Fire of Love
For the second year in a row, Sundance went online, canceling what was supposed to be a hybrid event to celebrate its 38th edition as a wholly virtual fare. Once again, the post-premiere debates and sense of community so cardinal to festivals were shunted to tweets, texts, and DMs—even as the fest, IndieWire’s Eric Kohn wrote a few days before kick-off, offered attendees a chance to whip up a digital avatar and socialize with other guests in 3D environments: “a microcosm of the way that the festival community has evolved in recent years.” For all the widespread fears around the pandemic’s impact on the industry, browsing through the usually overwhelming amount of reviews and dispatches one detects a careful optimism. “The decline in theatrical viewing for most movies may have a negative effect on the profitability of independents—and therefore on the ability to release them,” Richard Brody speculates in his festival report at The New Yorker, but if Sundance is any indication of the State of Independent Cinema, “the art of independent filmmaking is thriving.”
Nowhere was that more evident than in the festival’s documentary sections, once again a treasure trove hiding some of the edition’s finest. Among them, Sara Dosa’s Fire of Love offers a stunning portrait of the late French scientists Katia and Maurice Krafft, who devoted their lives (and met their deaths) studying volcanic eruptions around the world. The documentary is filled with staggering research footage shot by the Kraffts themselves, yet “its lingering power,” David Sims observes at The Atlantic, “is not just the spectacle but also the thrilling intimacy of its subjects, whose eccentric, danger-seeking romance feels drawn straight out of Hollywood myth.” Still, not all of the material presented here was filmed by the Kraftts; Sosa peppers their footage with B-roll cutaways captured in 16mm. While these shots are a very minor part of the film, “their inclusion,” Abby Sun contends in one of her dispatches at Filmmaker Magazine (once again a most comprehensive guide for anyone struggling to orient themselves in the fest’s sprawling critical output), “is something we should be cognisant of.”
In rejecting the all-archival norm of cutting between visual sources in favor of cutaways between the archival and the specifically staged, Fire of Love creates a hidden synthetic that doesn’t have any political or historical basis, rather being intended primarily to blend into contemporary aesthetics and nostalgic festishizations of analog formats. […] What, then, is the result of the mainstreaming of the archive? Archival material becomes a replicable aesthetic.
As Sun points out, the same trend is visible across several other Sundance titles, including Coodie Simmons and Chike Ozah’s jeen-yuhs: a Kanye West Trilogy, which grafts anachronistic VHS and DV tape artifacts onto material shot in recent years. The three-part doc charts a behind-the-scenes chronicle of Kanye’s ascent to planetary stardom through footage Simmons recorded of his friend over twenty years, warts and all. Yet the filmmaker might be the film’s biggest weakness as much as its greatest strength. As David Ehrlich notes in his IndieWire review,
On the one hand, Simmons’ personal attachment to the growing supernova at the center of this story results in the unique intimacy of a film that shares the fortune of its subject. On the other hand, that same codependency makes it hard for Simmons to maintain perspective once West’s fortunes start to turn. The big-hearted man behind the camera loves the volatile guy in front of it too much to look directly at the person he became (the same person he knew would eventually be watching this), and “jeen-yuhs” suffers as a result.
Free Chol Soo Lee
A standout from the US Documentary competition was Julie Ha and Eugene Yi’s Free Chol Soo Lee. “Perhaps the most impressive aspect of this capacious documentary,” as per The Hollywood Reporter’s Lovia Gyarkye, “is the filmmakers’ precise, unwavering focus on constructing a complex portrait of Lee”. A Korean immigrant who in 1973 was wrongfully convicted for murder by the San Francisco police (and spent over a decade in prison), Lee was eventually freed thanks to a widespread campaign that turned him into a cause célèbre of Korean-American activism, but struggled to reenter society, succumbing to a drug addiction and petty crime until his death in 2014. For Nick Allen, who hails the film as “the best from this year’s US documentary competition” (and whose dispatches at RogerEbert.com offer an in-depth look at the whole section), Free Chol Soo Lee “gifts many things to its title subject, including the idea of being truly seen.”
There’s something to be said about how the constructs of this documentary may seem familiar—stock footage, talking heads recollecting the past—but the editing weaves a spectacular spell, revealing certain information carefully and effectively. You deeply care about each chapter in Chol Soo’s saga, which we learn from his written word (voiced by Sebastian Yoon). And when he is freed, the story is far from over; the significance of Chol Soo as a public figure did not make him more perfect as a person, especially with the trauma of being in prison. […] "Free Chol Soo Lee” is what documentary filmmaking should strive for as a medium built of humanity and empathy.
Ha and Yi’s documentary was one of several committed to exhume and relitigate a dark corner of US History. Among them was Chase Joynt’s Framing Agnes, which draws on a long-hidden UCLA archive of interviews with trans people conducted in the 1950s. Joynt and fellow researcher Kristen Schilt found the transcripts and turned them into scripts performed by Joint (as the interviewer) and trans actors (as the interviewees), who then analyze the characters they’re playing. Framing Agnes, Richard Brody contends at The New Yorker,
…is a film of quiet but decisive radicality that builds its own genesis and production into it. It’s a documentary based on archival footage that doesn’t exist and that Joynt therefore creates. In displaying the production of that substitute for the nonexistent footage, he also centers the gap in historical consciousness that its nonexistence suggests.
Framing Agnes pairs beautifully with another riveting documentary that sought to question a case of historical amnesia, Margaret Brown’s Descendant, which nabbed a Special Jury Award for Creative Vision in the US Documentary program. The film’s loosely centered around the efforts to recover The Clotilda, the last slave ship to reach the US in 1860, nearly sixty years since the slave trade’s official banning. The vessel carried 110 captives to Mobile, Alabama, before it was hastily burned and sunk by its white owner. Over one a half centuries later, Mobile’s Africatown community—made up of the slaves’ direct descendants—are searching for truth and closure. “A stunning work of cultural ethnography” Christian Gallichio praises it over at The Playlist, Brown’s documentary is “less interested in the physical recovery efforts than with chronicling the residents of Africatown as they work to recover their own narrative.” The shift in focus is most apt, Robert Daniels echoes at IndieWire, because it “rightly places the descendants in control of their ancestors’ stories,” and in filling a historical gap, “Descendant explains to audiences how storytelling can be a revolutionary act.”
All That Breathes
The documentary selections may have been extraordinarily rich this year, and there are several other entries I’m looking forward to catching up in the coming months. High on my list is the winner of the World Cinema Documentary section, Shaunak Sen’s impressionistic All That Breathes, a look at two brothers working to rescue birds of prey from the polluted streets of New Delhi, “one of the more dreamily provocative documentaries I’ve ever seen,” Daniel Fienberg writes at The Hollywood Reporter. But there was plenty to discover in other sections, too.
The Audience Award in the US dramatic competition went to Cooper Raiff’s Cha Cha Real Smooth, where the writer-director stars as a Bar Mitzvah party starter who falls for a single mother played by Dakota Johnson. It’s a film that “feels overly designed to be a Sundance hit,” Owen Gleiberman argues at Variety, “the quintessence of a certain kind of Sundance film that’s rooted in an era that’s going out of style.” I’m not convinced the epoch Gleiberman is referring to is going to expire anytime soon: vestiges of that “Classic Sundance,” as A.O. Scott calls it at The New York Times, could also be seen in Jesse Eisenberg’s directing debut When You Finish Saving the World and Max Walker-Silverman’s A Love Song, “evidence that American independent film is either sticking to its guns or stuck in a rut.”
Most notable among the few exceptions was the winner of the Grand Jury Prize in the US Dramatic competition, Nikyatu Jusu’s Nanny, a horror film starring an undocumented Senegalese nanny, Aisha (Anna Diop), who works for an affluent Manhattan family in hopes to bring the child she’s left behind to the US. Echoing the setup of Ousmane Sembène’s 1966 seminal Black Girl, the film doubles as a haunting reimagining of the immigrant experience. In framing the story entirely from Aisha’s perspective, “Jusu upends the formula of a familiar genre,” Peter Debruge notes at Variety, “one that traditionally plays on the anxiety any mother might understandably feel in entrusting a foreigner to care for their kids.” To boot, “the film’s skilled usage of folklore,” per Jourdain Searles at The Hollywood Reporter, “is an inspired breath of fresh air in a horror landscape so often uninterested in the African diaspora.”
It bears noting that Jusu’s film was one of several entries directed by women, in a year that broke new records in representation. For the first time ever, Kate Erbland reports at IndieWire, female filmmakers directed the majority of both the fest’s features and competition titles, while the number of filmmakers who identify as people of color, according to Sundance’s director demographics, comprised half of all entries in the US dramatic competition, and 35% of all features unveiled at the fest. These numbers aren’t abstract triumphs, but evidence that, “on a conspicuous, quantifiable level,” Manohla Dargis suggests at The New York Times, “a genuine diversity of filmmakers also yields a welcome cinematic multiplicity.”
It can be easy to think of representation as an abstraction, as a political cudgel, a tedious rallying cry, a bore. Again and again this year, the sight of all these bodies, particularly of women — including Emma Thompson letting it all hang out beautifully in the gentle comedy “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande” — was a reminder that these representations aren’t boxes that were ticked off. They are the embodied truths, pleasures and terrors of women and people of color who, having long served as canvases for fantasies of otherness, have seized control of their own images.
Here’s hoping the festival will get to celebrate its 39th edition in an analogue set-up, once again, and keep up the great work—opening up space for new stories, and new storytellers.
The Current Debate is a biweekly column that connects the dots between great writing about a topic in the wider film conversation.