By: Henry J. Fromage –
Sundance Day 3 is another hodgepodge of next year’s Oscar shortlisted documentaries and festival award-winning dramas.
39. Little Death
With all the hype around A.I. these days, it’s inevitable that we’ll start seeing it show up in our movies, and this NEXT section selection makes bold use of cartoony, uniquely-wacked out A.I. image generation in the dreams and hallucinations of a prescription drug-addled hack TV writer with pretensions of more (played by David Schwimmer and Gabby Hoffman.. you’ll see). That’s only half of the film, though, as the second half changes perspectives radically. Not always subtle, but never boring. Three Beers.
40. Brief History of a Family
This icy Chinese drama plays out like a Eastern Yorgos Lanthimos flick, as a young high schooler from a broken home starts to interlope into a rich family of one of his peers. It’s small-scale at first, joining for dinner and having chats with the parents, but it becomes clear he more fits the archetype of studious, devoted son than their real son, or perhaps strives to on purpose. There’s a cold arthouse remove that keeps you guessing at character motivations, although it tends towards ambiguity at times when it would be more impactful to be more clear. Three Beers.
41. Every Little Thing
This beautiful doc follows Hollywood resident Terry Manear, who’s devoted her current life to nursing injured hummingbirds back to health, to the point that everyone around knows she’s the one to go to. She’s unromantic about the cruel realities of nature, but tender beneath that all business veneer, and her interactions with and extensive knowledge about these miraculous little creatures are something to behold. A Toast.
42. Black Box Diaries
This documentary plays like a tense political thriller, but in this case the intrepid and indomitable reporter investigating a terrible crime and the coverup that goes all the way to the top is the woman who it was perpetrated on. Shiori Ito was raped by a high profile journalist who was friends with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, and her case is initially shut down for “lack of evidence”. So, she finds herself investigating her own sexual assault, build a damning case instead, or in spite, of the authorities. Her public willingness to speak out about her sexual assault, particularly against someone in a position of power, was nigh unprecedented in Japan, and it’s a testament to her singular bravery and fortitude that despite the obvious and extreme distress it has and continues to cause here, she hasn’t and won’t stop fighting for the truth. A Toast.
43. Ibelin
This emotional documentary tells of the life of Mats Steen, a young man who succumbed at 25 years old to Duchenne muscular dystrophy after living years hardly ever leaving his room, playing games like World of Warcraft on his computer. His parents grieved his never having gotten to fall in love, or form friendships, or make an impact on the lives of those outside his family, but when they place an epitaph up on his blog, kind words from around the globe start to pour in. It turns out he had done all of those things, in spades, in his online life as ‘Ibelin’, and this documentary is a wonderful cross-media examination of this impactful and beautiful life. A Toast.
44. Girls Will Be Girls
This Indian drama follows a high schooler who’s just been voted the first girl to serve as prefect (a mix between top student and faculty discipline assistant). She’s a devoted and intelligent student, but when a boy who’s been living abroad in Hong Kong shows up, some new flutters emerge, to her mother’s chagrin, who nonetheless can’t helped but be charmed by him a bit as well. This is a perceptive and unflinching, particularly for this film market, drama about mother/daughter relations and the unignorable call of biology at this age. Two Beers.
45. Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat
Woodrow Wilson famously called Birth of a Nation “like writing history with lightning”, which is… unfortunate. But the quote jumped to mind when watching this electrifying documentary about a brief period in the late 50s where newly admitted African and Asian countries threatened to upset the balance of power in the United Nations, and a Patrice Lumumba-led Congo promised to rally a unified bloc of African nations to throw off the shackles of colonialism once and for all. I think director Johan Grimonprez’s conceit of infusing his heavily annotated and often shockingly damning film with period jazz as a way of demonstrating popular culture’s colonialist tendencies and the ways the CIA used famous artists giving concerts in Africa as a kind of trojan horse is more veneer than truly substantive, but it’s one hell of a mix regardless. When you see Africans today extolling the virtues of Putin’s Russia, this film will make it amply clear why. A Toast.
46. Reinas
Peruvian cinema is an automatic yes from me, and you’re almost certainly looking at their International Film submission here, and quite possibly their first to make a shortlist since 2009’s eventual nominee The Milk of Sorrow. Set in the turbulent 90s, where inflation ultimately killed the currency and violent Marxist groups encroached on the relative peacefulness of Lima with car-bombings of police stations, the story is more of a domestic drama where that is coloring. A deadbeat dad shows back up to get to know his two daughters better just as they’re about to imminently emigrate to the United States. His ex-wife needs his signature for them all to be able to leave the country, though, and he and the daughters aren’t entirely on the same page with the plan. A solid, well-acted drama with clear stakes and understandable motivations from all involved. Two Beers.
