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      Sundance, Once a Hotbed for Film Deals, Tries to Find Its Footing

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      The kind of independent movies that the festival showcases have struggled at the box office, spurring worries about what the market would be like this year.The past two years have been a time of major upheaval in the film business — and at the Sundance Film Festival.Between the diminishing audiences in movie theaters, the consolidation of studios and the shrinking amount being spent on content after the streaming giants had their wrists slapped by Wall Street, few were certain about what kind of market there would be for new films at the current Sundance — typically a hotbed of acquisitions for the brightest lights in the independent film world.Even the festival’s opening-night gala last Thursday, its first in person since 2020, felt tempered by the reality facing movies.“These last few years have brought extraordinary challenges for our industry, along with opportunities to respond to the needs of artists and reach audiences in new ways,” Sundance’s chief executive, Joana Vicente, told those assembled. “And as many of this year’s films illustrate, this is a moment when so much is at risk — the health of our planet, human rights, women’s rights, freedom of expression and democracy itself.”Not exactly a celebratory introduction.So on Monday, a collective sigh of relief rose through Utah’s Wasatch mountain range, where, within two hours, two high-profile films that had premiered at the festival found eager buyers. Netflix plunked down $20 million to take the worldwide rights to the thriller “Fair Play,” while Searchlight Pictures spent just under $8 million for the musical-theater-geek mockumentary “Theater Camp,” starring Ben Platt.A day later, Apple TV+ nabbed the musical drama “Flora & Son” for $20 million, and the indie distributor A24 bought the Australian horror film “Talk to Me” for a wide theatrical release this summer.Despite the deals, the state of movies and how audiences will watch them remained an underlying worry.The Race to Rule Streaming TVA Changing Medium: A decade of streaming has transformed storytelling and viewing habits. But we may be starting to hit that transformation’s limits.Netflix: Reed Hastings, one of the founders of Netflix, said that he was ceding his co-chief executive title and becoming the company’s executive chairman.Crime Shows: Just a few years ago, it looked as though old-fashioned police and court procedurals might not make the leap to the streaming future. Now, they aren’t just surviving, they are thriving.AMC’s Troubles: The company has struggled to earn enough from streaming to make up for losses from its traditional cable business. It is a widespread issue in the industry.“Everybody is wringing their hands about the industry,” said Vinay Singh, the chief executive of Archer Gray, a production company whose film “The Persian Version” was shown in competition at Sundance. “A lot of people have lost their jobs. There are cost-cutting measures happening on spending content. People are worried.”Indeed, no one seems to know any longer what kind of movie is worthy of theatrical release and what should be sent straight to a streaming service. Distribution and marketing executives have to figure out not only how to sell a movie to an increasingly fickle audience but also how to navigate the needs of corporate parents, often giant conglomerates whose business priorities are constantly in flux.Plus, there is always the fear of succumbing to “Sundance Fever”— making lightheaded decisions because of the high-altitude fervor of the audience. Over the decades, both streaming services and theatrical distributors have overpaid for films at the festival. Harvey Weinstein spent $10 million for “Happy, Texas” in 1999 only to see it flop at the box office. Focus Features paid $10 million for “Hamlet 2” in 2008, and in 2019, Amazon scooped up three movies for a combined $41 million while New Line paid $15 million for “Blinded by the Light,” only to have it gross $12 million. And that was when the industry was healthier.Now, with so much riding on every decision, a positive response to a film at Sundance is no longer enough to guarantee that it will attract a theatrical distribution deal.Netflix paid $20 million for “Fair Play,” starring Alden Ehrenreich and Phoebe Dynevor.Sundance Institute“I’d like to believe this movie could have done well in theaters,” said Ram Bergman, a producer of “Fair Play,” one of the festival’s most acclaimed and sought-after films. But despite the enthusiasm from the traditional studios, he said, there was little faith that the $5 million R-rated thriller, starring Phoebe Dynevor (“Bridgerton”) and Alden Ehrenreich (“Solo: A Star Wars Story”), could succeed opposite the superhero spectacles without a prohibitively expensive marketing budget.“You are dealing with a lot of the studios that have convinced themselves that these movies cannot really do well in theaters,” Mr. Bergman said. “It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. And if a streamer, let’s say Netflix, really wants to get behind it and treat it as one of, like, their high-priority movies, it’s hard to compete.”Therein lies the challenge. Most filmmakers come to Sundance with the expectation that their film will be shown on big screens across the country. The reality is that their movies are exactly the kinds that are performing poorly at the box office: small, inexpensive, complex and lacking movie stars.Add the fact that independent chains like ArcLight Cinemas and Landmark Theatres, which were the traditional supporters of indie fare, have closed and the calculus required to make these films successful becomes even more challenging.Searchlight is counting on fans of Mr. Platt (“Dear Evan Hansen”) and live theater in general to power “Theater Camp,” which celebrates all those who dream of hitting it big on Broadway. The thinking goes that if Mr. Platt can sell out Madison Square Garden, as he has with his one-man show, he can draw audiences to a movie theater. (However, Mr. Platt’s last film endeavor, the adaptation of “Dear Evan Hansen,” grossed only $15 million at the domestic box office.)“This is a crowd-pleasing movie, and it was designed with an audience in mind from inception,” said Erik Feig, chief executive of PictureStart, one of the producers of “Theater Camp.” “Yet we didn’t mitigate our risk with presales. We took a flier. We did our research into the market, but comparisons change like every 90 seconds, so you kind of build something for a business model that two weeks later is extinct.”Other buzzy projects did not generate the kind of sales that Sundance, which ends on Sunday, is normally known for. “Cat Person” pleased crowds at the festival, but the critics excoriated it, particularly for veering away from the viral New Yorker short story it was based on. “Magazine Dreams” features an Oscar-caliber performance by Jonathan Majors (“Lovecraft Country”), but he plays a character who spirals into madness and begins carrying a loaded gun — a particularly difficult film to buy in the wake of the two recent mass shootings in California.And the documentary “Justice,” which turns an investigative eye toward Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court appointment and was added to the festival’s lineup at the last minute with much fanfare, disappointed critics, too.“Magazine Dreams,” starring Jonathan Majors, proved to be a difficult sell because of its dark subject matter.Sundance InstituteThe “Justice” filmmakers say they have received new tips, since their film was announced, that they plan to follow up on. It’s just not clear that the film, which was self-funded by the director, Doug Liman, who is best known for glossy action movies, will find a distributor ready to back an incomplete project.Despite the challenges, people were thrilled to be back in person at Sundance.“I feel a deep sense of gratitude to be in this room watching a movie,” Davis Guggenheim said at the premiere of his documentary “Still,” about Michael J. Fox and his protracted battle with Parkinson’s disease.“Theater Camp” brought its actors onstage to perform. The documentary “Going Varsity in Mariachi” was supplemented by a live performance by Mariachi Juvenil de Utah, and the cast of “Flora & Son” rapped one of its songs. The screenings were often sold out, and a film’s reception could be judged on the spot by the number of standing ovations it received. Still, buyers were being much more selective.“I think it’s natural that we’re seeing things not happen overnight,” Mr. Singh of Archer Gray said. “I think that’s fine. I actually think it might be a sign of health, because there’s so much stuff in play.”Mr. Feig echoed that sentiment.“It’s definitely a challenging market,” he said. “For each of these movies that has landed buyers, there probably weren’t 25 different offers for each one of these. There may be more of a handful. You just have to kind of build them sensibly knowing what your potential options are.”He also noted the festival’s combination of established names and rising talent, adding with more than a dash of optimism: “This is why Sundance is so amazing — it’s a discovery of fresh new voices. You saw that with ‘Fair Play.’ You see it with ‘Talk to Me.’ You saw that with ‘Theater Camp.’ All brand-new filmmakers, with their very first movie, and they broke through, they made noise, and they found studio partners.” More

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      ‘The Ability to Say Yes’ to Stories Long Neglected on the Screen

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      Like so many anxious filmmakers the week before the start of the Sundance Film Festival, Erica Tremblay was tucked inside a dark room in Los Angeles, prepping the final sound mix for her feature debut, “Fancy Dance.”Ms. Tremblay has one of those quintessential Sundance tales: abandoning her career in publishing at age 40 to pursue filmmaking, specifically to tell stories centered in her Seneca-Cayuga Nation in Oklahoma. Her first short film, “Little Chief,” premiered at Sundance in 2020. Her script for “Fancy Dance” was accepted into the 2021 Sundance Lab, and with the help of the Sundance Institute, she secured financing to make the movie. Production concluded in September, and just three months later, her film was chosen out of 10,000 submissions to be shown at this year’s festival, which begins Thursday.None of it would have happened without her financiers. One, Nina Yang Bongiovi of Significant Productions, has been financing indie films like “Fruitvale Station” and “Passing” since 2013. Another, Tommy Oliver, the founder and chief executive of Confluential Films, is relatively new to the finance game after spending the past decade producing and directing his own films.“The thing that I like the best about working with Tommy is that I had creative autonomy,” said Ms. Tremblay, who has been working in one of Mr. Oliver’s bungalows on his Confluential campus since Thanksgiving. “Even though it’s hard to trust first-time filmmakers, whatever he saw in this, he was like, let’s do it. He has been there for the project but also been there for me as a creator. He was somewhat of a resident therapist in that regard.”Mr. Oliver and his wife, Codie Elaine Oliver, created the popular TV series “Black Love.”OWNMr. Oliver is one of a number of financiers of color with films debuting at the festival whose mission is to elevate underrepresented voices with financial investments, including Charles King, Luis A. Miranda Jr., Kimberly Steward, Doug Choi and Ms. Yang Bongiovi.It’s a far cry from how things used to be and a sign that diversity efforts have moved from the periphery of the business more toward its center.“When I started in the business, in the ’80s, I was so used to being not only the only Asian American but the only minority at the table ever,” said Chris Lee, a former president of production at Sony’s TriStar Pictures. He is executive producing the Justin Chon film “Jamojaya,” which received financing from Starlight Media, a Los Angeles-based Chinese financier that backed “Crazy Rich Asians.” “Now, you want an A-list director, you can go to John Chu, you can go to Destin Daniel Cretton, you can go to Justin Lin. There’s so many choices to put people in front of the camera now that people didn’t think of before.”Still, just appearing at Sundance is not the endgame. The true standard for success for these financiers will be how these movies perform at the festival and if they are bought by distributors. Alexis Garcia, from the independent studio Fifth Season, previously known as Endeavor Content, said distributors have told him the festival’s lineup of films this year doesn’t look commercial and it could be a soft year for acquisitions.Should that be the case, that could be a setback for the financiers who are just getting started.“When you are working with directors who are from an underrepresented group, there is actually more at risk, because if it doesn’t work, it just perpetuates the mythology,” said Kevin Iwashina, Fifth Season’s senior vice president of documentaries, who helped finance the Sundance doc “Going Varsity in Mariachi” and fully financed “AUM: The Cult at the End of the World,” a documentary about the cult responsible for the 1995 sarin gas subway attack in Tokyo. “And so decisions become that much more precise. There is more at risk than just financial capital.”Mr. Oliver is staking a lot in the four films he has headed to Sundance, in something of a coming-out party for Confluential Films. Mr. Oliver began the operation in 2013 as a label for his own productions — he is also a writer and director — but has recently expanded his ambitions. Mr. Oliver hired Charlotte Koh, formerly of Searchlight Pictures, as Confluential’s president in 2021 and has dedicated the company to financing projects by creators of color. Goldman Sachs helped raise $100 million to $150 million that Confluential will use for operating and production costs.Best known for creating the popular OWN series “Black Love” with his wife, Cody Elaine Oliver — the two own the show and all its ancillary products: podcasts, live events and merchandising — Mr. Oliver’s ambitions run from indie films to prestige pictures to helping finance studio movies.In addition to “Fancy Dance,” the producer has invested in “Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project,” a documentary about Ms. Giovanni, the American poet, and the narrative features “Young. Wild. Free.” and “To Live and Die and Live.” The upcoming Netflix movie “The Perfect Find,” starring Gabrielle Union, is also being produced by Confluential after the company optioned the novel by Tia Williams. “We have the ability to say yes, and not just say yes, but to look at what the makeup of those projects are, and that’s significant,” said Mr. Oliver. “What I’m really excited about building is something that is sustainable to support, not just one director, but a bunch of directors. We can do something now where we have a different type of seat at the table.”Luis A. Miranda Jr. invested in the documentary “Going Varsity in Mariachi.”Sundance InstituteMr. Miranda is using the money he made from the theatrical hit “Hamilton” — created by his son, Lin-Manuel Miranda — to invest in young artists, many of whom are from underrepresented groups and communities. After receiving an unsolicited email from the producer James Lawler, Mr. Miranda invested in the Sundance documentary “Going Varsity in Mariachi,” which depicts high school Mariachi contests popular in the border towns in Texas. It’s one of the better-known documentaries scheduled to debut in competition. To Mr. Miranda, a veteran political strategist, the film was the perfect combination of storytelling and politics and showed where he wants to put his money.“We are a huge part of the audience of movies but not a large number of the ones that are financing films,” he said in an interview, referring to his Latino roots. “And I know that there are a lot of voices out there who have not been able to tell their stories. I know that because my son was one of them. If I would have had the money then, Lin-Manuel would not have had to go through three years of rewriting and knocking on doors. So if I can make young, talented people’s lives easier in telling their stories, I will do that.”Ms. Yang Bongiovi said finding financing for films featuring people of color remains challenging. She recalled her experience with “Passing,” from the writer and director Rebecca Hall, starring Tessa Thompson (“Thor: Ragnarok”) and Ruth Negga (“Loving”). The film was bought by Netflix for a healthy sum out of Sundance in 2021 and was lauded by critics. Yet getting it made was “practically impossible,” she said, “and that was not that long ago.”Nina Yang Bongiovi says that when more people of color are financing films, they can work together to support projects.Aaron J. Thornton/Getty Images“I was told, ‘You have two women of color starring in it, that’s challenging,’” Ms. Yang Bongiovi said. “And then I remember telling folks, ‘Tessa Thompson is a Marvel superhero. She’s Valkyrie!’ But it just didn’t equate. It was a reminder that we still have a long way to go.”The growing number of financiers like her from underrepresented groups has Ms. Yang Bongiovi feeling hopeful. It means that instead of competing for projects, they can work together, reduce their individual risk and contribute the money needed to make these films.“Because there are more multicultural financiers and producers, we are teaming up,” she said. “We don’t see each other as competitors. We’re like, ‘Hey, we’re allies. We got to go in together, to force the tide to come through for us.’”Ms. Yang Bongiovi and Mr. Oliver worked together on “Fancy Dance,” while Mr. King and Mr. Oliver both backed “Young. Wild. Free.,” a film directed by Thembi L. Banks about a high school student whose life turns when he is robbed by the girl of his dreams. Mr. Oliver and Ms. Yang Bongiovi are also supporting “To Live and Die and Live” from the director Qasim Basir.“Young. Wild. Free.,” directed by Thembi Banks, is being backed by Mr. Oliver and Charles King, the founder and C.E.O. of the media company Macro.Sundance Institute“To me, that’s where you see real change, how we have found ways to partner and come together to move entire ecosystems,” said Mr. King, founder and chief executive of Macro, an eight-year-old company that has helped finance films like “Judas and the Black Messiah” with Warner Bros. and “Sorry to Bother You” with Ms. Yang Bongiovi. The latter was sold to Annapurna Pictures out of Sundance in 2018.“When I launched Macro, it was with a vision for building a multibillion-dollar media company that is going to have global impact, but also economically empower our communities and help to shape culture,” he said. “That companies like Confluential and others who’ve raised capital, who are financing, that they’re doing it as well, and then to be able to do things together, that’s fantastic. That’s only creating more opportunities for all of us.” More

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      Sundance Unveils 2023 Film Festival Lineup

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      Veterans like Nicole Holofcener and Ira Sachs and first-timer filmmakers like Randall Park made the cut, as did films about Ukraine.Nothing has been easy for the Sundance Film Festival. It’s been thwarted by pandemic complications, management upheaval and a business that is undergoing an identity crisis. But the confab will finally return to the snowy mining town of Park City, Utah, in January for the first time in three years with a slate of films it hopes will announce to both Hollywood and the rest of the world that independent filmmaking is back.Culled from a record 4,061 feature submissions, Sundance 2023, set to begin Jan. 19, will be filled with veteran filmmakers and those just starting out, subjects big and small, and a host of urgent topics. Stalwarts like Nicole Holofcener and Ira Sachs are returning to their roots with new films, while studios will unveil their fare.A24 is premiering “All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt,” from the director Raven Jackson and producers Barry Jenkins and Adele Romanski, among others. Searchlight is screening “Rye Lane” from Raine Allen-Miller. Amazon has “Cassandro,” the documentarian Roger Ross Williams’s first foray into fiction filmmaking, and Focus Features is showing A.V. Rockwell’s “A Thousand and One” in the U.S. dramatic competition.Brooke Shields (Disney), Judy Blume (Amazon), Michael J. Fox (Apple) Willie Nelson and Little Richard are all getting the documentary treatment, while subjects like the Ukrainian war and films both by and about Iranian women are being explored via multiple entries in multiple genres.“A lot of the filmmakers are looking at relationships: family, work, institutions — things we often look to for stability in unstable times,” said John Nein, Sundance’s senior programmer and director of strategic initiatives. “In the program, there is a reflection of an age of anxiety in terms of the relationships we have with traditional institutions. There are all these ways of exploring just how tenuous those relationships can be.”The Projectionist Chronicles a New Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Gotham Awards: At the first official show of the season “Everything Everywhere All at Once” won big.Governors Awards: Stars like Jamie Lee Curtis and Brendan Fraser worked a room full of academy voters at the event, which is considered a barometer of film industry enthusiasm.An Indie Hit’s Campaign: How do you make “Everything Everywhere All at Once” an Oscar contender? Throw a party for tastemakers.Jennifer Lawrence:  The Oscar winner may win more accolades with her performance in “Causeway,” but she’s focused on living a nonstar life.Indeed, Daisy Ridley plays a woman obsessed with her mortality in one of several films opening the festival, “Sometimes I Think About Dying”; Jonathan Majors stars as an amateur bodybuilder struggling to find human connection in “Magazine Dreams”; and Susanna Fogel directs Emilia Jones and Nicholas Braun in “Cat Person,” based on the popular New Yorker short story by Kristen Roupenian.With anxiety comes antiheroes, who abound in films this year, the programmers say. These include Randall Park’s directorial debut, “Shortcomings,” about a cynical 20-something (Justin H. Min of “After Yang”) who traverses the country with two buddies looking for the ideal connection, and Sachs’s “Passages,” which challenges audiences with the terrible decisions made by the lead character (played by Franz Rogowski). Holofcener, who often traffics in the world of anxiety, has reteamed with Julia Louis-Dreyfus for “You Hurt My Feelings,” the story of a novelist whose long marriage is upended when she overhears her husband (Tobias Menzies) giving his honest reaction to her latest book. It also hails from A24.Among documentaries, the filmmaker Luke Lorentzen follows an aspiring hospital chaplain on a yearlong residency in “A Still Small Voice,” which the director of programming Kim Yutani called “one of the more fascinating journeys I saw this year.”It’s all happening at a time of transition for Sundance. The institute’s chief executive, Joana Vicente, only joined the group in September 2021, a few months before the festival was rocked for the second year in a row by Covid-19 and was forced to shift in January to a virtual format in light of the rise of the Omicron variant. Five months later, the festival director Tabitha Jackson announced her departure after just two years at the helm. She has since been replaced by the former New York Film Festival executive director Eugene Hernandez, who stepped into the role in November but will not oversee the event until 2024, the organization’s 40th anniversary.“It was less than ideal,” Vicente said. “But I actually look at these past two years as incredibly successful festivals where we launched incredible films, some of which went on to win the Academy Awards,” she said, referring to “CODA,” the 2022 best picture winner. “We reached audiences in ways that we had not reached before, people who could not afford to come to Sundance, who thought Sundance maybe was not for them: film lovers, film students were able to connect and to discover these films.”Sundance’s virtual platform allowed patrons from all around the country to access films that previously had been available only to those who trekked to the snowy mountain town of Park City. The 2022 festival received some 818,000 unique visitors to its online portal during its 10-day run. For 2023, of the 101 features screening at the festival, 75 percent will be made available to view remotely.“We’re definitely prioritizing the in-person experience,” Vicente added. “But we are also continuing to build on what digital affords us in terms of reach and accessibility.”Similar to 2022, when Sundance screened films on a pressing news topic — a documentary and a feature film on the pre-Roe underground abortion network the Jane Collective — this year, the programmers added three films made by Iranian women and two that chronicle the conflict in Ukraine, ripped-from-the-headlines subjects that are likely to prompt heady conversations.In the U.S. dramatic competition, “The Persian Version” tells the screenwriter-director-producer Maryam Keshavarz’s story about a large Iranian American family that gathers for the patriarch’s heart transplant, only to have a family secret uncovered. “Shayda,” produced by Cate Blanchett’s company Dirty Films, is Noora Niasari’s feature debut about an Iranian mother who finds refuge in an Australian women’s shelter with her daughter when her estranged husband returns. And “Joonam,” competing in the U.S. documentary competition, tracks director Sierra Urich’s investigation into her mother and grandmother’s complicated pasts and her own fractured Iranian identity.In the world documentary competition, Mstyslav Chernov’s “20 Days in Mariupol,” from “Frontline” and the Associated Press, chronicles a team of Ukrainian journalists trapped in the besieged town and their struggle to document the atrocities. “Iron Butterflies,” from the director Roman Liubyi, investigates the 2014 downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in eastern Ukraine, killing 298 people. Three men with ties to Russian security services were convicted of murder by a Dutch court, but they are unlikely to be arrested.“The excitement I have around this program is significant,” Yutani said. “I think the offerings take a viewer on a complete roller coaster. There are a lot of films that are going to really strike people in a personal way and touch them. I also think there are some real thrills. So I encourage people who are coming to the festival to take chances.” More

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      Sundance Liked Her Documentary, ‘Jihad Rehab,’ Until Muslim Critics Didn’t

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      The film festival gave Meg Smaker’s “Jihad Rehab” a coveted spot in its 2022 lineup, but apologized after an outcry over her race and her approach.Meg Smaker felt exhilarated last November. After 16 months filming inside a Saudi rehabilitation center for accused terrorists, she learned that her documentary “Jihad Rehab” was invited to the 2022 Sundance Festival, one of the most prestigious showcases in the world.Her documentary centered on four former Guantánamo detainees sent to a rehab center in Saudi Arabia who had opened their lives to her, speaking of youthful attraction to Al Qaeda and the Taliban, of torture endured, and of regrets.Film critics warned that conservatives might bridle at these human portraits, but reviews after the festival’s screening were strong.“The absence of absolutes is what’s most enriching,” The Guardian stated, adding, “This is a movie for intelligent people looking to have their preconceived notions challenged.” Variety wrote: The film “feels like a miracle and an interrogative act of defiance.”But attacks would come from the left, not the right. Arab and Muslim filmmakers and their white supporters accused Ms. Smaker of Islamophobia and American propaganda. Some suggested her race was disqualifying, a white woman who presumed to tell the story of Arab men.Sundance leaders reversed themselves and apologized.Abigail Disney, a grandniece of Walt Disney, had been the executive director of “Jihad Rehab” and called it “freaking brilliant” in an email to Ms. Smaker. Now she disavowed it.The film “landed like a truckload of hate,” Ms. Disney wrote in an open letter.Ms. Smaker’s film has become near untouchable, unable to reach audiences. Prominent festivals rescinded invitations, and critics in the documentary world took to social media and pressured investors, advisers and even her friends to withdraw names from the credits. She is close to broke.“In my naïveté, I kept thinking people would get the anger out of their system and realize this film was not what they said,” Ms. Smaker said. “I’m trying to tell an authentic story that a lot of Americans might not have heard.”Battles over authorship and identity regularly roil the documentary world, a tightly knit and largely left-wing ecosystem.Ms. Smaker wanted to explore what leads men to embrace terrorism. But Arab American filmmakers say that framing was all too familiar. Meg SmakerMany Arab and Muslim filmmakers — who like others in the industry struggle for money and recognition — denounced “Jihad Rehab” as offering an all too familiar take. They say Ms. Smaker is the latest white documentarian to tell the story of Muslims through a lens of the war on terror. These documentary makers, they say, take their white, Western gaze and claim to film victims with empathy.Assia Boundaoui, a filmmaker, critiqued it for Documentary magazine.“To see my language and the homelands of folks in my community used as backdrops for white savior tendencies is nauseating,” she wrote. “The talk is all empathy, but the energy is Indiana Jones.”She called on festivals to allow Muslims to create “films that concern themselves not with war, but with life.”The argument over whether artists should share racial or ethnic identity and sympathy with their subjects is long running in literature and film — with many artists and writers, like the documentarians Ken Burns and Nanfu Wang, arguing it would be suffocating to tell the story of only their own culture and that the challenge is to inhabit worlds different from their own.In the case of “Jihad Rehab,” the identity critique is married to the view that the film must function as political art and examine the historic and cultural oppressions that led to the imprisonment of these men at Guantánamo.Some critics and documentary filmmakers say that mandate is reductive and numbing.“What I admired about ‘Jihad Rehab’ is that it allowed a viewer to make their own decisions,” said Chris Metzler, who helps select films for San Francisco Documentary Festival. “I was not watching a piece of propaganda.”Ms. Smaker has other defenders. Lorraine Ali, a television critic for The Los Angeles Times who is Muslim, wrote that the film was “a humanizing journey through a complex emotional process of self-reckoning and accountability, and a look at the devastating fallout of flawed U.S. and Saudi policy.”She is dismayed with Sundance.“In the independent film world there is a lot of weaponizing of identity politics,” Ms. Ali said in an interview. “The film took pains to understand the culture these men came from and molded them. It does a disservice to throw away a film that a lot of people should see.”From Firefighter to FilmmakerMs. Smaker was a 21-year-old firefighter in California when airplanes struck the World Trade Center on Sept. 11. She heard firefighters cry for vengeance and wondered: How did this happen?Looking for answers, she hitchhiked through Afghanistan and settled in the ancient city of Sana, Yemen, for half a decade, where she learned Arabic and taught firefighting. Then she obtained a master’s from Stanford University in filmmaking and turned to a place Yemeni friends had spoken of: the Mohammed bin Nayef Counseling and Care Center in Riyadh.The Saudi monarchy brooks little dissent. This center tries to rehabilitate accused terrorists and spans an unlikely distance between prison and boutique hotel. It has a gym and pool and teachers who offer art therapy and lectures on Islam, Freud and the true meanings of “jihad,” which include personal struggle.Hence the documentary’s original title, “Jihad Rehab,” which engendered much criticism, even from supporters, who saw it as too facile. “The film is very complex and the title is not,” said Ms. Ali, the Los Angeles Times critic.To address such concerns, the director recently renamed the film “The UnRedacted.”The United States sent 137 detainees from Guantánamo Bay to this center, which human rights groups cannot visit.But reporters with The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic and others have interviewed prisoners. Most stayed a few days.Ms. Smaker would remain more than a year exploring what leads men to embrace groups such as Al Qaeda and the Taliban.Saudi officials let her speak to 150 detainees, most of whom waved her off. She found four men who would talk.A film still of the guard tower. Ms. Smaker envisioned the documentary as opening with accusations facing the men — bomb maker, bin Laden driver, Taliban fighter — and peeling layers to find the human.Meg SmackerThese conversations form the core of the movie and cut far deeper than earlier news reports. That did not dissuade critics. Ms. Disney, a titan in the documentary world, picked up on a point raised by the film’s opponents. “A person cannot freely consent to anything in a carceral system, particularly one in a notoriously violent dictatorship,” she wrote.This is a debatable proposition. Journalists often interview prisoners, and documentaries like “The Thin Blue Line” give powerful voice to them, without necessarily clearing this purist hurdle of free consent.Ms. Disney declined an interview request, saying she wished Ms. Smaker well.Lawrence Wright wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11” and spent much time in Saudi Arabia. He saw the documentary.“As a reporter, you acknowledge the constraints on prisoners, and Smaker could have acknowledged it with more emphasis,” he said. “But she was exploring a great mystery — understanding those who may have done something appalling — and this does not discredit that effort.”To gain intimate access, he added, was a coup.Ms. Smaker envisioned the film as an unfolding, opening with American accusations — bomb maker, bin Laden driver, Taliban fighter — and peeling layers to find the human.Distrust yielded to trust. Men described being drawn to Al Qaeda out of boredom, poverty and defense of Islam. What emerged was a portrait of men on the cusp of middle-age reckoning with their past.Ms. Smaker asked one of the men, “Are you a terrorist?”He bridled. “Someone fight me, I fight them. Why do you call me terrorist?”Her critics argue that such questions registered as accusation. “These questions seek to humanize the men, but they still frame them as terrorists,” Pat Mullen, a Toronto film critic, wrote in Point of View magazine.Mr. Metzler of the San Francisco festival said a documentarian must ask questions that are on a viewer’s mind.The film in fact dwells on torture inflicted by Americans at Guantánamo Bay. Ali al-Raimi arrived at age 16. “Every day was worse than the last day,” he said.He tried to hang himself.“Nothing,” he said, “was worse than Guantánamo.”The men longed for the prosaic: marriage, children, a job. Khalid, a voluble man, was trained as a bomb maker; in the film, he said he now crafts remote-control car alarms in Jeddah. Ambiguity lingers.Success, InterruptedSundance announced in December that it had selected “Jihad Rehab” for its 2022 festival, held the following month. Critics erupted.“An entirely white team behind a film about Yemeni and South Arabian men,” the filmmaker Violeta Ayala wrote in a tweet.Ms. Smaker’s film had a Yemeni-American executive producer and a Saudi co-producer.More than 230 filmmakers signed a letter denouncing the documentary. A majority had not seen it. The letter noted that over 20 years, Sundance had programmed 76 films about Muslims and the Middle East, but only 35 percent of them had been directed by Muslim or Arab filmmakers.Sundance noted that in its 2022 festival, of the 152 films in which directors revealed their ethnicity, 7 percent were Middle Eastern. Estimates place Americans of Arab descent at between 1.5 and 3 percent.Sundance officials backtracked. Tabitha Jackson, then the director of the festival, demanded to see consent forms from the detainees and Ms. Smaker’s plan to protect them once the film debuted, according to an email shown to The Times. Ms. Jackson also required an ethics review of the plans and gave Ms. Smaker four days to comply. Efforts to reach Ms. Jackson were unsuccessful.The review concluded Ms. Smaker more than met standards of safety.Ms. Smaker said a public relations firm recommended that she apologize. “What was I apologizing for?” she said. “For trusting my audience to make up their own mind?”Prominent documentary executives said Sundance’s demands were without precedent.An executive who has run a major festival went so far as to write an email to Sundance cautioning that its demands of Ms. Smaker might embolden protesters. Festivals, the executive wrote, will ask “two, three, four times what are the headwinds” before extending an invitation.That executive had earlier invited Ms. Smaker to show “Jihad Rehab,” but she had declined as her film was not yet completed. This executive asked to remain anonymous out of concern of offending Muslim filmmakers.“Jihad Rehab” premiered in January; most major reviews were good. But Ms. Smaker’s critics were not persuaded.“When I, a practicing Muslim woman, say that this film is problematic,” wrote Jude Chehab, a Lebanese American documentarian, “my voice should be stronger than a white woman saying that it isn’t. Point blank.”Ms. Disney, the former champion, wrote, “I failed, failed and absolutely failed to understand just how exhausted by and disgusted with the perpetual representation of Muslim men and women as terrorists or former terrorists or potential terrorists the Muslim people are.”Her apology and that of Sundance shook the industry. The South by Southwest and San Francisco festivals rescinded invitations.Jihad Turk, former imam of Los Angeles’s largest mosque, was baffled. In December, his friend Tim Disney — brother of Abigail — invited him to a screening.“My first instinct,” he said, “was ‘Oh, not another film on jihad and Islam.’ Then I watched and it was introspective and intelligent. My hope is that there is a courageous outlet that is not intimidated by activists and their too narrow views.”An Elusive Happy EndingIn June, Ms. Smaker received another screening — at the Doc Edge festival in New Zealand.She hopped a flight to Auckland with trepidation. Would this end in cancellation? Word had leaked out, and Mr. Mullen, the Toronto film critic, tweeted a warning.“Oh wild — controversial Sundance doc Jihad Rehab comes out of hiding,” he wrote, adding: “Why would anyone program this film after Sundance? File under ‘we warned you!’”Dan Shanan, who heads the New Zealand festival, shrugged.“What happened at Sundance was not good,” he said. “Film festivals must hold to their belief in their role.”Ms. Smaker has maxed out credit cards and, at age 42, borrowed money from her parents. This is not the Sundance debut of her dreams. “I don’t have the money or influence to fight this out,” she said, running hands back through her hair. “I’m not sure I see a way out.” More

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      The Unraveling of an Award-Winning Documentary

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      The director of “Sabaya,” about Yazidi women who had been sexually enslaved by ISIS, says that he wasn’t present for a key scene and that he substituted footage.BAGHDAD — In a pivotal scene of the 2021 documentary “Sabaya,” two men rescue a young woman named Leila from a Syrian detention camp for the families of ISIS fighters, bundling her into a car and driving her to safety as shots are fired behind them.In interviews with BBC Radio and others, the film’s Iraqi-Swedish director, Hogir Hirori, recounted the tension of the rescue and the terror of the ride as they raced from Al Hol detention camp with the young woman, one of thousands of women and girls from Iraq’s Yazidi religious minority who had been sexually enslaved by ISIS.The dramatic scene helped the Swedish-government-funded film garner glowing reviews and awards, including best director for a foreign documentary at the Sundance Film Festival last year. But following an investigation by a Swedish magazine, Kvartal, Hirori has admitted that he was not there when Leila was freed, that he substituted another woman instead and that he lied to a BBC interviewer.The admissions follow findings by The New York Times last year that many of the traumatized women either did not initially consent to be in the film or refused but were included anyway. The director’s admissions have also renewed accusations that the documentary played down the coerced separation of mothers from their young children, born during enslavement by ISIS — and turned the very men responsible for that separation into heroes for rescuing them.While Yazidi women sexually enslaved by ISIS were welcomed back by their communities after ISIS was defeated, the children were not. Some women did not want the children, but for most, the forced separations have had serious repercussions, including suicide attempts.In a statement issued after the Kvartal investigation, Hirori acknowledged that he had depicted Leila’s escape “using a rescue scene of another woman which I participated in.” He said the woman who was presented as Leila, the main character, did not want to be filmed after the rescue and so he did not mention her in the documentary.Speaking in Swedish through an interpreter, he told BBC Radio last year, “It was important for me to film it as it was happening because that was the reality.” In the interview, one of several in which he expressed the same sentiment, he also spoke of the Yazidi women: “They aren’t just numbers, they are people just like you and me.”The BBC has removed the lengthy interview from its website after press queries. A BBC spokesperson said it was being reviewed. Hirori said in his statement that he regretted not telling the BBC the truth about the rescue scene.A timeline by Kvartal also showed that in three scenes that included news reports about the battle against ISIS and a Turkish invasion, audio was inserted from events that had occurred several months earlier or weeks later. In at least one of the scenes, the film’s hero reacts to news from the car radio that he could not have been hearing.Hirori and the film’s producer, Antonio Russo Merenda, a former Swedish Film Institute commissioner who has said he was heavily involved in the film’s editing, did not respond to requests for comment by The Times.In his statement following the Kvartal investigation, Hirori said that the film was not intended to be journalism and that Swedish documentary tradition allowed filmmakers “to express their own unique view of events.”Kristina Eriksson, a communications officer at the Swedish Film Institute, said, “We follow the debate about the role of documentaries and welcome the discussion, but nothing has emerged so far that gives us reason to act in relation to the film.” She declined to clarify whether the institute had procedures governing the veracity of documentary films it funded.The issue of forced separations is the single most contentious one among Yazidis. While the Yazidi Home Center featured in “Sabaya” was responsible for finding and caring for hundreds of Iraqi Yazidis freed from ISIS captivity, the organization, acting on instructions from Yazidi elders in Iraq, also arranged for the children to be taken from their mothers. Most were sent to an orphanage in northeastern Syria that the women were not allowed to visit once they returned to Iraq.Almost all the women were told that to go home after being rescued from Al Hol camp, they would have to give up their children. The women were also told, falsely, as was one of the woman in “Sabaya,” that the separation would be temporary.Hirori has said he did not have space in the film to address the issue. “My focus was in trying to document how these women and girls were saved and not to go into the whole giving up the children,” he said in an interview with The Times last year.Sherizaan Minwalla, a human rights lawyer based in Erbil, Iraq, who has worked extensively with Yazidi genocide survivors, said, “The film portrayed a false narrative of women with children being rescued when in fact they were hiding with their children to avoid being forcibly separated before returning to their families in Iraq.” Some of the women were so afraid they would be separated from their children that they chose to stay in the Syrian detention camp rather than be rescued.A limited number of freed Yazidi women have been reunited with their children. Because those mothers and their children face threats from the Yazidi community in Iraq, almost all have been relocated to other countries.“The director doesn’t need to show situations that are wholly invented falsehoods in the film to have it be a false portrayal,” said Jennifer Crystal Chien, director of Re-Present Media, a San Francisco nonprofit that advocates for storytelling from underrepresented communities. Omitting key information means the viewer can “draw the wrong conclusions,” she said.The documentary was rejected by the Human Rights Watch Film Festival last year because of concerns over consent by traumatized ISIS survivors, but it was shown at the Sundance Film Festival.Months after the release of “Sabaya,” the filmmakers obtained written consents but in languages most of the women do not understand. The agreements entitled the filmmakers to use their names, stories and all footage for any project, in perpetuity.“There are certain types of things that seem in some way exciting or dramatic or have a kind of heroic outcome,” Chien said. “These kind of things are very appealing to people who are making decisions about funding and programing even though they may not know anything about the actual situation in the region or whether the footage that’s being gotten could possibly be gotten with informed consent at all.”Sangar Khaleel More

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      Sundance Wrap-Up: 6 Movies We Like and One We Disagree on

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      Even virtual, the festival gave our chief film critics a lot to talk about.For the second year in a row, the Sundance Film Festival canceled its in-person plans and went virtual, wrapping up on Sunday evening. It was quite a feast, with more than 80 documentary and narrative features. Here are six our chief film critics especially liked, and one they disagree about.Manohla Dargis‘All That Breathes’Directed by Shaunak Sen, “All That Breathes” is an immersive, haunting documentary portrait of two Muslim brothers in New Delhi who have dedicated their lives to rescuing birds, many affected by humans and climate change. With intimacy, a great score and some fantastic macro cinematography — the birds loom large here — the movie pays tribute to the brothers even as it underscores that individuals alone can’t save nature.At times, Sen’s emphasis on visual lyricism over information opens up unanswered questions. And while he draws attention to anti-Muslim sentiments, it is never clear how Sen would like viewers to connect these terrifying threats with the grim specter of species extinction. Even so, there is no denying the movie’s power or its subject; there’s also no denying the heartbreak of its images. The raptors perched on mountains of garbage, the monkeys navigating overhead tangles of wires, the solitary turtle struggling to ascend a mound of debris — in the story of interspecies coexistence, the animals have already lost.‘Descendant’Emmett Lewis in “Descendant,” about the discovery of the last recorded American slave ship.Participant, via Sundance InstituteIn her latest documentary, Margaret Brown tells the story that begins — though doesn’t end — with the discovery of the Clotilda, the last recorded American slave ship. In 1860, decades after the importation of enslaved peoples had been made illegal in the United States, the ship sailed to Alabama. The men who owned and operated the Clotilda arrived at night and, after bringing their captives ashore, torched the ship to hide their crime. The ship sunk, disappearing from view.Brown tracks the fascinating efforts to recover the Clotilda, but her truer, more vivid subjects are those who survived slavery. Some helped establish Africatown, a community north of Mobile where much of the documentary takes place. There, Brown visits with descendants, people for whom slavery isn’t an abstraction but a living memory that generations have carefully preserved and passed down. The movie loses some of its focus midway, but the story of the Clotilda and where Brown takes this documentary are very moving.‘Dos Estaciones’Teresa Sánchez plays the owner of a tequila factory in “Dos Estaciones.”Gerardo Guerra, via Sundance InstituteFor much of this elliptical, visually arresting Mexican drama, María García (Teresa Sánchez), a stolid and stoic loner, holds the center. María, a monument to an old-fashioned way of life, if one who presents as nonbinary, owns the Jalisco tequila factory that gives the movie its title. But times are tough: a fungus is ruining the agave crops, and foreign-owned companies pose a threat to artisanal producers like María, who’s alone physically and existentially.The director Juan Pablo González immediately grounds you in María’s life both with the seductive, velvety beauty of the cinematography and by focusing on the material conditions of her everyday life, including the mesmerizing, labor-intensive production of tequila, which you follow from field to bottle. At one point, romance looms, and for a time the story shifts to a hairdresser, Tatín (Tatín Vera) a transgender woman, who with María, and several other characters, creates a vivid, textured, altogether unexpected world.A.O. Scott‘Leonor Will Never Die’Sheila Francisco plays a local filmmaker coming out of retirement.Carlos Mauricio, via Sundance InstituteThe titular heroine of this wonderfully unclassifiable movie — played by the Filipino singer and theater actress Sheila Francisco — is a sweet-natured, absent-minded woman of around 70. She lives (and frequently squabbles) with her grown son, stays on (mostly) friendly terms with her former husband and is haunted by the memory of her other son’s death. She is also a locally renowned action filmmaker, whose complicated emergence from retirement frames the director Martika Ramirez Escobar’s heartfelt, zany tribute to the magic of movies and the power of love.Leonor’s final script becomes a movie within the movie, but Ramirez Escobar’s metacinematic shenanigans don’t stop there. I counted at least four distinct layers of reality in “Leonor Will Never Die,” but there might be more. In any case the fun lies in the ways they collide and overlap. This may sound like a too-clever postmodern genre mash-up, but somehow the combination of family melodrama, pulpy violence and surreal comedy add up to the disarmingly tender portrait of an artist on the edge of the afterlife.‘A House Made of Splinters’Children in a temporary shelter in Ukraine, in the documentary “A House Made of Splinters.”via Sundance InstituteThe reality that Simon Lereng Wilmont’s documentary explores is almost unbearably heartbreaking. In Lysychansk, in eastern Ukraine, an institution provides temporary shelter for children whose lives have been disrupted by alcoholism, domestic violence and unemployment, social problems that war with Russia has made worse. The children find safety and companionship with one another and an endlessly patient staff while waiting to return to their parents or, more likely, to be transferred to orphanages or foster care.Granted extraordinary access to his subjects, Wilmont proceeds with exemplary tact and sensitivity, weaving a heartbreaking tapestry that also glows with empathy and even shows glimmers of mischief and delight. To be reminded of the vulnerability of young bodies and souls is wrenching, but there is also something thrilling about the honesty and tenacity of the kids and the dedication of their caretakers. It’s as if a Frederick Wiseman film had been reimagined by William Blake.‘Marte Um (Mars One)’Cícero Lucas in a scene from “Marte Um (Mars One).”Leonardo Feliciano, via Sundance InstituteThis Brazilian charmer isn’t especially flashy, buzzy or provocative. It’s a gentle, closely observed family drama, shot in warm colors in Contagem, a city in the state of Minas Gerais. The main characters — Wellington (Carlos Francisco), Tercia (Rejane Faria) and their children, Eunice (Camilla Damião) and Deivinho (Cícero Lucas) — each contend with crises that test their individual sense of identity and their bonds with one another.Unfolding in the wake of Jair Bolsonaro’s election to Brazil’s presidency in 2018, their stories brush against social and political sore spots (involving race, work, sexuality and religion) that will hardly seem foreign to North American audiences. But “Marte Um,” beautifully directed by Gabriel Martins, isn’t a culture-war polemic or an ideological fable. It’s a stirring example of — and a passionate argument for — the kind of humane realism that keeps movies alive, and that never goes out of style.Dargis vs. Scott‘Sharp Stick’Kristine Froseth plays a naive Angeleno opposite Jon Bernthal’s married man in “Sharp Stick.”via Sundance InstituteDargis I was looking forward to Lena Dunham’s “Sharp Stick,” about the sexual coming-of-age of Sarah Jo (Kristine Froseth), a woman in her mid-20s. But the only thing that kept me watching is Dunham; if anyone else had directed it, I would have bailed.There’s no point in enumerating all the reasons I dislike it — OK, the unfunny Los Angeles stereotypes were exasperating. But my biggest issue was the cloying and childlike Sarah Jo, whose narratively expedient naïveté worked my last frayed nerve. When I wasn’t overwhelmed with irritation, I did appreciate that Dunham has revisited the vexing, oft-troubling figure of the desiring, desirable young woman, a character that evokes Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, Tennessee Williams’s Baby Doll and so on.Scott My position in arguments about Lena Dunham is always “yes, but.” Yes, Sarah Jo’s unworldliness is overstated, some aspects of her sexual awakening seem like wishful thinking, and the tonal shifts from silly to sexy to earnest to icky can be a lot. But “Sharp Stick” is interesting to think about partly because Dunham herself is thinking, rather than (as so many of her Sundance peers and followers have done) recycling clichés about lust, female empowerment and family dysfunction. The unstable, scattershot quality of this movie is to me evidence of her curiosity and a willingness to push out of her own comfort zone, if she even has one. More

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      ‘The Exiles’ and ‘Nanny’ Win Top Prizes at Sundance

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      The horror/drama “Nanny” from the first-time feature filmmaker Nikyatu Jusu nabbed the U.S. Grand Jury prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, which was primarily virtual for the second year in a row. The film about a Senegalese nanny working for a privileged family in New York City generated strong reviews and is still looking for distribution.“The Exiles,” about three exiled dissidents from the Tiananmen Square massacre in China, won the Grand Jury prize for U.S. documentary. “Utama,” a Bolivian character portrait, nabbed the top award for world dramatic film, while the Indian documentary “All That Breathes” took the world documentary Grand Jury Prize.Anna Diop in “Nanny,” one of the standouts in this year’s lineup.via Sundance Institute“Cha Cha Real Smooth” nabbed the Audience Award in the U.S. dramatic competition just days after it sealed a $15 million distribution deal with Apple — the biggest sale of the festival. The crowd-pleaser was written, directed by and stars Cooper Raiff in his sophomore effort. Dakota Johnson also stars.In the documentary space, the surprise screening of “Navalny,” which CNN and HBO Max will release later this year, won both the audience prize in the U.S. documentary competition and the Festival Favorite award. The film tracks the aftermath of the poisoning of Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader and one of Vladimir Putin’s harshest critics. Directed by Daniel Roher, “Navalny” debuted to rave reviews and brought additional attention to the dissident who has been jailed in a Russian prison for over a year.In his speech after winning the audience prize, Roher said he hoped the film would help people “learn about the courage it takes to bring down an authoritarian regime.”Other audience awards went to “Girl Picture” (World Cinema Dramatic), “The Territory” (World Cinema Documentary) and “Framing Agnes” (Next).“Today’s awards represent the determination of visionary individuals, whose dynamic work will continue to change the culture,” said Joana Vicente, the chief executive of the Sundance Institute.The festival made a last-minute decision to go virtual because of concerns over the highly contagious Omicron variant, and the awards were announced in a two-hour string of tweets, which included speeches from each of the winners.“Whether you watched from home or one of our seven satellite screens,” said the festival director, Tabitha Jackson, “this year’s festival expressed a powerful convergence; we were present, together, as a community connected through the work.”In addition to Apple’s purchase of “Cha Cha,” other high-profile sales included two by Searchlight Pictures: the horror film “Fresh” from the director Mimi Cave and “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande,” starring Emma Thompson as a repressed widow who hires a sex worker. Both films will bypass theaters and debut on Hulu in the U.S.Sony Pictures Classics picked up “Living,” the remake of the Akira Kurosawa film “Ikiru” starring Bill Nighy as a civil servant who discovers he has a fatal illness; and IFC Films will release “Resurrection,” starring Rebecca Hall, in theaters before it debuts on the streaming service Shudder. More

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      Sundance Canceled? Don’t Tell These Partygoers.

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      The film festival went virtual again this year. But that didn’t stop some veteran attendees from having a good time in Park City anyway.When the Sundance Film Festival announced that it was canceling all in-person events because of the pandemic two weeks before it began, festival goers could be forgiven for thinking the party was over.There would be no screenings at the Egyptian Theater in Park City, Utah. No swag lounges along Main Street. No celebrity sightings at the Tao Park City pop-up club.But that didn’t stop Rebecca Fielding, 34, who handles client engagement for an interior design firm in Manhattan, from boarding her flight. When she arrived last weekend, she spent the day at a spa before hobnobbing at a Main Street club with hundreds of inebriated people dancing on banquettes and bumping into each other on the dance floor.“This is so fun,” she said, making her way to join them. “So many people are here.”Sundance may have gone virtual this year (screenings through Jan. 30 have moved online), but many film buffs and hangers-on still made the pilgrimage to Park City. Despite the lack of official events, they found ways to party, schmooze and even watch movies.“This has been bigger than in past years,” said Jennifer 8. Lee, 45, a documentary film producer from New York City who has organized housing and activities for hundreds of film lovers during Sundance since 2007. “I was surprised by how many people were still willing to come. We even got extra people after the festival was canceled.”Signs for Sundance were still on display on Main Street in Park City, Utah.Lindsay D’Addato for The New York TimesThrough her film-buff group, Goodside, she had arranged for 80 to 100 people to stay across 12 houses in Park City; the guests had paid up to $500 a night for a room. (While Ms. Lee’s group allowed guests to buy out each others’ reservations, many hotel rooms and Airbnbs were nonrefundable or only eligible for a partial refund or credit when Sundance was canceled. Most airlines only offered flight credit.)Last Saturday night, Ms. Lee held a screening for the one of the festival’s most talked-about films — Lena Dunham’s “Sharp Stick,” a comedy about a 26-year-old babysitter in Los Angeles who loses her virginity to her employer — at her six-bedroom mountainside rental house on Woodside Avenue, a couple blocks from town.About 20 people piled onto couches and the floor, drinking cocktails and snacking on homemade dumplings and curried popcorn, while the film was projected on a screen that one of the guests had brought. To minimize risk, all guests had to take a Covid test.“There is enough critical mass that we can do our own events,” said Ms. Lee, a former reporter for The New York Times. Following the screening, there was a group discussion of the movie.Other houses took turns showing films and hosting dinner parties. “We are probably screening five movies a day across the houses,” Ms. Lee said.After the screenings, the action moved to restaurants and bars around town. At Courchevel Bistro, patrons in fur vests and leather pants dined on baked Brie and elk. At No Name Saloon Bar & Grill, a rowdy sports bar nearby, servers wore “Sundance 2022” shirts and served tequila shots to packs of guys in flannel shirts and cowboy boots.There seemed to be few of the celebrity-filled parties usually held during Sundance to promote films, fashion labels and other publicity-starved brands.A celebration at the new Vintage Room at the St. Regis Deer ValleyLindsay D’Addato for The New York Times“Without the festival, we just had to get more creative in finding ways to entertain them,” said Lucien Alwyn Campbell, a V.I.P. concierge for hire in Park City who estimates that 40 percent of his Sundance clients still made the journey this year. “There were four groups who went snowmobiling. We staged seven dinner parties last night with private chefs for clients who rented homes.”He also held house parties. “Usually, people go to the Tao pop-up during Sundance,” Mr. Campbell, 37, said, “but we obviously didn’t have it this year, so we had to create late-night places for people to dance.”Local bars and clubs, however, remained open and were, in fact, easier to patronize since there were no invitation-only parties to crash. Downstairs, a popular club on Main Street, had a special lineup of DJs and V.I.P. tables for as little as $100 for four.On Saturday night, DJ Spider played a mix of hip-hop and house music to a packed dance floor. By 10:30 p.m., the line to get in was 15 people deep; most of them appeared to be in their 20s and 30s, and many wore Canada Goose parkas and cowboy hats. Maskless partygoers crammed the small dance floor until the 2 a.m. closing time.“Coming through,” said a young server in a tight black ensemble, screaming over the song “I’m Too Sexy” as she fought her way through the crowd with bottles of tequila.In part because it was so last-minute, this year’s cancellation of Sundance did not seem to hurt local businesses as much as it did the previous year, said Brooks Kirchheimer, president-elect of the Park City Chamber of Commerce. “This has actually been great for Park City,” he said. “Usually people come to town and just sit in a movie theater for eight days. Now these people are seeing Park City in a different light. They are doing different activities.”Would-be Sundance attendees actually hit the slopes this year.Lindsay D’Addato for The New York TimesThat includes skiing.Many visitors talked about how they actually had time to hit the slopes this year, and how nice it was to take advantage of Park City’s terrific skiing and its lift along Main Street.“I’ve been coming on and off to Sundance since 2001,” said Elisa Briles, 47, a communications manager for a San Francisco tech company. “This is the first time I’ve ever focus on skiing during Sundance. Usually I am too busy going to movies and parties.”Ms. Briles was taking an afternoon break at a bar at the St. Regis Deer Valley near the Vintage Room, a large, greenhouse-like lounge that opened last month atop Deer Valley. On that Friday afternoon, the lounge was packed with would-be festival goers dressed in metallic snowsuits and furry boots, guzzling Champagne and oysters.“I wouldn’t say it feels like a movie festival here, but it definitely feels like a really fun ski weekend,” Ms. Briles said. “I’m still with my friends. We are still meeting really cool people.” More