My experience of the first wave of Sundance movies was, unusually, much stronger in the “narratives,” than the documentaries. The rest of the ride was much more like my traditional Sundance - all festivals, really - experience, with documentaries being a bit more focused and therefore being the stronger set of films.

The two forms are really different kinds of experiences, especially at a festival. The goals are, normally, different. But when veteran director/provocator Sebastian Silva offers Rotting in the Sun, there is, for me at least, a documentary element. I don’t know if this is a caricature of male gay life, at a certain age, or if it is accurate. On the other hand, Kokomo City and The Stroll, which are very stylized docs, are unequivocal about what we experience when watching those two remarkable films about transvestite and transsexual women who have been sex workers… which are, by the way, made by first-time directors (with the support, in The Stroll, of a more experience co-director).

There were a number of big themes at Sundance this year. There was a heavy female influence on the films, with many films focusing on young women trying to figure out how they fit into their worlds. There were also a bunch of older women, either being celebrated, celebrating or demanding safe space for the generation of women coming behind them,

It’s interesting. As I look through the list of films I saw, there is no question about the political leanings of the festival. But I found a lot less stridency this year and a lot more just showing and being inside of whatever issue that might be labelled as “woke” by people who want to label everything.

For me, the best films just told the story… didn’t have to repeat it or beat you over the head with it or lecture us, as an audience. These filmmakers, in general, chose to challenge the audience, not educate us from what they feel is “above.”

(Note: I covered Cat Person, Fair Play, and Victim/Suspect in this piece and Cassandro, Invisible Beauty, Magazine Dreams, The Pod Generation, Sometimes I Think About Dying, The Disappearance of Shere Hite, Fair Play (again), Little Richard: I Am Everything, It’s Only Life After All, Kim’s Video, Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields, birth/rebirth, and Run Rabbit Run in this piece.)

My Personal Top 10 for the fest is… in alphabetical order…

Bernal and the real Cassandro at Sundance

Cassandro - A big entertainment and intimate portrait of a young gay man in a well-defined homophobic culture figuring out how to make his dreams come true. Gael Garcia-Bernal is perfect in the role, though it sure doesn’t seem like he will from the start. The “happy surprise” level rises as the movie progresses.

Hmmm… decades later, the Super Bowl promos reflect Bethann Hardison

Invisible Beauty - A somewhat conventional piece of doc filmmaking, but with a power source at its center, its subject, Bethann Hardison. At first, it seems to be a bit of a hagiography, taking its time to really get to how she became all the things that famous people call her early on, the film does a beautiful job bringing us closer and closer so that we really understand how she earned the accolades… and how much she was needed in the role she created for herself.

Kokomo City - Who knew? The film announces itself as brash and daring from the opening scene, in which a woman tells a story from her life. The filmmaker understands the subject so well that there is never an objectification of its subjects in a storyline that threatens to dissolve into objectification and caricature at anuy moment… never falls into the trap.

Magazine Dreams - This film was probably the biggest attention-getter at Sundance this year - except maybe the Kavanaugh doc, which was a late entry, shown only once on location - both because of the rising stardom of Jonathan Majors and the brouhaha over open-captioning that caused a jury walk-out at the premiere. (Don’t get me started on the bad title.) There is love and hate around the film… I am on the love side. Majors is Brando-level magnetic. Undeniable. Now, this was true in Devotion as well, which was not a very well made movie. I don’t know what Elijah Bynum will make of his big opportunities that come from this film. Yes, it is somewhere derivative. But for me, it was a pretty fresh take on this Taxi Driver-esque material. It’s more about becoming that other films have been. Imagine a spin-off of Silence of the Lambs telling the tale of how Jame Gumb became what he already is in the film. And Majors… holy merde. He is about to be Marvel-driven for a few years. Managing where he is at the end of that experience is going to be so important. I so hope he is about to maintain an even strain.

My Animal - A late surprise for me. I love Ginger Snaps, a Canadian coming-of-age-werewolf-thriller which emerged at TIFF in the same festival year, 2000, as David Gordon Green’s George Washington got most of the critics’ love coming out of the fest, led by Roger Ebert. My Animal is the first directorial feature by Jacqueline Castel, a French Canadian who lives in New York now. A very different take from Ginger Snaps or, for that matter, Turning Red, which treads some of the same territory. I kept thinking while watching that this was what Luca Guadagnino was after with Bones and All… a sexy, dangerous, intimate coming of age story with a genre element offered pretty matter-of-factly. Amandla Stenberg is wonderful here, in kinda the Mary Stuart Masterson in At Close Range role. But Bobbi Salvör Menuez… I feel like I have been looking at her face forever. As the movie goes on, she reminded me more and more of young Meryl Streep… though who knows how that comparison will sit. Ultimately, we know where this movie is headed, mostly. But the journey is quite compelling and, for me, unexpected. (P.S. Paramount bought rights before the festival.)

It takes a village to get try to get basic medical rights for women.

Plan C - This movie shredded me. Last year at Sundance, it was the year of The Janes, with both a narrative and a documentary about the women in Chicago who came together to make abortion services available to women both before the Roe decision. Both films were powerful and spoke to the threat of the religiously-driven Supreme Court members placed on the court by Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump. Months later, Roe was overturned. More than 50 years after Roe (the ruling was on Jan 22, 1973), medicinal abortion is safe and inexpensive… and being targeting by the same religious zealots who seek to control women’s bodies based on their faith. Plan C, self-named by this group of women. as the next step after efforts to make Plan B pills available to women who can’t afford it or have had female healthcare removed by governmental leaders in many states, faces new legal challenges… like like the women helping women in need pre-Roe. We are back where we were 50 years ago. And it is horrifying. Watching these women try to find ways around the laws that are specifically designed to limit what grown women are allowed to do with their own bodies is nothing less than stomach-churning. How? I live in California, so we are pretty much safe from this and a lot of fascistic ideas finding life these days. But watching this makes it feel like we are in a very, very dangerous time.

Smoke Sauna Sisterhood - Estonian Anna Hints gives us the Sundance movie that none of us realized we needed… women, mostly naked in the least sex way possible, sitting around a sauna created from the smoke of meat being slowly cooked, talking about life. But the simplicity, the honesty, the beautiful cinematography… these women in Estonia are us and we them. I understand that my penis disqualifies me from being one of them, and the stories are often about the very specific lives of women. But the emotions are not gendered, ultimately. And the peacefulness of the film… I couldn’t quite figure out why I felt it so deeply. But I did.

STILL: A Michael J Fox Film - I have no been the biggest fan of Davis Guggenheim’s directed docs. Michael J. Fox and his Parkinson’s (an affliction that runs in my godparents’ family and as such, has been part of my life for decades) seems like low-hanging fruit. But damn… I kinda loved this movie. Guggenheim and Fox push right past any kind of pity party and tell the story of the life of an underdog, very openly, honestly and self-effacingly. It never feels like they are trying to do a gossip piece, though there are celebrities (aside from Fox). It never feels like it wants our pity, though sadness over Fox’s condition is unavoidable. It never puts the 4th coat of paint on the story, which is mostly what I have objected to with Guggenheim’s work in the past. This doc is deeply entertaining and deeply moving… which is so much more than I ever expected.

The Stroll - As Kokomo City tells the tale of 4 trans sex workers, The Stroll is more like a head-school reunion, focusing on one section of lower Manhattan - now extremely tourist-y - where these women, a generation or so older than the Kokomo girls, lived a section of their lives. I don’t mean to make too light of it, as it is still the story of working the streets and all the dangers and self-destructive behaviors that this suggests. But the women telling this story are the survivors. And they tell their stories with the distance of time… a certain loving nostalgia for a time none of them would want to go back to again. In the past, I have written about the current era of doc being unique in that, often, 2 or 3 or 5 docs will cover a certain subject and each will bring a different piece of the picture to viewers. The Stroll and Kokomo City are a perfect pairing… each with its own stories and voices and feelings.

Victim/Suspect - I wrote about this film in an earlier piece, contextualizing it with other Sundance films about women being re-victimized by their rapes. It’s so sad to know that the cycle keeps repeating. As a white man, it is too easy to forget the weight of being female and/or of color in our daily lives. Life can feel like an even playing field. But it is not. And I don’t advocate making the threat to other members of all of our communities our only focus. But thank god, there are people who do. The lawyers here. The women of Plan C. The focus of Bethann Hardison, doing a wide range of things, but never letting the dangers of the world be removed from her focus. This is an important film. And very well made.

This got longer than Substack likes… so I will do one more newsletter with the other 25 other films I saw at the festival that I haven’t yet written about.

Until tomorrow…

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THB #311: Sundance Top 10