For film critics, covering the Sundance Film Festival is practically a rite of passage. Sundance has aimed to nurture independent filmmaking since its inception, and its continued success has meant that the films it chooses to accept (and the directors behind them) can be made or broken there. Attendance means audiences get to view potential blockbusters and stars before they get launched into the stratosphere. Everyone’s either looking for emerging trends and talent, or just the latest offering from industry veterans. Given the current administration, I was expecting a politically charged atmosphere, but what I found was something more complicated. This year attendees seemed less interested in more loud and blatant protests than more long-term, complicated change, the kind that is less headline grabbing, but no less essential. Here are the my takeaways from the 2019 Sundance Film Festival.
There was a time when respectable documentary filmmakers were expected to take a fly-on-the-wall approach and keep themselves out of the story as much as possible in order to be taken seriously. It’s a rather odd approach considering that the supposedly unobtrusive director is actually the one shaping the story and determining how the audience will view the subjects in question. The trend wherein directors shed all preconceived notions of detachment seems to have arrived, as last year alone gave us many excellent docs which took an unabashedly partisan view, such as RBG, Minding the Gap, and Won’t You Be My Neighbor? Likewise, the new documentaries I saw at the film festival were all about how the director became fascinated with something, whether it was a person, subculture, event, or a movement, and created a film to explore this interest, typically with his or her viewpoint front and center. Apollo 11 used archival footage to tell the story of the successful moon landing, Hail Satan? explored the rise of the Satanic Temple, Bedlam explored the mental health crisis in America, partly by telling the story of the director’s own sister, who also suffered from mental illness, Knock Down the House followed many outsider, inexperienced female candidates who were running for the first time (including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez), and Raise Hell: The Life & Times of Molly Ivins chronicled the life of the titular journalist.
Lasting change is the goal.
