Aisha Harris January 31, If Sundance stays in Utah, much of the festival will relocate to Salt Lake City, though current host Park City could still host some events. But the movies are why everyone comes together each year in this snowy ski town, and the slate offered some gems we could be talking about throughout the year, assuming they land distribution. Documentary Grand Jury Prize. You can see the full list of winners here. I was on the ground for the first few days of the fest and then caught up with more films at home during the virtual portion.
Here are a few of my favorites. As the true crime genre has exploded in popularity, plenty of valid critiques have framed it as a form of morally dubious schadenfreude, murder-as-entertainment, as it were. Two excellent documentaries at Sundance this year took unique approaches to questioning the form.
Gandbhir won the U. Documentary Directing Award. Both actors have been around for a minute Pellerin was recently in Becoming Karl Lagerfeld and Madekwe was in Saltburn , but their moody chemistry together as the star-struck barnacle and the self-serious artist crackles on screen, and could very well mark a turning point in their careers.
Du Bois which inspired a book by Henry Louis Gates and Anthony Appiah decades later as a basis to traverse eras, continents, and historical figures. A deliberately-paced Afrofuturistic narrative thread involving an international cruise liner is opaque and meandering, occasionally to the point of being inaccessible in a Terrence Malick-y way.
But its most affecting moments are the essayistic montages of archival footage, which stitch together a clear-eyed mediation on memory, lineage, and the meaning of freedom. I really dug the war satire Atropia , the feature debut of writer-director Hailey Gates. The film and especially the excellent Shawkat juggles a bunch of different tones β farce, romance, social critique β and it succeeds at some better than others. Teenager Natalia Dolores Oliverio harbors a deep crush on her friend, but her plans to pursue him romantically are thrown out of whack when an older woman enters their inner circle.
