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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

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      Sundance Film Festival: ‘Nanny’ Leads a Parade of Scares

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      When a character took a severed human leg out of a fridge in the horror movie “Fresh,” I laughed then hit pause. I had that luxury because, like everyone else this year, I didn’t have to fly to Utah for the Sundance Film Festival but attended this impressively sanguineous edition at home. So I just fast-forwarded to the leg chopper’s grisly comeuppance. As to the movie, it will do fine without my love: It’s already racked up positive reviews and will be released on Hulu, which is owned by Disney because, well, sometimes dreams really do come true.That human shank was part of a colorful parade of body parts on display at this year’s Sundance, which included a veritable charnel house of severed limbs, decapitated heads and disemboweled guts. The specter of the horror maestro David Cronenberg haunts “Resurrection,” a not entirely successful creepfest with an excellent Rebecca Hall, while other movies owed a conspicuous debt to Jordan Peele’s 2017 Sundance hit “Get Out,” notably “Master” (about a Black student and professor at a white-dominated college) and “Emergency,” an entertaining nail-biter about three friends trapped in a white nightmare.A scene from the comedy-turned-thriller “Emergency.”via Sundance InstituteI didn’t love “Fresh,” which uses a captivity freakout to dubious feminist ends, though I may have enjoyed it with more company. Watching horror movies alone isn’t the same as being in a theater filled with other people, including at Sundance. There, the audience tends to be already super-amped-up and excited just to be in the room, seeing a movie for the first time and often with the filmmakers in attendance. The hothouse atmosphere of festivals can be misleading and turn mediocrities into events, certainly, but the noisy clamor of such hype is always outweighed by the joys of experiencing discoveries and revelations with others.This is the second year that Sundance has been forced to jettison its in-person plans because of the pandemic. The festival had instituted sound vax and mask protocols, and the Utah county where Sundance takes place has a higher vaccination rate than either New York or Los Angeles. But Utah also had the third-highest rate of Covid-19 infections in the country as of Monday, as The Salt Lake Tribune recently reported. And, frankly, given how often I had returned home from Sundance with a bad cold or the flu (including a whopper of a mystery bug that flattened me in 2020), I didn’t bother to book another overpriced condo.Rebecca Hall in “Resurrection,” a creepfest with a debt to David Cronenberg.Wyatt Garfield, via Sundance InstituteInstead, I moved into my living room, hooked my laptop to my TV and streamed from the festival’s easy-to-use website. In between movies, I texted some of the same colleagues I hang out with at Sundance when we’re in Park City. In 2020, we had shared our love for “Time,” Garrett Bradley’s documentary about a family’s struggle with the American prison system. (I sat out the festival’s 2021 edition.) This year, we again traded must-sees and must-avoids. “I told you how awful it is,” my friend chided me about “You’ll Never Be Alone,” a shocker about a witch. She had, sigh. We also kept returning to a favorite: “Wow Nanny,” she texted. Oh, yes.A standout in this year’s U.S. dramatic competition, “Nanny” was another one of the selections that I deeply regretted not seeing with an audience, for both its visceral shocks and its lush beauty. In this case, I would have stayed put in my seat, just as I did at home, where pesky domestic distractions can make paying attention a struggle, especially when a movie isn’t strong enough to fully hold you. That was never a problem with “Nanny,” which kept me rapt from the start with its visuals and mysteries, its emotional depths and the tight control that the writer-director Nikyatu Jusu maintains on her material.Set in New York, the story centers on Aisha (the excellent Anna Diop), a Senegalese immigrant who’s recently accepted a nanny position. Her new workplace, a luxurious sprawl as sterile as a magazine layout, sets off immediate alarm bells, as do the overeager smiles and obsessive instructions of her tightly wound white employer, Amy (Michelle Monaghan). The setup recalls that of “Black Girl,” the Senegalese auteur Ousmane Sembène’s 1966 classic film about the horrors of postcolonialism. It’s an obvious aesthetic and political touchstone for Jusu, who nevertheless quickly and confidently spins off in her own direction.Like a number of other selections in this year’s festival, “Nanny” is a horror movie with a profound difference; unlike too many other filmmakers, Jusu never becomes boxed in by genre. Instead, horror-film conventions are part of an expansive tool kit that includes narrative ellipses, an expressionistic use of bold color and figures from African folklore, including a trickster in spider form and a water spirit called Mami Wata. Here, clichés like the oppressive house, controlling employer and vulnerable heroine prove far more complex than they appear, having been skillfully reimagined for this anguished, haunted story.Women in peril are familiar screen figures, but this year there was some honest variety in the kinds of directors putting knives to throats. At one point — in between streaming, smiling, grimacing, weeping and occasionally eww-ing at all the blood and guts — I realized that I hadn’t bothered to count the number of women and people of color in this year’s program. I was seeing enough fictional stories and documentaries with a range of different types of people that I hadn’t started compulsively profiling the filmmakers. Yes, there were a few Sundance reliables, the eternally cute and kooky white children of Indiewood, but not enough to trigger you about the old days when the festival was clogged with Tarantino clones.The drama “Call Jane” was one of two Sundance films about the Jane Collective, a group that helped women in Chicago obtain safe abortions.Wilson Webb, via Sundance InstituteThe auteurist touchstone at Sundance these days is Jordan Peele, whose radical use of the genre continues to feel relevant to the traumas of contemporary life. The preponderance of frightful tales in this program is obviously a matter of availability, cinematic copycatting and curatorial discretion. Given all the onscreen evisceration this year, I would imagine that the festival director Tabitha Jackson and the director of programming Kim Yutani have strong stomachs and senses of humor. That they’re also feminists surely, if gratifyingly, goes without saying and may help explain why there are three movies in the slate about abortion.The two I saw — the well-acted drama “Call Jane” and the solid, informative documentary “The Janes” — aren’t horror movies in the usual sense, but like more conventional examples of the genre, they also turn on the body, and specifically the female body, in peril. Each movie revisits the Jane Collective, a group of women and some men who from 1968 to 1973 helped women in Chicago obtain safe abortions before the procedure was a Constitutional right. And while the image of one member (Elizabeth Banks) in “Call Jane” learning how to administer abortions by practicing on pumpkins may not have been a Halloween joke, I laughed anyway.On a conspicuous, quantifiable level, this year’s program reaffirms that a genuine diversity of filmmakers also yields a welcome cinematic multiplicity. It can be easy to think of representation as an abstraction, as a political cudgel, a tedious rallying cry, a bore. Again and again this year, the sight of all these bodies, particularly of women — including Emma Thompson letting it all hang out beautifully in the gentle comedy “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande” — was a reminder that these representations aren’t boxes that were ticked off. They are the embodied truths, pleasures and terrors of women and people of color who, having long served as canvases for fantasies of otherness, have seized control of their own images. More

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      Documentary Critical of Disney, From the Disney Family

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      A harsh portrait of pay inequality at the company, premiering at Sundance on Monday, was directed by the granddaughter of one of the founders.Three years ago, Abigail E. Disney began to publicly excoriate the Walt Disney Company for its “obscene” pay inequality, with Robert A. Iger, who was then chief executive, at one end of the scale and hourly theme park workers at the other. The company founded by her grandfather and great-uncle repeatedly returned fire, at one point calling her assertions a “gross and unfair exaggeration of the facts.”But Ms. Disney has refused to back down, even though the company recently agreed to a 16 percent raise for certain theme park workers. In fact, she is escalating her campaign — and, for the first time, bringing along two of her three siblings.“The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales,” an activist-minded documentary about the pay gap between corporate haves and have-nots, will premiere on Monday as part of the Sundance Film Festival, which is being held digitally because of the pandemic. Ms. Disney and Kathleen Hughes directed the film; Ms. Disney’s sister, Susan Disney Lord, and a brother, Tim, are among the executive producers. The movie positions the entertainment company that bears their name as “ground zero of the widening inequality in America.”To paint that harsh picture, Ms. Disney and Ms. Hughes profile four Disneyland custodians, who, at the time of filming (prepandemic), earned $15 an hour. They all struggle mightily with soaring housing costs in Southern California. One says he knows Disneyland workers who have had to “make a decision between medication or food.”Intermittently, the filmmakers cut to photographs of Mr. Iger, who was Disney’s chief executive from 2005 to 2020, a period of stunning gains for stockholders (including Ms. Disney and other members of her family). Viewers are reminded that Disney awarded him a pay package in 2018 worth $65.6 million. Stock awards tied to the acquisition of 21st Century Fox assets made up 40 percent.Ms. Disney and her sister are then shown reminiscing about their grandfather, Roy O. Disney, who founded the company in 1923 with his brother, Walt. “I cannot see him taking $66 million home for a year’s work in the same year when, at the same company, people can’t afford food,” an indignant Ms. Disney says. Her sister responds, “That would never have happened — that would never have happened.”The Disney family has not been involved in managing Disney since their father, Roy E. Disney, stepped down from the board in 2003 and led a shareholder revolt that resulted in Mr. Iger’s ascension. Roy E. Disney died in 2009.The New York Times was allowed to view the film ahead of its premiere. Disney, which was not given early access, responded to queries about the film’s content and tone with the following statement:“The well-being and aspirations of our employees and cast will always be our top priority. We provide a leading and holistic employment package that includes competitive pay and comprehensive benefits for our cast members to grow their careers and care for their families. That starts with fair pay and leading entry wages, but also includes affordable medical coverage, access to tuition-free higher education, subsidized child care for eligible employees, as well as pathways for personal and professional development.”The statement added, “We are committed to building on our significant efforts to date.”Recent developments at Disneyland cut against the film’s narrative. In December, unions representing 9,500 custodians, ride operators and parking attendants ratified a new contract that lifts minimum starting pay to $18 an hour by 2023 — up from $15.45 last year, a 16 percent increase — and includes seniority-based bonuses. Disneyland has almost returned to full staffing after being closed for more than a year because of the pandemic, a spokeswoman said. The Anaheim resort employs roughly 30,000 people.Mr. Iger has also left the company. Ms. Disney tells viewers that she decided to make the film because she was frustrated and angry at his “curt” response to an email she sent him in 2018 about theme park employee pay. He declined to comment for this article.Ms. Disney has faced claims of discrimination and unfair treatment from former employees at one of her companies, Level Forward, which helps finance and produce entertainment projects with a social justice focus. (“There’s fair criticism in there,” Ms. Disney told The Hollywood Reporter last year.)In an interview via Zoom, Ms. Disney and Ms. Hughes, an Emmy-winning television newsmagazine producer, said they were “encouraged” by the Disneyland pay increase but said it wasn’t enough — that around $24 an hour was the needed “living wage.”“If everything’s different, then why did the new C.E.O. walk away with $32.5 million for a not very profitable year?” Ms. Disney said. She was referring to Bob Chapek. Disney reported $2 billion in profit for 2021, compared to a loss of $2.8 billion in 2020. Before the pandemic, Disney was generating $10 billion annually in profit.The filmmakers are still looking for a distributor. They hope to use Sundance to generate interest from Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV+ or another Disney competitor. In addition to its condemnation of Disney, “The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales” takes on a host of complicated subjects, including the evolution of capitalism, shifting government economic policies and racial injustice.“I want changes to the entire system — from C.E.O.s generally and from Wall Street especially — that result in the recognition of the dignity and humanity of every single worker,” Ms. Disney said.Ms. Disney is a prominent member of the Patriotic Millionaires, a group that pushes for higher taxes on businesses and wealthy individuals like themselves. As she has said over the years, it is a position that some of her own family members have a difficult time understanding. (That appears to include a brother, Roy P. Disney, who has supported Mr. Iger and is not involved with “The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales.”)Lest anyone think the film is her final word on the subject of pay inequality at Disney and other companies, she ends her documentary with these words: “To be continued.” More