At Sundance, a Sense of Uprooting Onscreen and Off

New York Times

31-01-2025

If a festival can be summed up in one word, then the word for this year's Sundance Film Festival is weird. That was the adjective that drifted through my mind as I circled in and out of screenings, chatted with other attendees and scanned local headlines. Weird could apply to some of the selections in the event, which ends Sunday. But it wasn't so much the lineup that struck many us, it was the festival, the pre-eminent American showcase for U.S. independent cinema and beyond. The vibe felt off, we murmured, the energy muted.
For good reason, too. The fires in Los Angeles County were still burning when Sundance opened on Jan. 23. Park City, Utah, is a long way from the Hollywood sign, but Sundance and the mainstream industry have always been codependents, and when the mainstream feels unsettled, you can feel the anxiety in the air. Making matters worse is that the conflagration in California is just the latest crisis facing the movie world, which continues to grapple with the aftershocks of the pandemic and back-to-back strikes, along with its self-inflicted wounds.
Adding to this Great Movieland Unsettlement is Sundance's search for a new home. Last year, the festival announced that it was exploring alternatives to Park City, where it has been held for decades. Among the stated reasons is that the event has outgrown the resort town, which has a population of just over 8,200 and an infrastructure that remains ill-equipped to handle such a large annual inundation. Every year, tens of thousands of movie lovers swarm into Park City, straining resources and local patience. Now, after a search, Sundance has settled on three alternatives: Cincinnati; Boulder, Colo.; and Salt Lake City, where the festival already screens movies, with some events remaining in Park City.
Questions about where Sundance will land percolated throughout this year's event, which features the usual great and good, bad and blah selections. Among the standouts is Geeta Gandbhir's documentary 'The Perfect Neighbor,' which tracks how friction between a white woman and her multiracial neighbors in Florida turned progressively heated and then horrifyingly lethal. Consisting largely of imagery culled from police body cameras and interrogation interviews, it offers up a horrifying look at everyday racial animus and stand-your-ground laws. It also underscores, as the white woman makes one 911 call after another, that there's nothing funny about the prejudices and pathologies of a so-called Karen.
The documentary 'The Alabama Solution,' from Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman, makes similarly effective and sustained use of nontraditional source material. In this case, most of the visuals in 'Alabama' consist of cellphone videos that were surreptitiously shot by inmates documenting the gruesome conditions of Alabama's notoriously deficient prison system, as well as their own gutsy efforts to improve them. Like the body-cam material in 'The Perfect Neighbor,' the cellphone images in 'Alabama' are visually degraded yet prove hauntingly powerful because they're familiar and intimate. When the camera shakes as it scans a blood-slicked floor, it is partly because the inmate capturing this terrible scene is, too.
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