Sundance Film Festival (Park City, Utah)

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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

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      At Sundance, Two Films Look at Abortion and the Jane Collective

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      In the years leading up to Roe v. Wade, a Chicago group helped thousands of women obtain the procedure safely. A documentary and a feature tell their story.Judith Arcana was 27 and recently separated from her husband when she began driving women surreptitiously for safe — but illegal — abortions. The year was 1970, she was an out-of-work teacher on the South Side of Chicago, and she was spending her days counseling women in need.“I don’t think we were crazy,” said Arcana, now 78. “I don’t think we were stupid. I think that we had found something that was so important, so useful in the lives of women and girls.”“We were radicalized in the arena of women’s bodies,” she said. “We knew that what we were doing was good work in the world. And we knew that it was illegal.”Arcana was part of the Jane Collective, a disparate, rotating group of women who ensured safe abortions for thousands of women in Chicago between 1968 and 1973. Despite the law, women were still getting abortions. But they were often performing them on themselves and winding up in the hospital, or paying the mob with no guarantee of survival.During these years, because of Arcana and other women, if you lived in Chicago and needed help, you could call a number and talk with a woman who would offer a safer alternative. Members of the collective provided counseling and arranged the procedures, which they eventually administered — 11,000 all told during that period. But then in 1972, Arcana and six other members of the group were arrested, each charged with 11 counts of abortion or conspiracy to commit an abortion with a possible 10-year sentence for each charge. Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision issued in 1973, saved them all.Mugshots of members of the Jane Collective who were arrested in 1972. HBONow, close to 50 years later, members of the collective are sharing their stories in a pair of movies at the Sundance Film Festival, which begins Thursday: the HBO documentary “The Janes”; and a fictionalized account titled “Call Jane,” starring Elizabeth Banks and Sigourney Weaver, and looking for distribution.The movies are debuting at a particularly crucial time for abortion rights. The Supreme Court heard arguments in December over the legality of a Mississippi law that bans abortion after 15 weeks; it is expected to issue a decision this summer. Should the court uphold the law, the ruling would be at odds with Roe v. Wade, which declared abortion a constitutional right and forbade states from banning the procedure before fetal viability (23 weeks). The Sundance filmmakers make no secret that they support abortion rights but say they want their work to show the complexity of the subject.In “Call Jane,” Banks plays Joy, a mother and housewife who seeks out an illegal abortion after learning that her pregnancy is life-threatening — her attempt to secure one legally having been denied by an all-male hospital board. The movie’s director, Phyllis Nagy (whose credits include the screenplay for “Carol”), said she wished she could show it to the Supreme Court’s conservative justices. “I would sit there and say, ‘Now, talk to me,’ and it wouldn’t make any difference, probably,” she said. “But artists need to start having the kinds of political conversations with society that aren’t didactic,” she added. “Nothing else has worked.”Elizabeth Banks in “Call Jane,” about a woman trying to terminate a life-threatening pregnancy. Wilson Webb, via Sundance InstituteThe makers of “The Janes” hope those with differing views will allow themselves a look at life before Roe v. Wade. “This is a glimpse at history; I don’t think it’s an advocacy film,” said Tia Lessin, who directed with Emma Pildes, whose father used to be married to Arcana. Arcana’s son, Daniel, and Pildes are producers on the film. Lessin added, “It’s a real life story about what happened and the lengths that women went to to have abortions and to enable other women to have abortions.”“Do I hope that people’s takeaway will be ‘let’s not go back there’? Sure. But I really hope it moves people to engage in conversation. Love the film, hate the film,” she said before Pildes jumped in: “Talk about the issue.”And there is plenty to discuss.The Jane Collective was formed when a college student, Heather Booth, now 76, received a desperate call from a friend looking for an abortion. Booth, active in the civil rights movement, found a doctor willing to help and passed along the information. “I made what I thought was a one-time arrangement,” she said in an interview. Soon another woman called. Then another. Booth found herself negotiating fees and learning the intricacies of the procedure so she could counsel women. After a few years, Booth, by then a mother working on her graduate degree at the University of Chicago, recruited others to fulfill the growing need.“I was working full time. The number of calls were increasing. It was certainly too much for one person,” she added.Marie Leaner, now 80, was raised Roman Catholic and taught to believe that abortion was a sin. At a community center on the West Side of Chicago, she ran a program for teenage mothers. “I just thought it was atrocious that these women didn’t want to carry the babies but they felt this was their punishment for being in love or being sexually involved with someone,” she recalled. “I decided I wanted to do something about it.”She offered up her apartment for the procedures and occasionally held the hands of the women who came through. As one of the few Black women in the group, she said, “I knew that Black and brown people wouldn’t partake of the service if they couldn’t see themselves involved in it.”The State of Abortion in the U.S.Card 1 of 5Abortion at the Supreme Court. More

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      ‘Three Minutes: A Lengthening’ Looks at Jewish Life Before Nazi Invasion

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      A documentary based on a home movie shot by an American in 1938 provides a look at the vibrancy of a Jewish community in Europe just before the Holocaust.AMSTERDAM — Glenn Kurtz found the film reel in a corner of his parents’ closet in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., in 2009. It was in a dented aluminum canister.Florida’s heat and humidity had nearly solidified the celluloid into a mass “like a hockey puck,” Kurtz said. But someone had transferred part of it onto VHS tape in the 1980s, so Kurtz could see what it contained: a home movie titled “Our Trip to Holland, Belgium, Poland, Switzerland, France and England, 1938.”The 16-millimeter film, made by his grandfather, David Kurtz, on the eve of World War II, showed the Alps, quaint Dutch villages and three minutes of footage of a vibrant Jewish community in a Polish town.Old men in yarmulkes, skinny boys in caps, girls with long braids. Smiling and joking. People pour through the large doors of a synagogue. There’s some shoving in a cafe and then, that’s it. The footage ends abruptly.Kurtz, nevertheless, understood the value of the material as evidence of Jewish life in Poland just before the Holocaust. It would take him nearly a year to figure it out, but he discovered that the footage depicted Nasielsk, his grandfather’s birthplace, a town about 30 miles northwest of Warsaw that some 3,000 Jews called home before the war.Fewer than 100 would survive it.Now, the Dutch filmmaker Bianca Stigter has used the fragmentary, ephemeral footage to create “Three Minutes: A Lengthening,” a 70-minute feature film that helps to further define what and who were lost.“It’s a short piece of footage, but it’s amazing how much it yields,” Stigter said in an interview in Amsterdam recently. “Every time I see it, I see something I haven’t really seen before. I must have seen it thousands and thousands of times, but still, I can always see a detail that has escaped my attention before.”Almost as unusual as the footage is the journey it took before gaining wider exposure. All but forgotten within his family, the videotape was transferred to DVD and sent to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington in 2009.“We knew it was unique,” said Leslie Swift, chief of the film, oral history and recorded sound branch of the museum. “I immediately communicated with him and said, ‘If you have the original film, that’s what we want.’”The Holocaust museum was able to restore and digitize the film, and it posted the footage on its website. At the time, Kurtz didn’t know where it had been shot, nor did he know the names of any of the people in the town square. His grandfather had emigrated from Poland to the United States as a child and had died before he was born.Thus began a four-year process of detective work, which led Kurtz to write an acclaimed book, “Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film,” published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2014.Glenn Kurtz, who found the original footage shot by his grandfather in his parents’ closet in Florida, later wrote a book about the significance of the film.Stigter relied on the book in completing the film, which is co-produced by her husband, Steve McQueen, the British artist and Academy Award-winning director of “12 Years a Slave,” and narrated by Helena Bonham Carter. It has garnered attention in documentary circles and has been screened at Giornate degli Autori, an independent film festival held in parallel with the Venice film fest; the Toronto International Film Festival; Telluride Film Festival; the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam; and DOC NYC. It was recently selected for this month’s Sundance Film Festival.Nasielsk, which had been home to Jews for centuries, was overtaken on Sept. 4, 1939, three days after the German invasion of Poland. Three months later, on Dec. 3, the entire Jewish population was rounded up and expelled. People were forced into cattle cars, and traveled for days without food and water, to the towns of Lukow and Miedzyrzec, in the Lublin region of Nazi-occupied Poland. From there, they were mostly deported to the Treblinka extermination camp.“When you see it, you want to scream to these people run away, go, go, go,” Stigter said. “We know what happens and they obviously don’t know what starts to happen, just a year later. That puts a tremendous pressure on those images. It is inescapable.”Stigter stumbled across the footage on Facebook in 2014 and found it instantly mesmerizing, especially because much of it was shot in color. “My first idea was just to prolong the experience of seeing these people,” she said. “For me, it was very clear, especially with the children, that they wanted to be seen. They really look at you; they try to stay in the camera’s frame.”A historian, author and film critic for a Dutch national newspaper, NRC Handelsblad, Stigter worked on this film, her directorial debut, for five years. She started it after the International Film Festival Rotterdam invited her to produce a short video essay for its Critic’s Choice program. Instead of choosing a feature film, she decided to explore this found footage. After making a 25-minute “filmic essay,” shown at the Rotterdam festival in 2015, she received support to expand it into a feature film.“Three Minutes: A Lengthening” never steps out of the footage. Viewers never see the town of Nasielsk as it is today, or the faces of the interviewees as talking heads. Stigter tracks out, zooms in, stops, rewinds; she homes in on the cobblestones of a square, on the types of caps worn by the boys, and on the buttons of jackets and shirts, which were made in a nearby factory owned by Jews. She creates still portraits of each of the 150 faces — no matter how vague or blurry — and puts names to some of them.An image from the home movie showing Moszek Tuchendler, 13, on the left, who survived the Holocaust and became Maurice Chandler. He was able to identify many other people in the footage of the town where he grew up.United States Holocaust Memorial MuseumMaurice Chandler, a Nasielsk survivor who is in his 90s, is one of the smiling teenage boys in the footage. He was identified after a granddaughter in Detroit recognized him in a digitized clip on the Holocaust museum’s website.Chandler, who was born Moszek Tuchendler, lost his entire family in the Holocaust; he said the footage helped him recall a lost childhood. He joked that he could finally prove to his children and grandchildren “that I’m not from Mars.” He was also able to help identify seven other people in the film.Kurtz, an author and journalist, had discovered a tremendous amount through his own research, but Stigter helped solve some additional mysteries. He couldn’t decipher the name on a grocery store sign, because it was too blurry to read. Stigter found a Polish researcher who figured out the name, one possible clue to the identity of the woman standing in the doorway.Leslie Swift said that the David Kurtz footage is one of the “more often requested films” from the Holocaust Museum’s moving picture archives, but most often it is used by documentary filmmakers as stock footage, or background imagery, to indicate prewar Jewish life in Poland “in a generic way,” she said.What Kurtz’s book, and Stigter’s documentary do, by contrast, is to explore the material itself to answer the question “What am I seeing?” over and over again, she said. By identifying people and details of the life of this community, they manage to restore humanity and individuality.“We had to work as archaeologists to extract as much information out of this movie as possible,” Stigter said. “What’s interesting is that, at a certain moment you say, ‘we can’t go any further; this is where it stops.’ But then you discover something else.” More

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      Sundance Film Festival Unveils 2022 Lineup

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      Films addressing racism and abortion are among the 82 titles that will screen when the event returns in person in January.When members of the independent film community descend on Park City, Utah, for the Sundance Film Festival in January — after experiencing the previous edition virtually — they will bring with them movies that reflect the times from directors as varied as Lena Dunham and Michel Hazanavicius of “The Artist.”Culling from 3,762 feature submissions, the Sundance programmers chose a diverse slate of 82 titles — including 39 by first-time feature directors — in a variety of genres that explore myriad themes, like tackling grief and battling the status quo.“We’ve been through a lot these past two years and I think that has had a huge influence on what artists are concentrating on,” Sundance’s director of programming, Kim Yutani, said. “Some of that is fighting the system, really calling into question institutions, corporations. We saw a lot of films that are looking at the fight for democracy.”Examples include Rory Kennedy’s documentary “Downfall: The Case Against Boeing,” from Netflix, which investigates the two Boeing 737 Max crashes that killed 346 people; “The Exiles,” a nonfiction film centering on three dissidents after the Tiananmen Square massacre; and two films that examine the Jane Collective — an underground group of women from Chicago who between 1969 and 1973 helped women secure safe, illegal abortions before Roe v. Wade was handed down. One, the documentary “The Janes,” was directed by Tia Lessin and Emma Pildes, with HBO producing. The other, “Call Jane,” is a fictional feature from Phyllis Nagy (the screenwriter of “Carol”) with a cast that includes Elizabeth Banks and Sigourney Weaver.“It’s kind of the hallmark of independent work, isn’t it? A resistance to the status quo,” said the festival director, Tabitha Jackson. “This year, it’s reflecting on the fact that we are in this age of reckoning, this age of accountability.”Three films take on that reckoning, examining the insidious nature of racism and privilege through the lens of Black women: “Alice,” a complex take on slavery, stars Keke Palmer and Common, and was written and directed by Krystin Ver Linden. “Master,” a film from Mariama Diallo starring Regina Hall, focuses on three women trying to find their place at an elite New England university. (Amazon will distribute.) And “Nanny,” by the writer-director Nikyatu Jusu, follows an undocumented woman from Senegal who works for a well-off couple in New York City; Anna Diop (“Titans”) and Michelle Monaghan star. All three films, part of the U.S. dramatic competition, hail from first-timers.Of the submissions to Sundance this year, only 28 percent were from women. Yet among all the features selected, 52 percent were directed by women. When asked whether the programmers decided to boost women auteurs over men, they steered around the question, saying they are always looking to promote female filmmakers. Jackson added: “The slightly depressing fact is that the figure of 28 percent submissions from women has remained pretty static across the years. It is a figure that we would wish to see higher because of what it indicates about the state of the industry. It’s surprising that so few are submitting.”Kristine Froseth and Jon Bernthal in the Lena Dunham film “Sharp Stick.”Sundance InstituteThe majority of the films at the festival, which runs Jan. 20-30, will arrive without distribution, a fact that Jackson calls “kind of cool.” But they’re also debuting at a time when theatrical distribution is still depressed amid consumers’ fears about returning to the movies. Though the market was held virtually in 2020, Apple paid a festival record $25 million to acquire “CODA,” the drama about a hearing daughter and her deaf family that was just named one of the American Film Institute’s 10 best films of the year. The industry will be watching the Sundance sales titles closely in January for clues to the health of both the streaming and theatrical markets.While sales are always dependent on how a film plays in the snowy confines of Park City, buyers may be leaning toward the better-known directors and actors, like Dunham, who is returning to the independent film scene 12 years after “Tiny Furniture” with “Sharp Stick,” about a naïve young Hollywood outsider who has an affair with her older boss. Dunham plays a supporting role in the film alongside Jon Bernthal and Jennifer Jason Leigh.Hazanavicius is making his Sundance debut a decade after he won the best director Oscar for his black-and-white silent dramedy. His new “Final Cut” is a horror film featuring his wife and “Artist” star, Bérénice Bejo, in the story of a small crew attacked by real zombies while shooting a low-budget zombie movie.Both the Dunham and Hazanavicius titles will debut in the Premieres section, which is usually reserved for more high-profile work. That includes Jesse Eisenberg’s feature directing debut, “When You Finish Saving the World,” which stars Julianne Moore and Finn Wolfhard of “Stranger Things” and was produced by the indie label A24.Other buzzy titles include “Am I OK?,” starring Dakota Johnson in the feature directing debut of Tig Notaro and her partner, Stephanie Allynne; “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande,” with Emma Thompson as a retired educator who hires a young sex worker to teach her his ways; and “Fresh,” an Adam McKay-produced film directed by Mimi Cave about a young woman (Daisy Edgar-Jones of “Normal People”) trying to survive the unusual appetites of her boyfriend (Sebastian Stan).Kanye West in the documentary “jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy.”NetflixDocumentaries are always a popular draw at Sundance, and this year looks strong with Netflix debuting “jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy” (directed by Clarence Simmons, known as Coodie, and Chike Ozah), with new footage of Kanye West covering 21 years, and Showtime premiering “We Need to Talk About Cosby,” W. Kamau Bell’s examination of the age-old question of whether you can or should separate the art from the artist.Two actresses-turned-directors are taking on the nonfiction genre for the first time. Amy Poehler is bringing the Amazon documentary “Lucy and Desi” and Eva Longoria Bastón has “La Guerra Civil,” about the rivalry between the boxers Oscar De La Hoya and Julio César Chávez.“These are two pleasant surprises in our programming,” Yutani said of the those two titles. “Eva’s is such an interesting project for her to be involved in, and Amy Poehler is the perfect person to tell that story.” More

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      In-Person New York Film Festival Unveils Lineup

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      Opening with Joel Coen’s “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” the event will include the body horror tale “Titane” and the Harlem Renaissance adaptation “Passing.”The Cannes Palme d’Or winner “Titane,” about a serial killer with rather unorthodox sexual tastes, and the Sundance critical hit “Passing,” an adaptation of the Harlem Renaissance novel by Nella Larsen, are among the highlights of the 59th New York Film Festival, organizers announced on Tuesday.After last year’s virtual edition, screenings will be held in-person with proof of vaccination required, although there will be some outdoor and virtual events. (More details on pandemic protocols will be released in the coming weeks.)As previously announced, “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” Joel Coen’s solo directing debut, will play opening night, Sept. 24. A take on the play by Shakespeare, it stars Denzel Washington in the title role and Frances McDormand, the director’s wife, as Lady Macbeth. The centerpiece of the festival will be “The Power of the Dog,” the first Jane Campion film in more than a decade, and “Parallel Mothers,” from Pedro Almodóvar, will be the closing-night title.The main slate will feature a mix of premieres and highlights from earlier festivals. The body horror tale “Titane” made headlines last month when its director, Julia Ducournau, became only the second woman (after Campion in 1993) to win Cannes’ top prize. Other titles from the French festival heading to New York include “Benedetta,” Paul Verhoeven’s 17th-century lesbian nun potboiler; “The Souvenir Part II,” Joanna Hogg’s follow-up to her 2019 semi-autobiographical drama about a film student in 1980s London; and “The Velvet Underground,” Todd Haynes’s documentary about the band synonymous with Andy Warhol’s New York.From Sundance, “Passing,” directed by the actress Rebecca Hall, who adapted Larsen’s 1929 novel, stars Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga as childhood friends who reconnect from opposite sides of the color line. Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s animated “Flee,” which won the Sundance world cinema documentary prize, focuses on a gay Afghan refugee in Denmark.Other titles of note include Mia Hansen-Love’s “Bergman Island,” starring Vicky Krieps and Tim Roth; the comic-drama “Hit the Road,” from Panah Panahi, son of the Iranian auteur Jafar Panahi; and two films from the Korean director Hong Sangsoo, “In Front of Your Face” and “Introduction.”Passes are on sale now; tickets to individual films will go on sale Sept. 7. Go to filmlinc.org for more details. More

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      After the First Virtual Sundance, Four Writers Compare Notes

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyAfter the First Virtual Sundance, Four Writers Compare NotesWhat worked online? What didn’t? And which films stood out? When you’re watching from home, feel-good movies don’t always have the same effect.Oscar the Grouch and his pal Caroll Spinney in the Sundance documentary, “Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street.”Credit…Luke GeissbühlerFeb. 5, 2021At this year’s Sundance Film Festival, there were the usual premieres and Q. and A. sessions, breakouts and crowd-pleasers — but no actual crowd. Because of the pandemic, the Park City, Utah, event was pared back and conducted largely online. None of the attendees could, say, meet by chance and talk movies, and it was hard to get a sense of the festival overall. To rectify that, we asked the co-chief film critic A.O. Scott, the critic Devika Girish, and the reporters Kyle Buchanan and Nicole Sperling to compare notes. Here are excerpts from their conversation:NICOLE SPERLING I’m usually whiny and cranky about Sundance. Why are we in the snow? Why January? I could see all you people in Los Angeles. But this year, I was so nostalgic for every bit of the experience. I wanted nothing more than to be packed into a crowded shuttle bus, talking to strangers about tiny movies. I was so craving everything Sundance stands for that I even tuned in to festival director Tabitha Jackson’s morning broadcasts, something I would never do if I was actually in Utah, just to get an inkling of that geeky film love I was missing.DEVIKA GIRISH It was fun to be able to browse the program so conveniently (and to “walk out” of a lost cause without stepping on people’s toes), but it made my festival FOMO much worse! In Park City, there are geographical and material limits on what you can see and when. And if you’re famished, you choose dinner over a movie. But at home, on my couch, armed with takeout, I had at least 25 films to choose from at any given moment during the weekend. I spent a lot of time dipping in and out, and worrying that I was making all the wrong choices.SPERLING The feel-good movies really felt good this year, like “Coda,” the opening-night narrative film centered on a hearing teenage girl raised by her deaf parents. People glommed onto what was really a traditional story of struggle and triumph told about a demographic we don’t know enough about, a reminder that a movie well made yet sentimental can really work at this moment. I think it’s also why the documentaries on Rita Moreno and “Sesame Street” played so well in my house. Both were filled with joy and hope, things that make a big difference during this endless lockdown.Emilia Jones in Sian Heder’s competition winner, “Coda.”Credit…Sundance InstituteA.O. SCOTT On its own terms, “Coda” feels like a Sundance movie with all the rough edges sanded off. It has a specific, American location, a coming-of-age narrative, a class angle and an important representational agenda, and it handles all of these elements with the utmost caution. Every beat of the plot was signaled far in advance, and arrived with the assurance that nothing too terrible would happen. The performances of the deaf and hearing actors together were wonderful, but the conventional story sold out the reality of the characters’ lives. This will make for perfectly unobjectionable family television viewing, but that’s not necessarily what I look for at Sundance.KYLE BUCHANAN I agree with Tony. “Coda” is effective the same way a sitcom is effective, but the swerves and texture of real life are sadly lacking. It plays well because the actors are committed, but I was embarrassed at some of the hacky, seen-it-a-million-times scenarios they were called upon to animate.SPERLING: “Coda” won one of the grand-jury prizes and sold for $25 million. It will be interesting to see if the feel-good sentiment will remain when Apple decides to release the film.SCOTT I understand the appeal of “Coda,” but I’m still a bit startled at the scale of its triumph and the $25 million that Apple+ paid, partly because we will never know if it was a good investment. In previous years, the big-money Sundance sales were tested at the box office, where ordinary ticket-buyers validated or (more often) undermined the judgment of eager distributors.BUCHANAN To me, there was a letdown I felt watching many of these movies: The settings were gratifyingly specific, but the structure was straight out of Syd Field. I’m thinking of “Jockey,” a well-made horse-racing drama that nevertheless feels like the studio-notes version of Chloé Zhao’s “The Rider,” or even “Pleasure,” a clever and explicit treatise on pornography from the director Ninja Thyberg.“Pleasure” is at its best when it follows its lead character — an aspiring adult-film actress named Bella Cherry — through a series of naturalistic encounters that explore consent and coercion on triple-X sets. So why, in a film this daring, is Bella’s character arc so devoid of surprises? “Pleasure” continually telegraphs who Bella will betray and how in order to get ahead, and I kept waiting for a swerve that never came. (A movie this nervy should not be stealing its plot beats from “Showgirls.”)GIRISH One of my few surprise discoveries in the fiction slate was “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair,” a disquieting little film about a lonely, internet-obsessed teenager that hit me hard in my own solitude. But my highlights were the Opening Night documentaries. Questlove’s “Summer of Soul” brought the Harlem Cultural Festival of 1969 into my living room, with rousing performances by Nina Simone, Stevie Wonder, Mahalia Jackson and more. I was most captivated by the shots of the concert’s massive audience: A wistful spectacle of collective joy, grief and resistance.Nanfu Wang’s “In the Same Breath,” an incredibly thoughtful, personal and well-reported look at the propaganda-fueled narratives surrounding Covid-19 in China and the United States, offered a sobering full-circle moment. Starting the festival with these documentaries was a solemn reminder of why we were attending Sundance 2021 from home, and what (despite some of the perks of a virtual festival) we lose when we can no longer gather together in space and time.BUCHANAN Only the documentaries managed to truly keep me on my toes. There’s a moment in “Flee,” about an Afghan refugee smuggled to Europe, when the protagonist admits to family members for the first time that he is gay. I immediately braced myself for how this would go in any other Sundance movie, but what actually happened next — a reveal I will not spoil — caught me off guard and moved me to tears. Minor miracles can happen when independent films shake off the yoke of plot and let themselves be guided by the breath of real life.SPERLING “In the Same Breath” really stuck with me. So did Peter Nicks’s “Homeroom,” which tracked a group of activist high school seniors in Oakland last spring, as they watched their final year from their bedrooms and grappled with the killing of George Floyd. Sundance’s curation this year felt spot-on to me: fitting the festival squarely into the moment we are living through, not shying away from the momentous problems we are facing, while also offering some hope.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Questlove’s ‘Summer of Soul’ Wins at Sundance

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyQuestlove’s ‘Summer of Soul’ Wins at SundanceThe documentary took home two prizes while “Coda” won several honors for its fictional tale of a hearing teenager in a deaf family.Sly Stone in the documentary  “Summer of Soul,” about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival.Credit…Mass Distraction MediaFeb. 2, 2021A documentary about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, often called the Black Woodstock, and a feature about a hearing daughter in a deaf family took top honors Tuesday night at the first virtual edition of the Sundance Film Festival.In the nonfiction category, both the U.S. Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award went to “Summer of Soul,” a potent mix of never-before-seen concert footage and history lesson by the first-time filmmaker Ahmir Thompson, better known as Questlove.Among dramatic features, both the U.S. Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award went to “Coda,” an acronym for “child of deaf adults.” Sian Heder (“Tallulah”) wrote and directed the crowd-pleasing tale starring Emilia Jones as a teenager who serves as an interpreter for her working-class family in Gloucester, Mass. Additionally, Heder won the directing award for American features, and the film won a special honor for its acting ensemble.In the world-cinema feature competition, “Hive,” which follows the wife of a soldier missing in the Kosovo war, won both the grand jury and audience prizes as well as the directing award for its filmmaker, Blerta Basholli. Among world-cinema documentaries, “Flee,” Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s animated look at an Afghan refugee in Denmark, won the grand jury prize. The audience award went to “Writing With Fire,” from Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh, about India’s only newspaper run by women of the Dalit, or “untouchable” caste.Other directing winners included, for American documentaries, Natalia Almada, whose “Users” examines the human costs of technology, and in the world cinema documentary category, Hogir Hirori for “Sabaya,” about an effort to save Yazidi women and girls held captive by ISIS.Because of the pandemic, this edition of the festival, which officially ends Wednesday, was pared back and conducted largely online. For a complete list of winners, see sundance.org.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More