Every January, the Sundance film festival feels like fresh start to the year. It’s Hollywood’s resolution to find and celebrate the stories it hopes will define the next 12 months. After a rough stretch for the industry, Sundance attendees went hunting for optimism. They found it.
Here are the five big themes, and talents, that will shape the cinema landscape in 2018 – and beyond.
Consciousness matters
Since the first Sundance audience award was presented to sex, lies and videotape in 1989, the trophy has tended to go to fictional crowd-pleasers like Hustle & Flow, Spanking the Monkey and Love Jones. But for three straight years, audiences have been most moved by a film’s message. Like 2016’s Nat Turner slave rebellion drama The Birth of a Nation, and 2017’s Crown Heights, the true story of an unjustly incarcerated inmate, this year’s winner, Burden, is a real-life reenactment of racial struggle in America, here the retelling of an uneducated North Carolina man (Garrett Hedlund) trying to leave the Ku Klux Klan. A “Sundance film” used to mean a quirky dramedy. Clearly, audiences in Park City now think it should mean more.
The future is female
In the same week Greta Gerwig became the fifth woman nominated for a best director Oscar, four female film-makers – The Kindergarten Teacher’s Sara Colangelo, On Her Shoulders’ Alexandria Bombach, And Breathe Normally’s Ísold Uggadóttir and Shirkers’ Sandi Tan – swept the Sundance jury’s four directing prizes. (And Nancy writer-director Christina Choe scooped up the Waldo Salt screenwriting award while the grand jury prize went to Desiree Akhavan’s The Miseducation of Cameron Post.)
The indie festival winners of today become the major voices of tomorrow. Expect to see this year’s victors, and the artists inspired by their success, to use their award-winning clout to reshape the future. Meanwhile, other films in the line-up from Laura Dern’s wrenching performance in The Tale to the teen-girls-with-guns midnight smash Assassination Nation, which sold for a staggering $10m, show that film-makers are redefining what it means to create a strong female character – plus Ophelia, new spin on Hamlet starring The Last Jedi’s Daisy Ridley, and Lizzie, a reframing of the axe murderess as an abused daughter who literally slays the patriarchy, insist there’s also more to tell about female characters we already know.
No one dominates indie’s next wave
For the first time in three decades, Harvey Weinstein wasn’t at Sundance. His Miramax used to steer the Sundance brand before studio wings like Fox Searchlight decided to follow his model and outbid him, snatching up indie hits and potential Oscar winners. More recently, streaming services like Netflix and Amazon have been the biggest buyers at the fest, last year purchasing a combined 14 films. This year, Netflix bought one, and Amazon zero. All the former titans left their checkbooks at home – or in Weinstein’s case, didn’t dare show up at all. There’s a sudden power vacuum at the center of indie cinema, which means there’s room for a punchy, eccentric personality like 21-month-old Neon Films to acquire four flicks – thrillers Assassination Nation and Revenge, the police brutality drama Monsters and Men, and the quirky doc Three Identical Strangers – and a chance to steer this year’s conversation.
It’s time to take horror seriously
Last year, Jordan Peele’s $5m horror flick Get Out was simply the fun ticket Sundance-goers wanted to score. This year, it’s a quadruple Oscar nominee. Sundance’s midnight movie section has been building its reputation as the festival’s buzziest programming for the last several years, launching hits like The Babadook and It Follows, and accelerating the careers of future Marvel directors Taika Waititi and Jon Watts. The big ticket in 2018 was Ari Aster’s Hereditary, which stars Toni Collette as a grieving mother haunted in her own home. Collette gives an unhinged, terrifying performance that critics are calling one of her best – she literally climbs the walls. Before Get Out’s success, floating a low-budget horror performance as a major awards contender would have been a stretch. But Daniel Kaluuya is now a best actor nominee. And Collette, who’s yet to win a statuette herself, could chase after him.
Behold the next generation of superstars
Another best actor Oscar nominee no one knew last year: Timothée Chalamet. In 12 months, the 22-year-old actor went from unknown kid in Call Me By Your Name to Gary Oldman’s biggest competition. Sundance is where film lovers get introduced to the next major stars. Besides Chalamet, last year the favorite face was Lakeith Stanfield, who acted in three features and one short while performing his own music at parties on Main Street. Yet, Stanfield’s lead role in Crown Heights didn’t make an impact outside the festival, and his supporting part in Get Out got overlooked amidst the film’s other acclaim.
This year, the prince-in-waiting of Sundance scored a wacky star part people can’t miss as a telemarketer who sells his soul in Boots Riley’s outstanding satire, Sorry to Bother You. It’s finally Stanfield’s opportunity to shine outside the confines of Park City. Other rising names to watch include Kiersey Clemons, who co-stars with Nick Offerman in the musical-comedy Hearts Beat Loud, Hamilton performer Daveed Diggs, whose buddy comedy Blindspotting opened the fest to glowing reviews, trans model Hari Nef, gifted the best zingers in Assassination Nation, and barn-storming Arkansas guitarist Benjamin Dickey, hand-picked by Ethan Hawke to play the lead in his country-rock biopic Blaze. Trust Hawke’s taste: he’s the king of Sundance, who’s been coming to the festival for 27 years – and he knows the future when he sees it.
