Sundance 2022, in person and online, is still happening

It only seems like a minute go we finished up the 2021 Sundance Film Festival — and now we’re preparing for the 2022 edition.

Tabitha Jackson, the festival’s director, let people know in advance about rule for 2022: Everyone attending would have to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19. In October, Sundance reiterated that rule, and other health and safety requirements. And, just before Christmas, Sundance announced an important clarification: That being “fully vaccinated” meant getting a booster shot, if eligible.

In December, Sundance announced its slate of 82 feature-length films that will screen at the 2022 festival — both in theaters in Park City, Salt Lake City and the Sundance Mountain Resort, and on the festival’s online portal. It also announced that it would show New Frontier installation works both in Park City — in a space called The Craft — and online, in a virtual space called The Spaceship.

One notable thing about Sundance’s Park City footprint: It will be smaller. Three traditional venues — the MARC, in the Park City racquet club; the Park Avenue, in the hotel formerly known as The Yarrow; and the Temple Theatre, in the Temple Har Shalom synagogue — will not be used this year. (In Salt Lake City, the Tower Theatre is out of commission, as it’s in the midst of renovations.)

By the way, Utah residents will get special deals for ticket packages, and some free screenings.

The Slamdance Film Festival announced its slate, as well. And, just before Christmas, Slamdance announced it would abandon its plans to return this year to Park City’s Treasure Mountain Inn, and conduct its festival as an online-only event for the second year in a row.

Wrapping it up: Back-to-school documentaries, meeting an ex-missionary, and weighing the award winners

It was a weird week, but in the end, the 2021 Sundance Film Festival came as close to being a real film festival as one could experience while staying at home.

I saw a lot of movies — 26 in all, more than a third of the 73 features in the festival’s slate — and listened to a good many live Q&A sessions. I sat in on a panel discussion, and I attended the awards night ceremony and the party after.

The only difference is that the party was accessible via a VR headset, and I had to buy my own alcohol. (In the spirit of the proceedings, I tried one of the festival sponsors — and had my first-ever can of White Claw.)

Here’s are the stories I wrote for The Salt Lake Tribune during the festival:

• I talked to Gregory Barnes about how he channeled his experiences as a missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints into his short film “The Touch of the Master’s Hand.” (The short won the Jury Prize for U.S. Fiction.)

• Three looks inside American high schools were in the U.S. Documentary competition — each from fascinating and unique perspectives.

• Festival organizers greeted their online audience with music, a roll call of “satellite screens” from around the country, and the words of Sundance’s founder, Robert Redford.

• The big winners on Awards Night included the deaf-family comedy-drama “CODA” and the concert documentary “Summer of Soul (… Or When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised).”

• I picked some of my award winners, for categories the Sundance juries never thought of.

• Sundance boasted that it had more viewings of its 2021 screenings than ticket buyers at its 2020 festival. (Sundance estimated that the number was almost three times the previous year’s figures, because of a multiplier — an estimate that for every “viewing,” about two people were actually watching. Since that was an estimate, I didn’t include it in my story. The figures were impressive enough without it.)

• And let’s not forget the Slamdance Film Festival, which ran online in February instead of alongside Sundance in Park City. Here’s a list of its award winners.

Sundance review: 'Users' is a stunning visual poem that reminds us of what humans have done to the planet

‘Users’

★★★1/2

Appearing in the U.S. Documentary competition of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. Can be streamed through the festival digital portal on Wednesday, February 3. Running time: 82 minutes.

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Natalia Almada’s visual poem of a documentary, “Users,” would have been a perfect movie to watch with a Park City audience during the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. 

Some people would have walked out, bored. Those who stayed would have had to chance to hear Almada in the Q&A, explaining herself. Then we could have gone to a bar and talked about this beautiful, borderline inscrutable movie for hours.

In a voiceover, Almada considers the past and future of being a mother. “In the past, people could not choose the gender fo their children. We didn’t know until it was born,” she says. Compare that to today, and watching Almada’s baby being rocked gently by a mechanical device. “It did it right every time. It was a perfect mother, and it was everywhere,” she says.

Almada — assisted by sound designer Dave Cerf (her husband) and cinematographer Bennett Cerf (her brother-in-law) — presents breathtaking images and audio of wastewater treatment centers, recycling centers, California wildfires, hydroponic farms, oil wells, heart surgery, and other assorted images. One can read into the juxtaposition of these images with footage of children glued to screens that Almada wants to chronicle the ways hers and previous generations are trashing the planet before their children can enjoy it.

“I wonder if my children will grow up in a world covered in solar panels,” she says at one point, “their food grown without sunlight or soil.”

Almada’s fascination with the mechanics of industrialization call to mind Jennifer Baichwal’s classic “Manufactured Landscapes,” but the message seems more urgent now. The planet is at a breaking point, Almada suggests, and her kids are in the generation that will pay the price.

Sundance review: 'All Light, Everywhere' is a deep intellectual dive into what we see, and how we see, in our surveillance society

‘All Light, Everywhere’

★★★1/2

Appearing in the U.S. Documentary competition of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. Running time: 105 minutes.

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Director Theo Anthony considers what we we look at and look with, and the biases inherent in both, in “All Light, Everywhere,” a documentary that’s literally eye-opening.

The film’s unseen narrator (voiced by Keaver Brenai) begins with the observation that the optic nerve — the spot where the signals go from the eye to the brain — is a blind spot in our retina, and that our brains fill in the gaps. Much of what we view, and the technology we use to do that, work in much the same way, Anthony argues.

As a case example, Anthony visits Axon Enterprise Inc., the Scottsdale, Ariz., company that holds 85% of the market share for body cameras sold to law enforcement across the United States. (The company used to be called Taser International, and they make those, too.) A genial company PR guy shows Anthony’s cameras around the plant, and explains how the cameras work and details the features that make them popular with cops nationwide — like how they don’t us infrared or other parts of the spectrum past what a human eye can see, so such footage doesn’t end up in front of a jury.

We also meet Ross McNutt, whose company Persistent Surveillance Systems uses aerial surveillance to create what McNutt alls “Google Earth in real time.” The company ran its surveillance system for the Baltimore Police from May to August 2016, a program unknown even to the city’s mayor. The program was discontinued when word got out; there’s an extended scene of McNutt going to a community meeting in one of Baltimore’s predominantly Black neighborhoods to lobby to restart the program, and he gets an earful.

One thread of Anthony’s narrative is that such programs, and the arguments about their fairness, are not new. Paris police were taking pictures of criminals they arrested as far back as the 1840s — but they didn’t have the photos organized until Alphonse Bertillon, a police officer and biometrics researcher, put the photos on file cards with other measurements to create the first criminal data file.

But every system, even those that use technology to remove the human factor, has its biases, Anthony notes. Police body cameras don’t really show what the officer is doing, as they’re advertised, because the camera points away from the officer — making the officer’s body the blind spot.

Anthony deconstructs the documentary form as he constructs his arguments, creating a film that’s as intellectually challenging as it is visually striking. It’s also a lot to digest, and may be the only Sundance documentary I’ve ever seen that included a bibliography in the credits. “All Light, Everywhere” is a movie that will make you think, and think twice, about what’s really being watched in our surveillance-heavy society.

Sundance review: 'The World to Come' is a quietly moving 19th century romance in which the small gestures carry much weight

‘The World to Come’

★★★1/2

Appearing in the Spotlight section of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. Can be streamed through the festival digital portal on Wednesday, February 3. Running time: 98 minutes.

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Passion runs hot in the cold of 19th century New York state in “The World to Come,” a slow-burn romantic drama where the details are everything.

It’s 1856, and a couple, Abigail (Katherine Waterston) and Dyer (Casey Affleck) are scratching out an existence on their small farm. Abigail writes in her journal about her loneliness, and her concerns for Dyer’s mental state: “He told me contentment was a friend that he never gets to see.” Abigail is also mourning the death of her daughter, from whooping cough, and worried that she will never have another child.

Abigail’s spirit is lightened when a new couple arrives nearby, Finney (Christopher Abbott) and Tallie (Vanessa Kirby). Tallie becomes a fast friend, who invites herself over to see Abigail when Finney is doing the disgusting business of slaughtering a pig. Soon Tallie is a regular visitor, and Abigail is beside herself in those spaces when Tallie is not there.

Director Mona Fastvold (“The Sleepwalker,” SFF ’14) builds unbearable tension in the unspoken thoughts Abigail directs toward Tallie and the slight glances Tallie returns in Abigail’s direction. Eventually that tension must break, with life-shattering consequences for all concerned.

Fastvold, working off a script by Ron Hansen and Jim Shepard, steeps this story in the authentic details of the two couples’ farm lives, until one can almost smell the pigpen and feel the pressing of pen to paper in Abigail’s fervent writing.

Affleck’s quiet menace isn’t as flashy as Abbott’s pious browbeating of Tallie, but both men embody the unspoken oppression their wives endure. Kirby, so powerful in “Pieces of a Woman,” matches that performance with a strong turn as a woman willing to unleash the passion she’s feeling. Waterston carries the movie’s weight, as narrator and the vulnerable, yet forceful, woman who imagines a better world than the one in which she must survive. This quartet comes together to make “The World to Come” a quietly heartbreaking drama.

Sundance review: 'Cusp' follows three Texas teens through a summer of heartbreak, pain and sisterhood

‘Cusp’

★★★1/2

Appearing in the U.S. Documentary competition of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. Running time: 83 minutes.

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The painfully observant documentary “Cusp” is every parent’s nightmare: A no-punches-pulled look at three teen-age girls during a lazy summer in a rural Texas town, left to their own devices and dealing with their own problems.

The film follows three teens: Brittney, Autumn and Aaloni, who each have their particular problems. Autumn has just broken up with a boy, Dustin, to whom she reluctantly gave up her virginity. Brittney, 15, has had too many boys — technically adults — come on to her, but her red flags fly out the window when she starts going out with an older boy. And Aaloni is dealing with her dad, a military man who thinks he’s the king of his castle and everyone else should be subservient to him.

In a carefree verité style, directors and cinematographers Parker Hill and Isabel Bethencourt don’t ask intrusive questions and they don’t overtly take sides. They follow these three girls to days at the beach and nights by the bonfire, in a summer where a tank top and jean shorts are the standard uniform and beer and pot the most accessible ways to pass the time and deaden the pain of childhood sexual assault, parental inattentiveness, obnoxious boys and their dead-end town.

I won’t divulge many plot details, mostly because it’s too complex and elusive to call the events shaped by Hill’s editing a plot in the traditional sense. “Cusp” is really a hangout movie, where you observe along with the filmmakers the ways these girls rely on each other because there’s nothing and no one else they can count on.

Sundance review: 'Wild Indian' is an absorbing story of cousins, on and off the reservation, and the tragedy that unites them

‘Wild Indian’

★★★

Appearing in the U.S. Dramatic competition of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. Running time: 87 minutes.

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The psychological thriller “Wild Indian” is an engrossing look at two men’s lives, diverged since a shared moment in their boyhood.

On the Anishinaabe reservation in Wisconsin in the late ‘80s, Makwa (Phoenix Wilson) and Ted-O (Julian Gopal) are cousins, about middle-school age. Makwa has had a rough life, beaten by his father and belittled by his mother, who are constantly fighting each other. To escape, he goes over to Ted-O’s house, where they practice target shooting with Ted-O’s father’s rifle. One day, something horrible happens involving that rifle.

The movie then skips ahead to 2019, some 30-plus years later. Makwa, now Michael (Michael Greyeyes) , lives in the Bay Area, a successful businessman with a beautiful house, an even more beautiful wife, Greta (Kate Bosworth), and a baby boy, Francis. His work buddy (Jesse Eisenberg) is sure Michael will get the promotion for which he’s angling.

Ted-O (Chaske Spencer) is just getting paroled after a 10-year sentence for drug trafficking. He lands with his sister, Cammy (Lisa Cromarty) and her 5-year-old boy. Seemingly on impulse, he gets a pickup truck and starts driving to the Bay Area, for a long-delayed and much-dreaded reunion with his cousin.

Director-writer Lyle Mitchell Corbine Jr. creates a spare storyline that serves as a clothesline onto which he hangs his observations about modern Native Americans, those who stay on the reservation and those who flee from it. The key are the performances, particularly from Greyeyes, who practically vibrates from the internal stresses of keeping his cool facade from cracking.

Sundance review: 'Life in a Day 2020' shows us the world during the pandemic, and so much more

‘Life in a Day 2020’

★★★

Appearing in the Special Screenings section of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. Can be streamed through the festival digital portal on Wednesday, February 3. Running time: 87 minutes.

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I know, I know, the last thing any of us want to do is relive a single day of 2020 — but it’s worth making an exception to watch “Life in a Day 2020,” a fascinating lap around the Earth that captures so much of what makes humans wonderful.

The premise is both simple and daunting. The project, sponsored by YouTube, asks people from all over to submit video of what they were doing on one day — July 25, 2020. Some 392,000 people in 192 countries did, and director Kevin Macdonald (“The Last King of Scotland”) and his team dug through them to find 90 minutes of material to tell a universal story.

Macdonald did this same trick with YouTube 10 years ago, for the first “Life in a Day” project, which also premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Macdonald said he might want to take it up again in 2030, in a series in the tradition of Michael Apted’s “Up” documentaries.

So what happens in a day? Some babies are born, some people are given funerals, some people graduate from school and get married. Some go out into nature, while others stay indoors. Actually, more of them stay indoors, because we’re all in the middle of a global pandemic.

COVID-19 is a major player in “Life in a Day 2020,” because there’s no way it couldn’t be. We see sanitation workers in China wiping down every surface in sight. We see a montage of Zoom calls. We hear from a mom whose son, featured in the first “Life in a Day” 10 years ago, died from COVID-19 earlier last year.

There’s a moment where a little boy from somewhere in America complains that “COVID ruined everything” because he had to cancel a trip to Six Flags and a sleepover with his friend Cole. We can all feel for this kid, because that’s us in 2020.

But there’s another moment when a Kansas City woman comes back to the car from a doctor’s appointment. She tells her husband that the test came back negative, and she starts crying. It’s then that we realize it wasn’t a COVID test, but a pregnancy test — and that this couple has been trying very hard to have a baby. It’s a poignant example of the message of “Life in a Day 2020,” that for all our hardships, life goes on.

Sundance review: 'Judas and the Black Messiah' is a dynamic history lesson, focusing on a Black Panther leader and the man who betrayed him for the FBI

‘Judas and the Black Messiah’

★★★★

Appearing in the Premieres program of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. Can be streamed through the festival digital portal on Wednesday, February 3. Opens in theaters nationwide and streams on HBO Max starting Friday, February 12. Rated R for violence and pervasive language. Running time: 126 minutes.

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History may be written by the winners, but movies about historical events — like the incendiary drama “Judas and the Black Messiah” — are an indication that the battle for hearts and minds is never over.

Director Shaka King takes a passage from recent history, chronicling a span from 1968 to 1969, recounting the career and assassination of Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya), chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party. It’s also, as the title suggests, a morality play, with a party member, William O’Neal (LaKeith Stanfield), turned by the FBI into Hampton’s betrayer.

As with Jesus, the title “black Messiah” isn’t one Hampton chose — it’s only used by the one undeniable villain in the piece, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover (Martin Sheen). So-called radicals like the Black Panthers — who practiced socialism and community building, as well as keeping plenty of firearms at the ready — were, in Hoover’s view, the biggest threat to (white) America’s way of life.

An ambitious young FBI agent, Roy Mitchell (Jesse Plemons), finds O’Neal facing an auto-theft charge — using a fake FBI badge to make the theft easier because “a badge is scarier than a gun.” Mitchell tells O’Neal he can avoid prison time if he infiltrates the Black Panther Party and brings back information to bring down Hampton.

O’Neal quickly works his way into the Illinois Black Panther Party, and gets a job as Hampton’s driver, using a car provided by the FBI. This gives O’Neal a front-row seat as Hampton tries to unite gangs in Chicago’s diverse neighborhoods — Blacks, Puerto Ricans and Confederate flag-flying whites — against the “pigs,” police both from Chicago and Hoover’s bureau.

King, co-writing with Will Berson (with story credit to brothers Keith and Kenneth Lucas), gives us two sides of Hampton’s life. One is the public face, the fiery orator who tells followers the Panthers’ most powerful weapon is the people. The other is his private side, shown in his romance with Deborah Johnson (tenderly played by Dominique Fishback), a poet who helps Hampton perfect his rhetoric and reach more people.

King packs a lot into his movie — history, allegory, romance, suspense — and does so with an adrenaline-pumping pace, cinematographer Sean Bobbitt’s strong visuals and a production and costume design that bring the swinging ‘60s to life.

King structures this history like a Passion Play, with Hampton as Christ, O’Neal as Judas taking his silver, and Hoover’s boys as the Pharisees. There’s also a Last Supper, and a moment where O’Neal denies his connection to Hampton. And, as with some interpretations of Jesus’ crucifixion (“Jesus Christ Superstar” comes to mind), much of the drama comes from O’Neal’s torn feelings over what he’s doing — supporting the aims of Hampton’s cause, but corrupted into actions that will lead to a martyr’s death.

For this to work, both sides of the duo must be at their sharpest, and Kaluuya and Stanfield are. Kaluuya produces some forceful oratory, and he’s soulful and introspective in the quiet moments where Hampton contemplates the sacrifice he’s making for the cause. Stanfield gives an equally dynamic performance, as O’Neal tries to justify his betrayal and make peace with his guilt. Together, they make “Judas and the Black Messiah” one of the most intense movies you’ll see this year.

Sundance review: 'Rebel Hearts' digs into a battle for justice in Los Angeles' Catholic community, and how it still reverberates today

‘Rebel Hearts’

★★★1/2

Appearing in the U.S. Documentary competition of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. Running time: 103 minutes.

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For many, the battle waged by the Immaculate Heart of Mary order of nuns against the archdiocese of Los Angeles may be forgotten history — which is why Pedro Kos’ eye-opening documentary “Rebel Hearts” is so necessary.

On one side of the battle were an order of nuns in Los Angeles who ran their own women’s college, Immaculate Heart College. They also were required, by John Francis Cardinal McIntyre, the head of the archdiocese, to teach in the region’s Catholic schools — even though the classes were overcrowded and the sisters severely undertrained.

In the wake of the Second Vatican Council, which ordered Catholic churches worldwide to modernize to be in touch with their communities, the nuns at Immaculate Heart tried to take the Vatican at its word. The nuns, after much deliberation, wrote a set of decrees that urged the archdiocese to let the nuns get training to teach, to set their own worship practices within the order, and to make wearing the nun’s habit voluntary.

Cardinal McIntyre, depicted in the film as a rigid authoritarian more concerned with the archdiocese’s financial portfolio and political connections than with theology, reportedly blew his stack. 

Kos has constructed a thoughtful chronicle of the nuns’ efforts to stand up for what they believed to be right, and the furious blowback from Cardinal McIntyre for having his authority questioned by a bunch of sisters. Many of the interviews have been compiled from decades past, originally conducted by Shawnee Isaac-Smith, who is one of the film’s producers and has been trying to tell this story for years.

Kos takes great pains in “Rebel Hearts” to be fair to the nuns and the archdiocese, though even recent representatives of the church in Los Angeles acknowledge now that McIntyre might have been too strict.

A few of the nuns are still alive, and their work for social justice continues in ways Kos chronicles — including the Corita Art Center, named for Corita Kent, an artist nun whose work is recognized internationally but riled McIntyre at the time. This gently powerful movie connects the past to the present, revealing how some battles are never over and always worth fighting.