton came to Park City for the debut of a four-hour documentary series about her, and she seemed to have a good time seeing movies and speaking her mind.

• Festival organizers issued a “thank you” to the Ute Tribe, acknowledging the ancestral owners of the land on which the festival was happening. The message was seen by everybody, because it played before every single screening.

• Two movies filmed in Utah — “The Killing of Two Lovers” and “Nine Days” — had their world premieres at Sundance, on the same day.

• Here are the short films that won awards.

• Sundance threw a community bonfire on Park City’s Swede Alley, with drummers, a choir, and a whole lot of lighter fluid.

• At Awards Night, the festival’s closing night party, Sundance Institute executive director Keri Putnam made a big announcement: Tabitha Jackson, director of the institute’s Documentary Film Program, will be the new director of the festival.

• Then Awards Night got to the other business of the night: Giving out awards.

• And one more award, after the festival was over: The Festival Favorite award.

Sundance review: 'Shirley' turns a famed author's life into fodder for a compelling mystery

‘Shirley’

★★★1/2

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

No more screenings are scheduled.

——

Director Josephine Decker’s drama “Shirley” is part biographical drama, part murder mystery, part sexually fueled fantasy, and part chronicle of madness — and all of it held together by powerhouse acting, particularly by Elisabeth Moss.

Moss plays Shirley Jackson, the famed author of such macabre stories as “The Lottery” and “The Haunting of Hill House.” In the movie’s telling, it’s the late 1940s in Vermont, and Jackson lives with her husband, the literary critic and scholar Stanley Hyman (Michael Stuhlbarg), who teaches at that hotbed of passion, Bennington College.

In this story, adapted from Susan Scarf Merrell’s 2014 novel, Hyman has just taken on a new assistant, Fred Nemser (Logan Lerman), who is recently married to Rose (Odessa Young). Rose is fascinated with Shirley, though the author’s brusque manner on their first meeting unsettles her — but not as much as Shirley intuiting that Rose is pregnant.

Stanley asks the Nemsers to live with them for awhile, and asks Rose to help out with housekeeping — but, more importantly, keep an eye on Shirley, who hasn’t left the house in weeks and sometimes never gets out of bed. Rose’s interest in Shirley grows deeper, particularly when Shirley starts researching the case of a missing college student and contemplates writing a novel based on the case, even though Stanley thinks the subject matter beneath her talents.

Decker and screenwriter Sarah Gubbins — who explored infatuation with artists by creating the series “I Love Dick” — blur the lines between fact and fantasy, suggesting Shirley as fragile flower and master manipulator, sometimes in the same sentence. Several flashbacks (or are they dream sequences?) take us inside the mind of the missing student, suggesting her desires are the same as Rose’s. The audience is left to question how much of Shirley’s quirks are the product of an unstable mind and how much are calculated to produce good material for her book.

“Shirley” eventually becomes a meeting of the minds between the jaded Shirley and the wide-eyed Rose, and both Moss and Young bring ferocity and vulnerability to the pairing. The result is an intriguing “what if” scenario of American literature.

Sundance review: 'Feels Good Man' chronicles the birth of a toxic meme

‘Feels Good Man’

★★★1/2

Playing in the U.S. Documentary competition of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Running time: 92 minutes.

No more screenings are scheduled.

——

The hijacking of a cartoon character, and the late political awakening of its creator, are explored in director Arthur Jones’ lively documentary “Feels Good Man.”

Matt Furie was your average offbeat San Francisco cartoonist when he created “Boy’s Club,” a comic book about four slacker friends. The wide-eyed innocent of the quartet was a frog called Pepe — a name, Furie admitted years later in a deposition (shown in the film), inspired by how small boys refer to their penises.

Jones details how the character and his catchphrase, “feels good man,” leapt to the internet chat group 4chan, where anonymous users tried to out-offend each other to get clicks. When girls and women started adapting the character, 4chan users took it back, making increasingly misogynistic versions of Pepe. From there, it was a short step to racism, xenophobia and full-blown white supremacism.

The beauty of Pepe, some experts interviewed here note, is that his memes were weaponized irony. Pepe memes could say the most horrific things, but if anyone called the posters on it, they could answer back with, “Chill out, it’s just a joke..”

Furie acknowledges in the film that he was incredibly naive about the whole thing. First he tried to shrug it off. When the Anti-Defamation League listed Pepe as a hate symbol, on par with a swastika or Ku Klux Klan cross, Furie tried to mount a positive retaking of the character, with the #SavePepe hashtag campaign — but the alt-right swatted down that effort easily.

With colorful animation, Jones illustrates how Pepe morphed from Furie’s original intent to a talisman for internet-obsessed losers and a rallying symbol for racists. Jones also interviews a wealth of experts, including an occultist (?!?), to sort out what it all means. Mostly, though, “Feels Good Man” is a revealing profile of Furie, a family man and artist trying to make sense of the firestorm he didn’t even know he was lighting.

Sundance review: 'Us Kids' shows the personal side of the student activism after Parkland

‘Us Kids’

★★★1/2

Playing in the U.S. Documentary competition of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Running time: 98 minutes.

Screens again: Saturday, Feb. 1, 12:30 p.m., The Ray (Park City).

——

Filmmaker Kim A. Snyder, our chronicler of the aftermaths of school shootings, asks an intriguing question in the fast-moving and thoughtful “Us Kids”: How does a revolution based on youth energy maintain itself when the youths get older and the cynical world moves on?

Snyder, whose “Newtown” (SFF ’16) encapsulated the unfathomable grief of parents whose young children were killed in the Sandy Hook shooting, this time profiles the students who survived the 2018 mass shooting that killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. And while grief and depression are important emotions for these kids, the overriding one is the anger that many of the survivors channeled into action.

Snyder compiles footage of some of the teens who became famous — like Emma Gonzalex, David Hogg and Cameron Kasky — for speaking out, then organizing the March for Our Lives in Washington, D.C., and other cities across America less than six weeks after the shooting. 

Those kids went even further, going on a nationwide tour to encourage young people to register to vote, and to vote against politicians in the thrall of National Rifle Association donations. (Utah viewers will note that the tour stopped in Salt Lake City, targeting Rep. Mia Love. — and that the youth vote in Utah went up 200 percent in 2018 compared to 2014.)

Snyder captures moments on the tour that might have gone unnoticed, like how Hogg and Gonzalez in some cities tried to engage with the pro-gun counter protesters who showed up at some stops. The film also talks to Kasky about the emotional strain that caused him to snap along the way.

Intercut with the tour, Snyder follows another Parkland survivor on a more solitary journey. Sam Fuentes was shot in both legs, and still has shrapnel scars on her face. She talks less about that than about watching a classmate, Nicholas Dworet, die in front of her.

Fuentes became instantly famous at the March for Our Lives (which happened on Dworet’s birthday, by the way), when she threw up in the middle of her speech. Snyder lets Fuentes explain why: She was terrified that she would be killed while standing on that stage.

“Us Kids” melds the personal with the political in the most moving ways possible. The juxtaposition of Fuentes’ story with that of the more famous Parkland kids, along with Kasky’s candid comments, are stirring reminder that there’s no rule book to trauma. Each survivor processes their grief their own way, whether it’s art or activism or smashing stuff. It’s up to us non-kids to listen.

Sundance review: 'Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets' puts real people in an unreal bar

‘Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets’

★★★

Playing in the U.S. Documentary competition of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Running time: 89 minutes.

Screens again: Saturday, Feb. 1, noon, Resort (Sundance).

——

Blurring a line that its subjects are too drunk to walk, Bill and Turner Ross’ “Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets” looks at a group of barflies in a Las Vegas watering hole that is fascinating to watch — especially if you don’t think about how much of it is fictional.

The festival’s film guide doesn’t reveal much about the movie, other than to say “it’s last call for a beloved dive bar known as the Roaring 20s,” and that it chronicles “real people in an unreal situation facing an uncertain future: America at the end of 2016.” And if moviegoers hadn’t read the Los Angeles Times article about the movie earlier this week, that’s all they might have known.

The Turner brothers, known for such verité documentaries as “Western” (SFF ’15), make no bones about the fact that aspects of the movie are fabricated. The brothers cast 22 non-actors — people they found at other bars — and put them together for a day and night in a bar they rented in Las Vegas. And just before they started shooting, they told the 22 people to pretend that the bar was closing at the end of the night.

Whether that fits your definition of a documentary is your call to make. Certainly the people are real, as are their interactions, even if the setting is not.

There are some scenes in which the experiment works, where the Rosses, as the only people operating cameras in the bar, capture little moments of honest connection. The most interesting person in the bar is Michael, an actor and self-confessed alcoholic, though he says, “I take it as a point of pride that I didn’t become an alcoholic until I was already a failure.” Toward the end, Michael has a heart-to-heart with a young patron, Zack, warning him not to wind up like he did.

Others filter in and out of the bar, including a philosophical Vietnam veteran, a drag queen, an Australian with a mysterious brown paper bag, and a hothead in a sports coat. The day bartender, Michael, plays guitar and sings Roy Orbison. The night bartender, Shay, has a teen son who hangs out in the alley behind the bar with his friends, smoking pot.

Even if you don’t know about the fiction of how this came to be, sometimes the moments seem too on-the-nose. The characters have matched up a bit too perfectly, the emotions just a bit too accessible. Mostly, though, “Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets” feels like spending a night with some drunks in a bar — and it’s up to the individual moviegoer how much of that one will tolerate.

Sundance review: 'The Cost of Silence' builds up rage against an environmental cover-up

‘The Cost of Silence’

★★★1/2

Playing in the U.S. Documentary competition of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Running time: 84 minutes.

Screens again: Friday, Jan. 31, 9 a.m., Holiday Village 2 (Park City); Saturday, Feb. 1, 3 p.m., Tower (Salt Lake City).

——

If one wishes to get righteously angry, to rail against the mendacity of a major corporation and the complicity of the U.S. government, look no further than “The Code of Silence,” a riveting mix of investigative journalism and heartbreaking testimony about a public-health nightmare.

It starts with the Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010, when 11 people were killed and millions of gallons of oil spewed into the Gulf of Mexico from a busted undersea oil well. But fears of crude oil washing up on the shores of Gulf Coast beaches — where millions of tourists visit every year — never materialized, and the oil company BP (which ran Deepwater Horizon) and the relevant government agencies said everything would be all right.

People living in the small towns along the Gulf Coast soon discovered that everything was not all right. Kids were getting nosebleeds, adults were getting rashes and hair falling out, and other symptoms. The suspected culprit — more than suspected to scientists who didn’t hew to BP-supported studies — was a chemical dispersant, Corexit, that was sprayed from the air onto the spills to break up the oil.

But when oil is dispersed, it’s still there in aerosol form, getting breathed in and leading to all manner of illnesses. Getting BP or any of the relevant federal agencies to acknowledge that has been a nightmare.

The pressure by BP shows up in ways gross and subtle. People agitating for a solution sometimes get threatened, or their property damaged. Doctors are discouraged from diagnosing chemical exposure, because insurance companies will tie them up with paperwork because there aren’t enough studies backing such a diagnosis.

The Goliath in this scenario is mostly invisible; bosses from neither the company that makes the dispersants nor BP nor federal agencies agreed to be interviewed for the movie. But director Mark Manning has a lot of Davids to talk to, parents turned activists who have gotten fed up and are taking action.

Manning is on a timetable, too. President Donald Trump proposed in 2017 to lift many restrictions on oil drilling off every coastline in America, but decided to delay a full plan until after the 2020 elections. So even when “The Cost of Silence” is at its most pessimistic, it does offer a simple solution: Vote. 

Sundance review: 'Mucho Mucho Amor' a fond, fun tribute to larger-than-life astrologer Walter Mercado

‘Mucho Mucho Amor’

★★★1/2

Playing in the U.S. Documentary competition of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Running time: 96 minutes. (Playing with a 7-minute short, “The Shawl.”)

Screens again: Friday, Jan. 31, 12:30 p.m., The Ray (Park City).

——

If you never heard of Walter Mercado, the documentary “Mucho Mucho Amor” is a delightful corrective — and those who grew up on Mercado’s flamboyantly presented TV horoscopes, the film is a fond look back at an icon for millions in the United States and all points south.

The hardest thing directors Cristina Constantin and Kareem Tabsch have to do here is explain to the uninformed who Mercado was. (He died on Nov. 2, the day after the filmmakers submitted the film to Sundance.) He had the swagger of Elvis, the wardrobe of Liberace, the accepting manner of Mr. Rogers, and the television ubiquity of Ryan Seacrest. He was an astrologer who read horoscopes on the air — and many of the fans interviewed, including Lin-Manuel Miranda and comedian Eugenio Derbez, describe how their abuelitas would tell them to be quiet until Mercado read their star signs.

Born in rural Puerto Rico n 1932, Mercado was protected by his mother, who believed he could heal people by touch. He went to San Juan to study dance, and became an actor in telenovelas. When a variety show producer had someone drop out, he put Mercado on camera to read horoscopes. The switchboards at the station lit up, and a caped-and-sequined star was born.

Mercado’s fame lasted for decades, but it’s hard to fathom how a pompadour-sporting man in extravagant costumes could flourish in a conservative, Catholic place like Puerto Rico. Many credit Mercado’s life-affirming spirit, evident in the video clips of his many TV appearances, for winning over hearts and minds in the Spanish-speaking parts of the Americas.

There were hardships, though — many of them caused by the contract Mercado signed with producer Bill Bakula, the man who took Mercado’s career into the American mainstream. The contract gave Bakula’s company rights to use Mercado’s name and likeness in perpetuity. Bakula is interviewed in the film, and he expresses no regrets.

“Mucho Mucho Amor” covers those down periods, but even then the film is celebratory because Mercado would have it no other way. His personality, even as ill health troubled him in his final years, cannot be contained.

Sundance review: Documentary 'Time' shows the toll imprisonment puts on a family

‘Time’

★★★

Playing in the U.S. Documentary competition of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Running time: 81 minutes. (Playing with the 6-minute short “See You Next Time.”)

Screens again: Saturday, noon, Temple (Park City).

——

It’s important to understand going into “Time” that director Garrett Bradley does not deliver what one might expect from a documentary that begins with a crime and a trial.

Those elements are mentioned, but not with the just-the-facts approach that hours of true-crime reality TV has trained us to crave. Bradley has a different plan in mind: To show the effect that long-term incarceration has on a family.

When Sybil Fox married Robert Richardson, they dreamed of having children and being successful in business in Shreveport, La. What happened instead is they were involved in an attempted 1997 bank robbery, which landed both of them in prison. Fox Rich (as she’s known) took a plea deal, did a short stretch, got out to raise their sons and reinvent herself as a saleswoman and advocate against unjust incarceration.

A prime example that Rich cites in her motivational talks is her husband’s case. Robert was sentenced to 60 years at Louisiana’s notorious state penitentiary, known commonly as Angola — a former plantation that, Fox Rich argues, is the ground zero for a new system for legalized slave labor.

Bradley follows Fox Rich as she makes the case for Robert’s release to any audience who will listen. But what’s more touching is the footage — both contemporary and from video journals Fox Rich recorded for more than 20 years — that captures the couple’s six sons growing up strong and proud, without their father being around. 

Watching these kids through the years is far more compelling than the usual true-crime fare. “Time” is a reminder that the crime may be the start of the story, but it’s not the whole story.

Sundance review: 'The Fight' turns the ACLU's legal battles against the Trump administration into pulse-pounding drama

’The Fight’

★★★1/2

Playing in the U.S. Documentary competition of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Screens again: Friday, Jan. 31, noon, Resort (Sundance); Saturday, Feb. 1, 2:30 p.m., Prospector (Park City).

——

Watching “The Fight” gave me a brainstorm that any TV producer can have for free: How about a weekly drama series taken from the files of the American Civil Liberties Union. the way Jack Webb cribbed Los Angeles Police reports for “Dragnet”? The drama that comes from saving the Constitution would be spectacular.

The directing team of Elyse Steinberg, Josh Kriegman and Eli Despres — the folks who made the 2016 Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner “Weiner” — get into the New York headquarters of the ACLU, and follow four of the 147 (and counting) lawsuits the group has filed against the Trump administration since 2017.

In one case, a pregnant teen migrant girl in a federal detention center seeks an abortion, which is being denied by the federal government. In another case, lawyers are trying to stop the separation of migrant children from their parents at the border, and get those that have been separated reunited. In a third, lawyers fight a ban on transgender people serving in the military. And in the fourth, a battle against putting a citizenship question into the 2020 census goes all the way to the Supreme Court.

As these attorneys meet the people who are plaintiffs in these cases, the movie provides a look at the real lives being destroyed by policies that are not just constitutionally questionable but cruel and capricious. By following the lawyers arguing these cases, from the hotel rooms where they practice their arguments to trains on which they commute, the filmmakers turn the dusty legal briefs into compelling human drama. 

Sundance review: In tender drama 'Farewell Amor,' an immigrant has a strained family reunion

‘Farewell Amor’

★★★

Playing in the U.S. Dramatic competition of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Running time: 96 minutes.

Screens again: Thursday, Jan. 30, 6 p.m., Resort (Sundance); Saturday, Feb. 1, 9 a.m., PC Library (Park City).

——

The American dream is not without its pitfalls, such as those endured by the Angolan family at the center of writer-director Ekwa Msangi’s warm-hearted drama “Farewell Amor.”

Walter (Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine) is picking up his wife, Esther (Zainab Jah), and their teen daughter Sylvia (Jayme Lawson) at JFK. Walter has not seen his family in 17 years, which means Sylvia doesn’t really know him, since she was a baby when they were last together.

Walter and Esther also have changed in the intervening years. Esther has become a devout Christian, putting pictures of Jesus up around their tiny apartment. Walter is dealing with another change in the apartment: That Linda (Nana Mensah), who was Walter’s girlfriend for the last few years, is no longer living there.

While Esther tries to do right by Walter, as the Bible commands her, she also is being biblically strict with Sylvia. On the other hand, Sylvia wants to explore this new American culture — specifically, she wants to compete in a dance-battle competition that a charming classmate, DJ (Marcus Scribner), has encouraged her to enter.

Deploying a three-pronged script structure — first from Walter’s viewpoint, then Sylvia’s, then Esther’s — Msangi lets surprises unfold organically, letting us get to know these people just as they are learning about each other. The three leads give lived-in performances, strengthening the notion that this is really a family in spite of their hardships.