Sundance 2024 roundup

Once again I’d like to thank the festival for allowing critics to participate remotely.

I saw twenty films (three of which earlier in the year) and noticed some pleasing trends: a serious commitment to own-voice storytelling, a full understanding of the ramifications of violence combined with a refusal to let any perpetrators off the hook, and deep concern about how social media/the internet/so-called artificial intelligence is alienating us from ourselves. It was a very good year.

DOCUMENTARIES: Black Box Diaries is a memoir by the woman at the center of the reckoning with sexual violence in Japan; a tough watch but a brave and valuable one. Sugarcane is absolutely brutal but extremely important and I admire how Canada is facing its past head-on. Daughters is also sad (as all merciless American prison stories are) but because of how the girls are involved it’s somehow both more hopeful and more devastating. The Mother of All Lies (which I saw at Cannes) takes that intergenerational stuff to a real pleasing place. Porcelain War has some heart-stopping drone footage of fighting in Ukraine but is mainly about the importance of art in fighting fascism. Never Look Away is about how war affected one woman’s life, and how that woman shaped some pretty important thinking about news, risk and courage (and directed by Lucy Lawless). Less of a bummer but still about some large issues are Every Little Thing, about the hummingbird lady of Los Angeles, and Agent of Happiness, about how people in Bhutan measure if they are getting what they want out of life. All of these were also either directed or co-directed by women!!

FICTION: Love Me and Veni Vidi Vici are both YA movies not marketed as such, and unfortunately neither go as all in as they needed to in order to get their messages fully across. Suncoast is also YA, and did – some people are complaining it’s too Hollywood but I think in this context that makes it great. Girls Will Be Girls is the final YA movie and more complex and compelling than these other three combined, a serious achievement here.

Going up an age group, Tendaberry didn’t really succeed but it has an emotional rawness that I can’t stop thinking about – keep an eye out for everyone involved in making it. The protagonist of Sebastian is thanks to male privilege is having a much easier time, and I really liked how it mingled its metacriticism with the sex stuff. How to Have Sex (which I also saw at Cannes, and is not about sex) worked less well for me, but it tells an old story in an important modern way.

In the grown-up section Exhibiting Forgiveness also didn’t work for me because of its strange attitude towards its own point. Hit Man (which I saw at the London Film Festival) will hopefully get the cinema release which is its due because if you think Anyone But You is a crowd-pleaser you ain’t seen NOTHING. Malu is a fine story, centering two older women, about how women cope (or don’t) with their own mistakes and disappointments. And finally Thelma is a perfect film which cannot be recommended more strongly, and the absolute dictionary definition of better late than never.

But above all there is Kneecap. The first ever Irish-language movie to play Sundance and the best ever depiction of being young in Northern Ireland/the North of Ireland that has ever yet been made. It was made for me personally (if you can say that a fictionalised version of the lives of an already extant rap group could be such a gift) and I loved it very, very much.