The seismic shifts in Hollywood have rippled over to Park City, Utah, for the Sundance film festival. At 2016’s Sundance, held a week after the 2016 Academy Awards nominations triggered the #OscarsSoWhite movement, the aftershock was immediate. Fox Searchlight paid $17.5m – the highest price tag in Sundance history – to acquire Nate Parker’s slave uprising drama Birth of a Nation, which, in the high altitude, was prematurely hailed as a can’t-miss Oscar contender.
The ground under Hollywood hasn’t stopped shaking. After that buy, details of Parker’s 2001 rape trial resurfaced. In the two years since, dozens of other men in the film-making world have been accused of sexual assault: actors, directors, producers, and former Sundance titan Harvey Weinstein, who burned the festival on to the map three decades ago when he bought Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies And Videotape, and later Clerks, Reservoir Dogs and Garden State.
Harvey’s gone. Other voices are taking his place (including a documentary on his chief prosecutor, Gloria Allred). In Weinstein’s wake, the #MeToo and Time’s Up campaigns have had the snowballing impact of motivating the industry to tell more female-driven stories. Additionally, since 2016, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has invited 1,457 new members. That incoming group is now a fifth of the voting membership and can dramatically shift the Oscar race towards films that celebrate young, diverse film-makers – the kind of talents who get their start at Sundance.
At this year’s festival, you could feel the rise of a generation of film-makers and stars lifted up by the terrain-shifting reverberations of an industry shaken to its core. What does a must-see movie look like in 2018? After the parallel triumphs of two small, daring and very different festival hits, Moonlight and Get Out (last Sundance’s surprise midnight premiere), the answer is: anything.
Opening-night crowds raved about Blindspotting, starring Hamilton star Daveed Diggs, a buddy flick set in San Francisco-neighbouring Oakland about two moving-van drivers – one white, one black – that teeters into spoken rhymes when arguments get heated. First-time director Carlos López Estrada, a friend of Diggs since college, claims his two influences are Gabriel García Márquez and Spike Lee. That’s palpable in the film, which manages to be funny and furious while hitting every beat.
People also flipped for another bold Oakland-set debut, which easily claimed the trophy for most ambitious film of the fest. Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You is a wacky, anti-capitalist comedy about a broke kid (the fantastic Lakeith Stanfield) and his artist girlfriend (Thor: Ragnarok’s Tessa Thompson) trying to sell encyclopedias over the phone. That deliberately vague description leaves space for audiences to be astonished by Riley’s bold surrealism, which brings together an economic-disrupter tech company signing up poor people for a pittance, stop-motion montages that have the whimsy of Michel Gondry, and an awkward rap scene that had people holding their breath until they were sure it was safe to laugh.
Also on the border between shock and guffaw were Aubrey Plaza and Jemaine Clement in An Evening With Beverly Luff Linn, the second film from the twisted brain of British absurdist Jim Hosking (The Greasy Strangler). Plaza plays an unhappily married woman who’s fixated on travelling performer Beverly Luff Linn (Craig Robinson), a mute in Scottish tweeds who claims to be the voice of Aberdeen. Along with Clement’s lovelorn gunman, she steals a box of cash and hides out in a hotel where the odd couple fight, flirt and chug tacky cocktails until Beverly takes the stage. The movie is half-hilarious, half-audience dare. When a scene gets interrupted by a coughing fit, again, irritated viewers might storm out – and you sense Hosking doesn’t mind a bit. Like his bizarro characters, he’s not trying to fit in.
Neither are the teen satanists in Jonas Åkerlund’s phenomenal Lords of Chaos, based on the real-life story of early 90s Norwegian black metal musicians who wore corpse paint, burned churches and ended the decade dead or in jail. Åkerlund used to play drums in the seminal Swedish band Bathorybefore directing music videos for Beyoncé and Lady Gaga. He knows these guys, literally. Better still, he knows their posturing insecurity. His vibrant dramedy is a bloody, sarcastic send-up of boys who want to be the baddest on their block – but when Åkerlund twists the knife, it hurts.
Speaking of misfits, one of the best documentaries of the festival was 24-year-old Bing Liu’s Minding the Gap. Liu, a skateboarder from Rockford, Illinois, picked up a camera in high school to begin filming his best friends Keire and Zack as they soared over stairs. Now, they’re older – and life’s obstacles are more perilous. Keire’s lost his dad; beer-chugging Zack has become one, and it’s beautiful and upsetting to watch these two big-grinning, indestructible kids become bruised men.
Women directed over a third of this year’s features, won all four directing prizes: Sara Colangelo for The Kindergarten Teacher (US drama), Alexandria Bombach for On Her Shoulders (US documentary), Sandi Tan for Shirkers (international doc) and Ísold Uggadóttir for And Breathe Normally (international drama). Plus, the grand jury award was taken by Desiree Akhavan’s The Miseducation of Cameron Post, which follows a teen girl (Chloë Grace Moretz) shipped off to a Christian camp named God’s Promise to pray away the gay. At the premiere, Akhavan introduced the film as her attempt at a queer John Hughes comedy, and like his coming-of-age classics, it’s both sincere about its characters’ struggles and aware that maturity will solve most of them.
Will The Miseducation of Cameron Post become a new classic? Maybe. In the middle of the festival, the 2018 Oscar nominations were announced and landed in Park City like a blueprint to the immediate future, with classical dramas by Steven Spielberg and Christopher Nolan competing against low-budget, first-time directors Greta Gerwig and Jordan Peele. Suddenly Sundance felt like standing in the middle of a construction site. Here, Hollywood is looking for the planks to rebuild the industry. And the materials are good.
- Amy Nicholson is a freelance critic and host of film podcast The Canon
