On Waking Up In a Strange Place 20 Years Later

Posted by Jennine Lanouette on Wednesday, January 23rd, 2013

Just got back from Sundance. I decided to go in early December to give myself a deadline for finishing this website. I figured it would be a good place to start letting people know about it. When I saw all the trumpeting about half the competition films being by women, that seemed like even more reason to go. Of course, by December its impossible to get advanced tickets, so I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to do once I got there.

I hadn’t been to the Sundance Film Festival for 20 years. Starting in 1989, I went for several years as a magazine editor and journalist looking for interesting films to cover. But, when I began teaching, I gradually phased out of journalism and then the festival started to get big and hard to manage, so I stopped going. In the intervening years, whenever it came around again, I would adopt a been-there-done-that detachment, determinedly resisting the Sundance fervor. Now that I have returned, I feel like a newly minted convert. I was amazed at what a great time I had and I can’t wait to go back again.

It was a little disorienting at first. Not only is the festival about 20 times larger, so is the town of Park City. Very little looked familiar. Main Street still goes up hill, the Egyptian Theater still has a funky marquee and the Elks Club is still there. But that’s about it. One of my condo mates said, “You must feel like Rip Van Winkle.” Indeed.

However, my fears that the festival’s much larger scale would be overwhelming and difficult to manage did not pan out. At some point, they figured out how to make it user friendly. More than friendly, I felt cared for by the army of cheerful volunteers, the free buses and the constant reminders to stay hydrated with give-away water bottles and refilling stations.

I had no trouble getting a last minute ticket to my first screening at 8:30 Friday morning and then got the low down from a couple of veterans on how to have success in the waiting list lines. Following their advice, I managed to see nine films, not much compared to the old days, but enough to get a flavor of the year’s selections. Most of them were good, a couple were “eh” and one was, by my estimation anyhow, a dud. Sadly, I was only able to get to four of the films directed by women. But, of the other five, two were advocating for women by revealing the challenges they face. Another two were narrative experiments in the New Frontier Features section. And the last one was “Fruitvale,” pretty much in a class by itself.

Here’s my tweet on that subject — “Fruitvale embodies what we hope for most from indie film: Giving voice to an underserved community, and doing it well.” A chronicle of the last 24 hours of police-shooting victim Oscar Grant’s short life, the film, written and directed by Ryan Coogler, is gripping to watch on the way through and devastatingly sad at the end. Afterwards my dominant feeling was, “Now this is what independent film should be.” I like to characterize my definition of independent film as “Let’s get out of the Hollywood fantasy factory and talk about something real.” Fruitvale is a perfect fulfillment of that intention. Happily, it has been picked up by The Weinstein Company, so it should be getting a pretty decent release.

I saw four films in total that I would put in that category of talking about something real by giving voice to those not often heard. The second is “Mother of George,” directed by Andrew Dosunmu and written by Darci Piccoult, about a newlywed couple in an African immigrant family in New York failing to fulfill cultural expectations to get pregnant. The wife, of course, is blamed but her visits to a doctor suggest that the problem may be with the husband. The husband’s refusal to consider the possibility begins to tear apart a loving marriage and forces the wife to pursue a drastic solution. The narrative starts slowly, gets a little bogged down at times, but eventually builds to a stunningly inconclusive ending that, nonetheless, reverberates with meaning.  And the film is a feast to look at, rich in color and texture, with compositions that boggle the mind.

Third is “Wajma (An Afghan Love Story),” written and directed by Barmak Akram, another women’s cultural persecution story. Wajma is an innocent, young Afghani woman in love with Mustafa, an Afghan young man who is rather cute and endearing, at least at first. Mustafa, who appears to be as devoted to her as she is to him, convinces Wajma to sneak away with him for a sexual tryst. But when she later reports to him that she has become pregnant, he immediately abandons her, accusing her of having slept with someone else before him. Her father also shows no mercy, locking her up in a storage shed with no heat or food for days on end until he can find a way to save the family from utter disgrace. Needless to say, she is bereft. Clearly, the film’s title is sardonic. This is what love looks like in Afghanistan. Even the next day, I found myself spontaneously wanting to weep when Wajma was brought back to mind.

Curiously, the next film I saw, the fourth in my giving voice category, was like traveling directly to the polar opposite extreme of women’s sexuality existing on this earth. “Concussion,” written and directed by Stacie Passon, is about a woman’s sexual unleashing. Abby, played to perfection by Robin Weigert, is in a stable but sexually unfulfilling lesbian marriage to an affluent lawyer in a suburban home with two kids, one of whom hits her in the head with a baseball. The injury prompts her to seek out sexual alternatives in a pied a terre she has set up for herself in the city. What I particularly appreciated in this film was its avoidance of going into sexual deviance. No whips and chains in this walk on the wild side. Just healthy, even loving, exploration. Although the encounters are between women, the film is not about lesbianism. Strangely, by using a lesbian context, it manages to give voice to the sexuality of all women.

There were two more films I enjoyed, although these put forth more of a personal expression than speaking for a larger community. First was “May in the Summer,” written and directed by Cherien Dabis, a family comedy/drama about a Palestinian/American woman who, while returning to Jordan to get married, is confronted with a set of family dynamics that ultimately challenges her decision. Nice to have a light comedy once in a while, even if it is set across the Dead Sea from a mine-filled war zone. Director Cherien Dabis first caught my attention with her short “Make a Wish” and I was glad to see her having success with this film.

For another polar opposite pairing, the second personal expression film was “Halley,” co-written and directed by Sebastian Hofmann, in the New Frontier Features section, an extremely tough to sit through exploration of death and decay. On Twitter, I called it an “admirably realized audience endurance test that in the end delivers a provocative metaphor.” It was so well shot and beautiful to look at, there was no doubt the director was leading somewhere. And, indeed, the final images opened up whole new layers of meaning that stayed with me for a long while after. Not for the faint of heart, however.

So that leaves two “eh” films and one dud. “The Meteor,” written and directed by Francois Delisle, another New Frontier offering, was one of those films that may have sounded good on paper, but in execution was nearly unintelligible. It struck me as simply an intellectual exercise in whether you can engage an audience in a story delivered in voice over against visuals that have almost no relation to what is being said. I can admire the attempt, but the experience did nothing for me.

Then there was “Afternoon Delight,” written and directed by Jill Soloway, which had the bad luck of appearing in the same festival as “Concussion.” Also about a suburban mom’s walk on the wild side, this film is cartoonish and superficial in comparison to Concussion’s sensitive truthfulness. But the filmmaking skill it exhibits is passable and it has enough funny one liners that someone will undoubtedly find it enjoyable.

And the dud? “The Lifeguard,” written and directed by Liz W. Garcia. I try to be charitable to writer/directors, so rather than dismiss it out of hand, I will offer this brief analysis: Garcia clearly came at the script from a thinking place that kept her at a superficial engagement with her subject matter. She was not able to approach it organically to get to that deeper instinctive level from which to make her creative decisions. And her directing skills are not yet professional.

I don’t like to tweet negative comments, but I couldn’t let this one go by unremarked. “I hate to say this,” I wrote, “but The Lifeguard undermines the Sundance claim that all films by women were accepted on their merits.”  The women directors at Sundance would have been just as well served, or perhaps more so, by a 40/60 ratio. The Sundance programmers didn’t have to dilute the impact with compromising choices just to get a perfect 50/50 score. Neither do they do Liz Garcia any favors by showcasing this work. Sundance is an awfully prominent platform from which to make beginner’s mistakes.

But six good films out of nine is not a bad ratio. In fact, this marks the biggest difference from when I last attended. The overall professionalism and aesthetic sophistication of the featured films has considerably matured from what we used to see at the tiny little infant Sundance oh so long ago.