Sundance

The first few minutes of Mad Cats screams torture cult. White-clad women stand watch on a picturesque hillside before we’re taken to a prison cell where one of the captives, who doesn’t know where he is or what the hell is going on, comes face-to-face with one of those women, an executioner.

Then, in sharp contrast, we meet Taka (Shô Mineo), a clumsy drunk struggling to make rent. He is provided with information on the whereabouts of his missing brother, an archeologist who disappeared after returning from his far-off fieldwork, and sets off to save him. He later partners with Takezo (Yuya Matsuura), a cat food connoisseur living on the street, and Ayane (actress is named Ayane as well), a young woman who does the heavy lifting for the team, including supplying guns and training the two amateurs.

Those creepy women on the hillside are actually cats out to get revenge on humanity… If this is where the film loses you, maybe find something else. Still with us? Good! Because it’s self-aware cringe and well-done action sequences from here, as we see how each “cat” the heroes fight has her own speciality weapon and we’re treated to the trio’s clever banter. 

Director Reiki Tsuno told us the vengeful cats offer a deeper meaning: “I had always wanted to make a movie about animals taking revenge on humans. I get angry and feel sad whenever I hear news about animals being put down due to the existence of inhumane pet stores and evil breeders. The numbers of them have been decreasing, but not zero yet,” Tsuno said. “This is a very shameful act of humanity. Nobody has a right to force animals to breed and then trash them only because of human ego.” 

While he could have made the film about mad dogs, snakes or hedgehogs, Tsuno said he chose cats since he’s a cat lover who has taken in his own abandoned felines. 

The animal rights aspects, aside from one clear example, seem lost amid the battle scenes. While it would have been nice to see those points made more clear, Tsuno told us he didn’t want to leave viewers depressed. “It’s also a tale of friendship. It’s also a tale of brothers. It’s also a tale of a cat and her owner. I put them all together in one movie and turned it into a comedy,” he said. “I didn’t want to express it in a depressing way, even though the theme is serious. I want to make movies that make you feel happy.”

The film features songs by Birthday Girl, a new artist for us, who is now on the reviewer’s Spotify. Overall, it’s a fun dose of comedy and action. The film feels like a wild dream. Keep in mind that there’s no need to question their practicality.

Mad Cats is presented in Japanese with English subtitles. It made its world premiere at the Treasure Mountain Inn Ballroom on Jan. 21 and will screen again at 3:15 p.m. on Tuesday, Jan. 24.

Visit the Slamdance website for more details.

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Find all our Sundance (and Slamdance) coverage from this year and year’s past. And while you’re here, subscribe and get six issues of Salt Lake magazine, your guide to the best of life in Utah.

For years one of our favorite “Friends of the Magazine” (FOM), Stuart Graves, has shared his adventures running around Main Street in Park City searching for celebrities during the Sundance Film Festival and asking them to take, as he says, “an old-school selfie” with his ancient point-and-shoot camera. We call them #stuartselfies. Now in 2023, the Sundance Film Festival has returned. It’s been three years since Stuart has been able to share his antics and portfolio of photos of his face alongside many famous faces. When Sundance called the code in 2022 (at the last minute) and cancelled the in-person festival he announced that he was formally retired from celebrity hunting (although he’s always looking wherever he travels). But like Tom Brady, Stuart just couldn’t stay on the bench and he will be back on Main Street. So here’s his managerie of stars on Main Street Park City from Saturday, Jan. 21, 2023. All photos by Stuart Graves (the smiley guy). See his greatest hits from before the COVID-gap here.

Follow the links to see Stuart’s Day One Sundance 2023 #stuartselfies and take a look at his greatest hits from the Sundance Film Festival.

For years one of our favorite “Friends of the Magazine” (FOM), Stuart Graves has shared his adventures running around Main Street in Park City searching for celebrities during the Sundance Film Festival and asking them to take, as he says, “an old-school selfie” with his ancient point-and-shoot camera. We call them #stuartselfies. Now in 2023, the Sundance Film Festival has returned. It’s been three years since Stuart has been able to share his antics and portfolio of photos of his face alongside many famous faces. When Sundance called the code in 2022 (at the last minute) and cancelled the in-person festival he announced that he was formally retired from celebrity hunting (although he’s always looking wherever he travels). But like Tom Brady, Stuart just couldn’t stay on the bench and he will be back on Main Street. So here’s his managerie of stars from Friday, Jan. 20, 2023. All photos by Stuart Graves (the smiley guy). See his greatest hits from before the COVID-gap here.

Click the links for Day Two, Day Three and (an increasingly less-valid) Greatest Hits.

Perhaps destined to become a new classic of the film nerd genre, David Redmon and Ashley Sabin’s documentary Kim’s Video is an entertaining, twisty, funny, dreamy, sometimes grumpy quest film, featuring co-director Redmon as its protagonist. He is our narrator and eyes, an ardent cinephile-cum-detective, seeking to locate and secure the Maltese Falcon of video archives: the holdings of the defunct titular video store, 55,000 VHS tapes and DVDs, ranging from canonic cinema classics and highbrow experimental films to bootlegged rarities, porn films and low budget productions depicting an engagingly gritty, dangerous, and long-lost New York. 

Redmon introduces himself as a classic loner, a rural Texas kid often left in the care of his grandparents, and drawn, in his loneliness, to the electrostatic magic of the small screen, which was always most animated for him, he says, by films. This personal history provides the foundation for Kim’s Video’s eclectic visual style, in which thought, event, and reflection are all filtered through the lens of “classic” cinema. Redmon’s hometown, he tells us, was close to Paris, Texas, a statement accompanied by a clip from the 1984 Wim Wenders film of the same name, showing a slack mouthed Harry Dean Stanton walking stiff-legged through a desert landscape. This technique of referential substitution recurs frequently, ultimately illustrating the broad range of Redmon’s personal filmic canon, while also backing his rather suspect, or at least narratively providential, claim that his obsession with film has made it difficult for him to tell fiction from fact. I don’t buy the claim on its surface, but I nevertheless accept it as a thesis for how the film wants to approach its ostensibly nonfiction narrative: despite its verité style, some apparently factual turns will be too weird, or convenient, to be believed. Truth is stranger than fiction, that is—or truth so closely mirrors the fictions of Redmon’s keystone films that it’s hard to say which is taking cues from which.

The founder of Kim’s Video, Yongman Kim is, indeed, movie star material. An enigmatic and handsome Korean businessman, who once had his own dreams of making films, Kim’s former employees describe him as both charming and a likely criminal mastermind. Ultimately, he came to support his immigrant family with an East Village dry cleaning store, running his video rental business as a side hustle. But in the high 80s, when VHS was king, Kim realized that his broad aesthetic tastes and innovative, even illegal, methods of procuring rare material could be hugely profitable. For hungry New York aficionados, like Texas-transplant Redmon, Kim’s massive lending library could also be transformatively educational, and it attracted a devoted base of members, none so fierce, it seems, as our protagonist. Kim’s stacks, Redmon tells us, “made me calm…[they] made me feel safe.”

Given this feeling that he’d found his true home (i.e., the embodied history of cinema itself), it makes perfect sense that the store’s sudden closure, in the early 2000s (a predictable victim of new technologies), would produce the deep, existential angst that drives Redmon’s increasingly edgy search for answers in the aftermath. It’s as if Redmon’s closest friends, his chosen family—the ghosts of cinema, he calls them—have been taken from him, kidnaped and absconded to, of all (cinematic) places, the town of Salemi, Sicily, so like (in fact so close to) the fictional Corleone of Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather films. Around 2009, we learn, Kim struck a strange deal with Salemi, and its then mayor, Vittorio Sgarbi (a Berlusconi crony), transferring his entire archive there on Sgarbi’s promise that the videos would be made permanently available, put on display in a perpetual festival, which, of course, would be free to any of Kim’s former members who came to visit. Enter Redmon, circa 2017, seemingly the only ever taker of the offer, who tells Salemi’s affable chief of police, “I’m going to be here. A lot.” His tone of menace, of course, is comic.

What actually happened with the archive, Redmon finds, is a sad travesty of cynical political maneuvering, emitting a sour whiff of mafia intervention, but the inventive and erstwhile director, inspired by his encyclopedic cinephilia and the ultimately endearing and amenable Kim, is up to the challenge of saving film history. (Some muscle provided by Redmon’s ghosts helps, too.) Kim’s Video may not fully convince us, or even really wish to argue, its deepest metaphysical claims (e.g., “cinema is a record of existence”), but it most certainly entertains as Redmon’s kooky gambits and pressure campaigns become increasingly unhinged and risky. Perhaps the film’s most deeply felt theme, rather, is that for the truly obsessed film otaku absolutely nothing is more valuable, worth risking everything for its preservation, than film knowledge and the physical documentation, however grainy, within which it resides.

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Every January, Sundance Film Festival offers a platform for filmmakers and artisans to share their stories with the world. Acting as a gatekeeper to Hollywood, the films that premiere at Sundance go on to reach global audiences and skyrocket entire filmmaking teams to the top. Historically, most of the movies embraced by the big shots are centered around a singular American experience—a white experience. To break away from this homogenized tradition, diversity-focused organization The LatinX House is heading up to Park City to hold space for black, brown, and indigenous storytellers at Sundance.

Activist Mònica Ramírez, actor/producer Olga Segura and writer/producer Alexandra Martìnez Kondracke co-founded The LatinX House in 2019 when they noticed the underrepresentation of the Latinx community at Sundance and in film as a whole. “We know there’s a huge problem in the way our community is represented on screen,” says Ramírez. They launched their inaugural house in 2020 during the festival’s first virtual format and have since held in-person activations at SXSW, and their own festival in Aspen called Raizado. Each new festival allows the LatinX team to create an inclusive and welcoming space for meaningful conversations. “It’s important to create a gathering place of filmmakers and creatives alongside activists and other kinds of leaders in our community to be able to share ideas, tackle social issues, get creative and hopefully form really great collaborations,” says Ramírez. 

This year, the team at The LatinX House has organized their first in-person activation at Sundance, including a full schedule of panels, private screenings, moderated conversations, and awards ceremonies. Between the packed program, Ramírez and her team included plenty of time for socializing and community building. “We’ve built in these community hours so that people can be in the space and let the conversation marinate, get some creative juices flowing in terms of how they might want to work with other people.” Above all, the Sundance house was built around love. “We build our houses with a lot of love and authenticity,” Ramírez beams. “People walk into that house and take notice of all these little special touches. They understand that we developed this experience with a lot of heart.” 

Outside of its own programs, the LatinX House also takes on a larger role in cross-cultural programing throughout the festival. “This year, we’ve been able to do cultural programming and collaborating with the Sunrise House, The Blackhouse Foundation, IllumiNative and a few other partners,” says Ramírez. “There are some really special moments coming throughout the festival that we’ll all be able to come together across the houses.” 

After the dust settles on Park City and the sundancers have departed, The LatinX House will continue efforts to uplift diverse experiences in film. Following the success of their 2022 Adelante Directors Fellowship Program and their own 2022 Raizado film festival held in Aspen, the LatinX team is ready to maintain the momentum. And as for our own Salty city, Ramírez says she is proud to see Latinx leadership that are making strides for a broader national agenda, “It’s really wonderful to see communities continuing to grow here, and the leaders on the ground making sure to address specific issues that are important to our community.” 

You can find The LatinX House’s full schedule on their website, follow them on socials to stay up to date with all their Sundance happenings. 

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There are few things on the cultural calendar in Utah that are as out of sync with the traditional, quaint Beehive lifestyle as the Sundance Film Festival. Each year, thousands of people in black descend upon Park City like a plague of Mormon crickets: Publicists, industry wonks, filmmakers, photographers, celebrities and their handlers, and a host of hangers-on crowd fresh from L.A., be-scarved, be-turtlenecked, be-satcheled and shod in impractical shoes.

Of course, we Utahns love Sundance. It’s a brush with the larger world that all Utahns secretly crave. (See: The Winter Olympic Games, 2002.) Despite the changing landscape of Utah (especially Park City), we maintain our low self-esteem problem—an underdog, outsider stance that hearkens back to the days of Brigham. On one hand, we’re proud of our weird heritage and, on the other, we seek approval like a middle child. We are the Jan Brady of the United States.

Each year, the crowd that arrives from the coast and the local crowd that arrives from the Salt Lake Valley mingle on Main Street to babble in two separate languages. (Park City residents usually bug out during the January invasion—ironically, the perfect time of year to visit Southern California.) The first language is the disdainful speech of the aloof artist, wherein to actually like something is decidedly uncool. The local language is one of unbridled enthusiasm and charming goofiness. We like things here. We really do. I love us for that. 

The Sundancers, however, come with their lists, a hierarchy of A through Z listers. There are clipboards waiting outside of all the private parties, celebrity lounges and concerts. Out there in party land, there are lists upon lists upon lists and rope lines and waiting in the cold to get into someplace only to find that there’s another level of VIP-ness beyond the first gate. There always seems to be another level of even more exclusive and elusive exclusivity beyond—each layered inside the next like a matryoshka doll. I imagine that eventually, you get to one super cool room, containing one super cool VIP. Who could, if there were anyone else there to hear, be heard to exclaim, “I think I won!” 

Welcome back to town, Hollywood. Don’t slip on the ice.

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For years one of our favorite “Friends of the Magazine” (FOM), Stuart Graves has shared his adventures running around Main Street in Park City searching for celebrities during the Sundance Film Festival and asking them to take, as he says, “an old-school selfie” with his ancient point-and-shoot camera. We call them #stuartselfies. Now in 2023, the Sundance Film Festival has returned. It’s been three years since Stuart has been able to share his antics and portfolio of photos of his face alongside many famous faces. When Sundance called the code in 2022 (at the last minute) and cancelled the in-person festival he announced that he was formally retired from celebrity hunting (although he’s always looking wherever he travels). But like Tom Brady, Stuart just couldn’t stay on the bench and he will be back on Main Street. We’re looking foward to a brand new batch of #stuartselfies. Meanwhile, we asked him to share some of his greatest #stuartselfie hits (and the stories behind them) from over the years. (Click here for his 2023 celebrity adventures.)

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The Sundance Film Festival will return in January 2023 with a fresh crop of films and the ability to screen them in-person for the first time in three years. This year’s programming is as varied and diverse as any year at Sundance, but some themes have started to emerge. This year’s festival will screen 101 feature-length films, most of which will be screened for the very first time at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. The festival will kick off with an event, Opening Night: A Taste of Sundance honoring director Ryan Coogler (Black Panther), writer/director Nikyatu Jusu (Nanny) and comic/host W. Kamau Bell (United Shades of America), and the stars will keep shining throughout the festival.

Two documentaries featuring musical icons will screen the first night of the festival. It’s Only Life After All  turns the camera on folk rock duo Indigo Girls, showing the “obstacles, activism and life lessons of two queer friends who never expected to make it big.” Little Richard: I Am Everything is about, you guess it, music legend Little Richard, utilizing both archival and performance footage. Other star-studded documentaries in this year’s lineup include two hollywood origin stories, Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie and Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields, and another documentary about a young adult author, not a star per-say but a household name, Judy Blume Forever.

The stars turned out for this year’s feature films as well. In the Premieres category, Anne Hathaway stars as a prison counselor in Eileen, set in the 1960s. Julia Louis-Dreyfus plays a novelist whose marriage is in trouble after she learns her husband’s true feelings about her latest book in You Hurt My Feelings. In the Midnight category, Infinity Pool is a horror/thriller about a resort with a dark and violent secret, starring Alexander Skarsgård and Mia Goth. In the U.S. Dramatic Competition, Daisy Ridley of Star Wars fame stars in Sometimes I Think About Dying as a woman whose new relationship is impeded by her fixation on death. Emilia Clarke and Chiwetel Ejiofor star in sci-fi feature, The Pod Generation, set in a future where couples can “share” their pregnancy via pods. The Pod Generation is also the winner of the Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize, an annual award for the “most outstanding depiction of science and technology in a feature film.”

Coming off the success of CODA, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2021 and won the Academy Award for Best Picture, actress Emilia Jones is starring in two Sundance films this year. In Cat Person (based on the 2017 short story of the same name published in The New Yorker), Jones works at a movie theater, where she meets and begins a flirtatious relationship with an older man. Fairyland, also starring Jones, focuses on the relationship between a father and his daughter, set in a tumultuous San Francisco during the 70s and 80s. It’s based on the  memoir Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father by Alysia Abbott. 

Fairyland is one of quite a few films at this year’s Sundance Film Festival that center on the tension and trauma of intergenerational relationships and the evolving roles people play in the relationship as internal conflict and outside challenges arise. See: A Thousand And One (U.S. Dramatic Competition), The Persian Version (U.S. Dramatic Competition), Bad Behaviour (World Cinema Dramatic Competition), MAMACRUZ (World Cinema Dramatic Competition), Scrapper (World Cinema Dramatic Competition), In My Mother’s Skin (Midnight), Run Rabbit Run (Midnight), A Little Prayer (Premieres), Jamojaya (Premieres).

There is also at least one film in the lineup this year that has pretty prominent Utah ties. Aliens Abducted My Parents and Now I Feel Kinda Left Out will premiere in the Kids category. The was directed by Studio C alumnus Jake Van Wagoner and filmed in Utah. One of the other films in the Kids category, Blueback (a film about a mother-daughter relationship strengthened by their shared desire to protect the oceans), is the 2023 Sundance Film Festival’s Salt Lake City Opening Night Gala Film, premiering at the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center on January 20.

See the full lineup of 2023 Sundance films here. And check out Salt Lake magazine’s reviews of last year’s Sundance films.

The 2023 Festival will take place January 19–29, 2023 with events and screenings in Park City, Salt Lake City and Sundance Resort. A selection of films will also be available online, January 24–29, 2023.  In-Person Ticket Packages are currently on sale through December 16, Online Ticket Packages go on sale December 13 at 10 a.m. MT, and single film tickets go on sale January 12 at 10 a.m. MT. Purchase tickets online at festival.sundance.org. 

Call for volunteers

The Sundance Film Festival is also looking for volunteers to help with both the in-person and online aspects of the festival. Volunteer perks include seeing films, swag, meals and, of course, getting to be in the middle of the action. The hourly commitment for volunteers is of 32 hours or more, fulfilling a variety of tasks like ushering in a theater, helping with ticketing and helping people get around the festival. In-person volunteers will be able to choose whether they will be working in Salt Lake City, Park City or at Sundance Resort. You can apply to volunteer at the Sundance Film Festival at the Sundance Institute website.

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