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Sundance 2021: ‘The Pink Cloud’

By Film, Sundance

So, it could be worse. We could be confined entirely to our homes, windows and doors shut tight, a candy colored airborne toxic event spreading just outside, killing anyone exposed to it in the span of just ten seconds. No need for ICU beds. No use for a vaccine. The Pink Cloud, with its tint of static dawn or dusk, is a kind of miracle, maybe a judgement, an inexplicable phenomenon. It could be industrial or natural, temporary or permanent, no one seems to know or, eventually, care. There is no urgency to interpret it. What matters is that the cloud’s presence sets the conditions of life for the foreseeable future. At first it is an emergency. Later it is the only world there is: a distant line of cumuli, a pink tendril just outside the window, hovering there like a reflection in a mirror, reaching out, a temptation. What is it that we might want to continue to live for?

Like so many others around the world, Yago and Giovana, virtual strangers who’ve just spent a casual night together, find themselves trapped in their first shelter, Giovana’s parents home. They check on their family and friends via video chat. Giovana’s younger sister is safe at her girlfriend’s house eating snacks and playing Dance Dance Revolution. Yago’s elderly father is being cared for by his nurse, Diego, but they’ll need some extra money to keep up with the old man’s meds. A day goes by, and then another. A week. “How does a chiropractor make money without touching anyone,” Yago wonders, and Giovana, a web designer, assures him she can help him for a while. It’ll go away, they tell themselves, sooner or later. Clear up. Everything back to normal. They adapt and settle in, joking about learning to be in love, as in an arranged marriage, but mostly, at first, they’re just trying to help each other stay fed, clean, healthy, positive. 

More time passes. So subtly we barely notice it. Seasons are marked by love or animosity, uneasy peace. The cloud remains long enough to raise concerns about how kids like Giovana’s sister will sustain themselves as they begin to lose hope for a normal adolescence and adulthood, how newborns will adapt to an entirely interior existence, the outside world potentially (probably?) remaining inaccessible to them all their lives. “Do you love the cloud,” Yago is asked. An unanswerable question since there is no world without it. Can one learn, rather, to love the conditions of the cloud, to love living within its embrace?

The Pink Cloud remains unconcerned with the hope of global solutions developed by science or government. Rather its interest is in tracking individual responses to radical change and a suddenly reduced life, to the recalculations one makes to preserve what may be the most precious asset one has left in such circumstances: intimacy, the capacity to touch a body, to affect a companion with your physical and emotional presence. It’s uncanny how accurately director Iuli Gerbase and her cast, shooting the film in 2019, a full year before our real lockdown, anticipated the complex spectrum of our subsequent experiences. We recognize all of it. The pathetic inadequacy of communing on a screen and the desire to reach through it. The impulsive nostalgia for how things once were, the longing to get out and away. The inevitable friction of these desires against the more pragmatic, or perhaps defeatist, stance, of accepting (rather than defining) the new normal and trying to make the best of it. The constant struggle between optimism and pessimism, between escapism and clear-eyed coping, between very different views of what we might imagine of the future.

The Pink Cloud is a deeply moving film in which every response to catastrophe is exactly right. It’s an essential watch and a work that should rightly be preserved as one of the most insightful and empathetic responses to our present moment.

Read more about Sundance here.

Cryptozoo

Sundance 2021: ‘Cryptozoo’

By Film, Sundance

Dash Shaw’s adult animated feature Cryptozoo is a visually dazzling if somewhat familiar tale of the risks and ethical challenges of intervening in, managing and preserving wildlife. In this case, though, the wildlife are not merely endangered: they’re often unique, mythological beings ranging from a unicorn to a South American mega worm, stone chucking fairies to a Japanese dream-eating baku. They’re cryptids, that is, defined in an opening title as animals whose existence is “disputed or unsubstantiated.” But apart from Matt and Amber, the two groovy, hippie kids (the film is set in the ’60s) who bumble their way into the Cryptozoo in the opening sequence, it isn’t disbelief that endangers the cryptids, that denies them consideration as living beings with agency and potentially rights. Quite the opposite, actually. In a period of great turmoil and war (Matt presciently recounts a dream of progressives storming the U.S. Capitol and founding a peaceful republic), the most pressing challenge to cryptid sustainability is the belief in their potential use as weapons by some nasty folks who know how to capture them. With their various powers and impulses and morphologies, cryptids, it seems, are inherently dangerous, and, like any being facing a threat, they’re likely to fight to the death. 

Which is why the tale’s nominal heroine, Lauren Grey, a veterinarian by training, has been on a lifelong mission to protect cryptids from exploitation ever since her childhood nightmares were relieved by the aforementioned baku. But is the high barrier around the Cryptozoo—scaled by Matt and Anna, expecting to find a secret military installation on the other side rather than a unicorn—protective or imprisoning? Is Lauren and her associate Joan’s quest to provide every cryptid a safe home a defensible ideal or a selfish utopian pipedream? The cryptids themselves seem to have very little say in the matter, forced to accept their human defenders’ good intentions as well they can understand them, which may be very poorly. (Their warlike exploiters’ harmful intentions are always clear, however.) And maybe it’s unfortunate that the film can’t quite get us into some alternative forms of thought and communication that varieties of nonhumanoid cryptids might employ. We’re merely told that “intelligence has nothing to do with appearance.” 

Really, though Cryptozoo seems to want to argue for cryptid (and generally nonhuman) rights and agency, this is more of a film about the inevitable missteps of human intervention in nonhuman lives. It is a film about humans and the incompatibility of their systems and philosophy of protection with the needs and unknowable desires of the natural world. The term zoo is a misnomer, Lauren assures another character as she leads her on a tour. Really the Cryptozoo is a sanctuary, she says. But other, less sanguine characters later challenge this idea, calling it a carnival and a holding pen. True, Lauren will admit, the cryptids need to perform for visitors in order to make the operation financially viable, but only for awhile, until their strangeness is appreciated, normalized rather than exploited, and then the cryptids can wander free among us, like any other domesticated animal one supposes. But, to greater and lesser extent, we see that domestication is already under way in the zoo/sanctuary, and while it might bring some creatures pleasure, we viewers can’t help but be troubled by it. Meanwhile those cryptids who can’t behave remain caged, reinforcing the sense of their bestiality and inherent danger. 

There are frequent gestures to these ideas throughout the film, but mostly it plays out as an action picture, an individual fight between the heroic Lauren and her evil “ex-military, extremist” antagonist Nicholas, a kind of cryptid bounty hunter working for the U.S. military. There’s a good deal of violence throughout Cryptozoo, pitting woman against man against cryptid against captivity, and the amount of bloodletting, as well as the easy urge to violence, is consistently disturbing. Whatever the moral challenges of protecting the wondrous in the name of love, of providing a safe haven to the special secrets of fantasy and nature, these seem to pale in comparison to the horrors of an essentially bullying, misogynistic, and destructive worldview that relentlessly seeks domination over all.

Read more reviews from the 2021 Sundance Film Festival here.

 

 

motherschmuckers

Sundance 2021: ‘Mother Schmuckers’

By Film, Sundance

Brothers Issachar and Zabulon are jackasses. And if Jackass-style jokes and crude comedy are what you need to purge your cynicism over the last year, Sundance selection Mother Schmuckers, which follows the brothers through Brussels, might be for you. Might be.

Written and directed by Harpo and Lenny Guit, Mother Schmuckers focuses on Issachar and Zabulon, who live with their mom, Cashmere, in a lower-income section of Brussels. As the brothers walk Cashmere’s dog, January Jack, after a scene involving poo, they stop and cause mayhem at a local grocery store. They narrowly escape from the ruckus, seemingly forgetting that they ever left Jack outside the store. Cashmere, a window prostitute with a demanding boss who also plays into the story, tells her sons to find Jack or they’ll have to find somewhere new to live. As the young men search throughout the city, they meet up with peculiar acquaintances, bushy haired, gun-toting filmmaker included, who lead them into situations ranging from idiotic to disturbing to “What the hell are they thinking?” 

Remember that none of it should be taken seriously. Keep that in mind, since the longer Mother Schmuckers goes on, the more it pushes the envelope. For some, those unapologetic, off-putting elements, with a few genuinely funny, well-timed jokes mixed in, could make it a classic. For most others, see something else.

Mother Schmuckers screens in French with English subtitles. It is the first Belgisch film to make it into Sundance’s Midnight section.

Read more of our Sundance reviews.

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Sundance 2021: ‘One for the Road’

By Film, Sundance

Thai director Baz Poonpiriya’s One for the Road is a lush road film, a buddy picture, a romantic comedy, an epic melodrama, a story of betrayal—or three, more or less—and the struggle for redemption. Maybe that’s one or two things too many—I’m still trying to get my head around the mother-sister thing—but when it’s all over you’re likely not going to feel as exhausted, as worked over, as you might think. The simile is there, visualized for you, in an early sequence: it’s like a long night at the bar, tossing back one overly crafty cocktail with a clever name after another, each layered—let’s say complicated—with a dash of this, a float of that: some egg whites, some chemo drugs, a touch of chartreuse, a little blood, lots of tears, two kinds of bitters, the angry and the anguished. And, by God, you’re going to get to the bottom of every glass, and yes, you’ll hate yourself in the morning, and you’ll swear that will never happen again as you wait for the room to stop spinning and for your entire GI tract to unsour, thinking of all the stupid things you might have said—

But no, actually, One for the Road isn’t like that at all. Or it is. Yes, you will get to the bottom of every single backstory, of every narrative twist—they just keep serving you for some reason, this place will never close—but no, you probably won’t hate yourself. You very likely won’t feel a single regret. If you have a heart and can take some pleasure in this movie’s urge toward the maximal.

In the midst of one of his nightly debauches, Boss, a Thai native turned wayward New York bar man, receives a call from his estranged pal Aood, who’s dying of cancer. Aood has one last wish: he needs Boss to come back to Thailand and drive him across the country so he can return some sentimental baggage to his ex-girlfriends. Boss agrees, of course, if reluctantly, and right off we see there’s a lot of tension to be overcome between the two men, signified by some prickly exchanges and a flashback of a broken window left behind in New York the last time the two saw each other. They’d shared an apartment there for a time and the dream to start the bar Boss now runs by himself. We get the sense they were both running away from something then, from home and family, but that the game wasn’t sustainable, at least not for Aood, who finally bailed out. Now, faced with his imminent death, he’s decided the best he can do is go on this apology tour, spending a few final, nostalgic moments with the women he hurt back then before he deletes them from his phone’s contact list. (That finality really is strangely moving.) There’s something exquisite and charming in the journey’s opening stages, fed as much by the chemistry between the actors—particularly Aood and the dancer Alice—as by some goofy comedy that plays nicely on Boss’s extravagant machismo and Aood’s natural vulnerability.

But the road gets bumpy pretty quick, forcing some hard reflections on the two friends’ inclination toward boorishness in their New York days, a combativeness that Aood seems to regret and that Boss continues to embody. Extended flashbacks, seamlessly woven into the contemporary journey, lead us through the evolution of the fellows’ friendship and their falling out, reaching back, too, to the complications of Boss’s coming of age in a wealthy family (class is nominally at stake here, too) and his own legacy of lost loves. As these narrative strands proliferate, we begin to see what we thought might be the end of the road drifting farther and farther off into the distance, and maybe there’s a point where we start to wonder if some strict but sensitive editing could have tuned up the film’s dreamy emotional power while trimming away the most sentimental flab.

And yet, with its fine performances and cinematography, it’s hard not to lean into One for the Road’s epic strumming of heartstrings, particularly on night one of the festival.


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Tickets for Online Sundance Film Festival on Sale Now

By Sundance

The Sundance Film Festival will hardly resemble the annual spectacle Parkites have come to know when it kicks off on January 28. The star-studded festival has been reduced to mostly online affair for 2021, with no local in-person screenings taking place. In its place, an extensive amount of virtual programming will be available to those who purchase tickets online.

Though the online format will open the festival to a wider audience—a small silver lining during the ongoing pandemic—tickets are still limited. Another silver lining is this year’s added flexibility. The $350 Festival Pass is an all-inclusive ticket to stream any and every movie you can during the festival’s duration, including live Q&A’s with the cast and crew. A single day pass, which includes the option to reserve a spot at premiere screenings will cost you $75, while a Single Film Ticket for $15 lets you view an online premiere or catch a film during its on-demand streaming period. There are also Award Winner’s passes and Explorer Passes for $100 and $25 respectively.

Sundance is typically an 11-day celebration of independent film, but due to unique circumstances the 2021 edition will be run for just one week from January 28 to February 3. Organizers have said they plan to return to Park City for a complete revival of the extravagant festival next year. We’re already spending most of our time watching movies on the couch, so I recommend taking this opportunity to check out some new independent film from the comfort of home. Sundance has been increasingly exclusive and difficult to access in recent years, and this is the chance to make some lemonade out of the Groundhog Day we find ourselves in.

Visit the Sundance website for complete festival details, click here to purchase tickets and click here to view the festival schedule.

Read more of our community coverage here.

 

Slamdance-Logo

Slamdance Film Festival Leaving Park City for 2021

By Film, Sundance

The Slamdance Film Festival will not be staged in Park City in 2021, but will instead take place in Joshua Tree, California and online from January 22-28, 2021. For more than two decades Slamdance has screened films concurrently with the higher profile Sundance Film Festival in relatively small the mountain town, but current circumstances with the continued spread of COVID-19 has made doing so this upcoming winter impractical.

Slamdance organizers are viewing the change as an opportunity for evolution rather than as capitulation. “Slamdance ‘21 isn’t about compromise because of the pandemic. It’s about community, accessibility and growth. It’s about Slamdance’s future and the love of independent film,” Slamdance President and Co-founder Peter Baxter said a prepared statement on the organization’s website. For 2021, Slamdance’s in-person experience will be an invite-only, socially-distanced retreat for the filmmakers and industry guests. The public will be rendered virtual attendees, able to watch films and view festival events on slamdance.com and on the Slamdance’s YouTube channel.

While Slamdance appears poised to carry on without slowing down, the departure leaves a significant hole in the cultural fabric of Utah and Park City. The insurgent festival has long served as an important authenticity check on the Sundance Film Festival, which has at times outgrown its “independent” label by becoming increasingly exclusive, inaccessible and mainstream, both for audiences and filmmakers. Slamdance has carried the torch for the rebellious and alternative viewpoints some see missing in Sundance’s modern incarnation. It will be sorely missed, especially during a year in which Sundance has outlined altered plans of their own that will make it difficult for audiences to connect with independent film as they typically do.

The first film I covered from Slamdance was a documentary called The Resurrection of Jake the Snake, which premiered during the 2015 festival and detailed the struggles of iconic professional wrestler Jake “The Snake” Roberts as he tried to reclaim his life after battling personal demons. It will always stick with me— partly because I got to attend a Royal Rumble watch party with childhood idols including Jake himself and “Razor Ramon” Scott Hall—because the film is a haunting depiction of addiction and the difficult fight towards recovery, and is a wonderful encapsulation of the courageous, niche filmmaking that occurs at Slamdance.

As of publication time, Slamdance organizers have not responded to questions about whether the festival plans to return to Park City in the future. Here’s hoping it’s a temporary departure and we don’t lose a beloved celebration of the daring, the different, the weird and the fun for good. Visit Slamdance’s website to stay up to date with the 2021 festival, and check out some of the festival’s previous films here.

Read more of our community coverage here.

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Sundance 2020: Downhill Red Carpet

By Film, Sundance

After Billie (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), Pete (Will Ferrell) and their sons survive an avalanche, they reassess their lives and their relationships.

Downhill premiered Sunday, January 26th at Sundance. To check out our exclusive Red Carpet photo gallery, click on any of the photos below:

Company: Fox Searchlight

Directors: Nat Faxon, Jim Rash Screenwriters: Jesse Armstrong, Nat Faxon, Jim Rash
Producers: Anthony Bregman, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Stefanie Azpiazu Executive Producers: Erik Hemmendorff, Ruben Östlund Cinematographer: Danny Cohen Editor: Pamela Martin Composer: Volker Bertelmann Principal Cast: Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Will Ferrell, Zach Woods, Zoë Chao, Miranda Otto

Photos by: Natalie Simpson of Beehive Photography

For more Sundance, click here. 

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Sundance 2020: The Nest Red Carpet

By Film, Sundance

In the Film The Nest, Jude Law plays Rory, an entrepreneur who decides to up and move his family in hopes of opportunity. But this leap of faith has more consequences than Rory initially thought.

The Nest premiered on Sunday, January 26th at Sundance. To check out our exclusive Red Carpet photo gallery, click on any of the photos below:

 

Director: Sean Durkin Screenwriter: Sean Durkin Produced By: Ed Guiney, Derrin Schlesinger, Rose Garnett, Sean Durkin Producers: Amy Jackson, Christina Piovesan Executive Producers: Andrew Lowe, Polly Stokes, Jude Law, Ben Browning, Glen Basner, Alison Cohen, Milan Popelka Director Of Photography: Mátyás Erdély Production Designer: James Price Editor: Matthew Hannam Casting: Shaheen Baig, Susan Shopmaker Composer: Richard Reed Parry Principal Cast: Jude Law, Carrie Coon, Charlie Shotwell, Oona Roche

Photos by: Natalie Simpson of Beehive Photography

For more Sundance, click here. 

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Sundance 2020: Four Good Days Red Carpet

By Film, Sundance

When addict, Molly (Mila Kunis), shows up at her mother’s house unannounced, emotions are heightened and a decision has to be made. Four Good Days captures the struggles of a family nearly destroyed by the devastation of addiction.

Four Good Days premiered Saturday, January 25th at Sundance. To check out our exclusive Red Carpet photo gallery, click on any of the photos below:

Company: Indigenous Media

Director: Rodrigo Garcia
Screenwriters: Rodrigo Garcia, Eli Saslow
Produced By: Jon Avnet, Marina Grasic, Jake Avnet, Jai Khanna, Rodrigo Garcia
Executive Producers: Sage Scroope, William Santor, John Hills, Andrew Chang-Sang, Doug Murray, John Griffith, David Haring, Christian Mercuri, Ruzanna Kegeyan
Cinematographer: Igor Jadue-Lillo
Edited By: Lauren Connelly
Music Composed By: Ed Shearmur
Casting Director: Veronica Collins Rooney
Production Designer: Brandon Mendez
Costume Designer: Michele Michel
Principal Cast: Glenn Close, Mila Kunis, Stephen Root, Joshua Leonard

Photos by: Natalie Simpson of Beehive Photography

For more Sundance, click here. 

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Sundance 2020: Ironbark Red Carpet

By Film, Sundance

Dominic Cooke directs this political drama based on a true story. An ordinary business man, Greville Wynne (Benedict Cumberbatch), is pushed to his limits to find out he wasn’t so ordinary to begin with. Ironbark touches all emotions.

Ironbark premiered Friday, January 24th at Sundance.To check out our exclusive Red Carpet photo gallery, click on any of the photos below:

Company: FilmNation Entertainment

Director: Dominic Cooke Screenwriter: Tom O’Connor Producers: Adam Ackland, Ben Browning, Ben Pugh, Rory Aitken Executive Producers: Leah Clarke, Benedict Cumberbatch, Ashley Fox, Glen Basner, Alison Cohen, Milan Popelka, Dominic Cooke, Tom O’Connor, Josh Varney Co-Producer: Donald Sabourin Director Of Photography: Sean Bobbitt Production Designer: Suzie Davies Editors: Tariq Anwar, Gareth C. Scales Costume Designer: Keith Madden Hair/Makeup Designer: Karen Hartley Thomas Music By: Abel Korzeniowski Casting Director: Nina Gold Principal Cast: Benedict Cumberbatch, Merab Ninidze, Rachel Brosnahan, Jessie Buckley

Photos by: Natalie Simpson of Beehive Photography

For more Sundance, click here.