Sundance

Jan. 22 was the 49th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision on abortion rights, and it could be the last, pending yet another Supreme Court decision. As anti-abortion groups marched in Washington for the annual March For Life, the 2022 Sundance Film Festival had lined up three films that show what it looks like to live in a society without access to legal abortions.

Call Jane

In every way, Joy (Elizabeth Banks) appears to be the perfect 1960s American wife and homemaker. With a pristinely coiffed blond bouffant and floral patterned house dress, she cares for and dotes on her attorney husband Will (Chris Messina) and 15-year-old daughter Charlotte (Grace Edwards). When she gets pregnant, it’s a cause for celebration. Until her first doctor’s visit, that is. With her life threatened by the pregnancy, Joy seeks an abortion. 

This is what the film does well, showing the frustration and desperation of a woman meeting obstacle after obstacle to receive life-saving medical care. The hospital’s (all-male) board denies her an abortion because there’s a chance Joy could carry the pregnancy to term (but potentially kill her in the process). She then seeks out a diagnosis of insanity from two psychiatrists, her only other avenue to a legal abortion. She’s denied that as well. And legality wasn’t the only obstacle. After all, this was an era where women couldn’t have their own bank accounts and were often denied contraception and likely couldn’t work if they were pregnant or had children. 

“How do you just keep going?” Joy’s husband asks that night as she goes about her regular beauty regimen before bed. 

“Because that’s what I do,” she says. What else can she do? 

When Joy does decide to go the extralegal route, she comes across a flier advising her to “Call Jane.” Jane, as it turns out, isn’t one woman but several, a collective working to give women access to safe abortions. After her abortion, which she hides by saying she had a miscarriage, Joy begins helping The Janes. As she meets women desperate to terminate their pregnancies—far more than the Janes can possibly accommodate—Call Jane shows Joy’s transformation from demure housewife to a supporter of women’s rights and an abortionist herself. This is partially spurred by tension among the Janes as they try to decide which women they will help. 

A pivotal scene shows the desperation of the Janes to help the likewise desperate women. They wrote the information of each one on a 3×5 index card and pass them around: Mothers who can’t provide for another child, women without access to birth control, rape victims, young girls, cancer patients and on and on.

While based on true events, Call Jane is a film in want of a climax. The group was eventually raided and arrested in 1972 (about a year before Roe v. Wade, which would render anti-abortion laws in 46 states unconstitutional), but that part of the story doesn’t really make it into the movie. We also miss out on a resolution to Joy’s domestic drama, which becomes more and more the focus of the film as it progresses. Performance highlights include Sigourney Weaver as the righteous and assertive Virginia, the de facto leader of the Janes, Cory Michael Smith as the Janes’ awkward-mannered abortionist, brief appearances by Kate Mara as Joy’s neighbor and friend Lana and Chris Magaro as a police officer whose single scene provides a much-needed (if not too late) rise in the stakes.  

Call Janes premiered day two of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival and is still seeking distribution at last check. 

ABOUT CALL JANE DIRECTOR PHYLLIS NAGY
Phyllis Nagy is a writer and director whose work includes award-winning films (Mrs. Harris), screenplays (Carol), and plays (Disappeared). 

The Janes

The Janes is the second film at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival about the real-life group the Jane Collective. The Janes is a documentary that chronicles the group’s formation out of the near-daily revolutions happening in Chicago 1968 through its dissolution in 1973 with Roe v. Wade. During that time, abortion was a crime in most states (and even circulating information about abortion was a felony in Illinois) and the Janes provided abortions to an estimated 11,000 women. 

The Janes begins with a little stage-setting, taking us through the political and societal upheaval of 1968 Chicago and liberation and anti-war movements where some of the Janes cut their teeth. We also see the gruesome results of women who, out of necessity or desperation, risk a variety of abortion methods. A medical doctor interviewed in the documentary recalls the septic abortion ward at Cook County Hospital, where they admitted women who had undergone an illegal abortion and something had gone wrong. He recalls treating women and girls with chemical burns, perforated organs, infections, septic shock, and every day, that ward was full. No matter the legality, there are going to be women who seek abortions. And the founding members of the Jane Collective, some of whom had received abortions themselves, saw the need for those abortions to be performed safely. Women were dying and it seemed no one else cared. Through this, The Janes establishes the impossibly high stakes.  

The story of the Jane Collective is told through archival footage and interviews with those involved. Their sharp recollection of the events gives the documentary its weight and emotion, and we get glimpses into their surprising playfulness, drive and deep care. One woman, Jeanne, still had a stack of the 3×5 index cards on which (as shown in Call Jane) they wrote the information of people seeking abortions from the Jane Collective. They would pass those cards around their group, assigning each one to the member who thought she could best handle that particular case. For years, their clandestine network avoided detection by using code names, fronts and safe houses. Unlike in Call Jane, in The Janes, we learn how the collective is ultimately raided by police and the members arrested and charged as told by the people who were there. What saved them from a lifetime in prison was partly a legal strategy of delay, delay, delay and partly the Supreme Court’s decision on Roe v. Wade. 

With abortion no longer illegal—which it had been in most states—the Jane Collective dissolved and the members largely went their separate ways, pursuing other causes. The septic abortion ward at Cook County Hospital was also shuttered a year later, as, like the Jane Collective, it was no longer needed. 

The Janes premiered on the fifth day of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival and has already been picked up for distribution by HBO. 

ABOUT DIRECTOR TIA LESSIN
Tia Lessin was nominated for an Academy Award for her work as a director and producer of the Hurricane Katrina survival story Trouble the Water, winner of the 2008 Sundance Grand Jury Prize and the Gotham Independent Film Award. She directed and produced Citizen Koch, about the rise of the Tea Party in the Midwest, which also premiered at Sundance and was shortlisted for an Oscar in 2014. The Janes is the third feature-length documentary that Tia has directed. 

ABOUT DIRECTOR EMMA PILDES
Emmy-nominated filmmaker Emma Pildes has an extensive background in, and boundless love for, non-fiction storytelling. The Janes is Emma’s directorial debut. 

Happening

The third Sundance film that gives a look at what a society without legal abortion could look like takes place in France, 1963. The official synopsis of Happening reads, “Anne (Anamaria Vartolomei) is a bright young student with a promising future ahead of her. But when she falls pregnant, she sees the opportunity to finish her studies and escape the constraints of her social background disappearing. With her final exams fast approaching and her belly growing, Anne resolves to act, even if she has to confront shame and pain, even if she must risk prison to do so.”

Happening is told from the perspective of Anne in 1.37 aspect ratio, along with several interior monologues with a musical accompaniment, to give the sense that the camera is one with the actress. “The camera was supposed to be Anne, not to look at Anne,” says Happening director Audrey Diwan. 

The film is adapted from the semi-autobiographical novel of the same name by prize-winning author Annie Ernaux, who, after seeing the film adaptation, told Diwan, “You’ve made a truthful film.” She later went on to say in a letter, “Audrey Diwan had the courage to show it [women’s recourse before legal abortions] in all its brutal reality: the knitting needles, the probe introduced into the uterus by an abortionist. Only such disturbing images can make us aware of the horrors that were perpetrated on women’s bodies, and what a step backwards would mean.”

The French-language film has already been acquired for distribution by IFC Films. Happening will open theatrically on May 6, 2022. 

ABOUT DIRECTOR AUDREY DIWAN
Audrey Diwan is a filmmaker, author and screenwriter who has collaborated with Cédric Jimenez, Gilles Lellouche and Valérie Donzelli, among others. She made her feature film directing debut with Losing It, starring Celine Sallette and Pio Marmai. Her second film, Happening, won the Golden Lion in 2021 Venice Film Festival and will be released theatrically in the US by IFC Films in 2022. 

Read all of Salt Lake magazine’s 2022 Sundance reviews.

It might be said that terroir is at the heart of Juan Pablo González’s stark and subtle drama Dos Estaciones. It is, in many ways, a film about the crafting of tequila in the highlands of Jalisco, in western Mexico. As aficionados know, though tequila’s origins are ancient and mysterious (or just disputed), the spirit received Mexico’s first appellation of origin in 1974. This legally reserved the name “tequila” only for spirits distilled from Weber azul (blue agave) throughout the state of Jalisco and in a few small municipalities elsewhere in Mexico. The deep history of tequila production around the town of Tequila (yes, Virginia, there is such a place, gracias a Dios, just an hour north of Guadalajara) led to the town, the nearby volcano, and the surrounding valleys collectively being named a World Heritage Site in 2006. 

Of course, these plays for site-specific authenticity are mostly based on international, legal recognition and there are a bevy of agave liquors made and marketed throughout the world—including in Tequila itself—which, while sold as tequila, are not officially certified as tequila. (Mezcal, sotol and raicilla are a different matter altogether.) 

Then again, tequila is not just about site; it’s also about method. Some distilleries base notions of taste and quality on their use of pre-industrial methods (stone or brick ovens for baking agave and a stone wheel—a tahona—to crush them), while many others gladly employ modern presses and autoclaves. Further, while hundreds of Mexican distilleries produce their own line of tequila, they also may rent out their facilities, or sell some of their stock, to other labels, many of them celebrity-co-owned, and headquartered in other countries, c.f. Patrón, Casamigos, and Utah’s own Vida. Notably, too, of the big three—Cuervo, Sauza, and Herradura, among the oldest and most famous tequila brands from Jalisco—only Cuervo is not owned by an American conglomerate. 

Blue agave wasn’t always the singular star it is today. In the late 19^th century, as Don Cenobio Sauza began to institutionalize modern production methods and national and international distribution, Weber azul ascended to its role as the now-customary source of tequila due to its relatively rapid rate of maturity. It’s an industrial winner, but the legacy of blue agave’s success is a vast monocrop that blankets central Jalisco’s rolling hills, displaces traditional subsistence crops, and is historically subject to disease, called a plague, which is just one of the many challenges faced by Dos Estaciones‘s stoic hero, Doña María (Teresa Sánchez). 

Purposeful and resolute, rarely showing a trace of emotion, Doña María begins her day and the film patiently inspecting the entirety of her family’s relatively modest facilities. We come to surmise that she is the last of the line. Gerardo Guerra’s patient and detailed cinematography not only provides a full tour of Doña María’s operation, from the field to the bottle, it seems designed to emphasize the essential bond between the picturesque red soil of Los Altos, the massive agave plants levered out of it, and the exhausting, repetitive work of the distillery’s laborers, men and women transforming raw materials into a finely crafted luxury item, often receiving lower wages than they’ve earned. If it’s not the most recent wave of plague that’s cutting into Doña María’s profits and building up her debts, it’s other scarcities of agave created by thieves and the massive buying power of foreign corporations. 

Nevertheless, the patrón, both terse and beneficent, is viewed as a valued member of her workers’ families. As much as Doña María’s duty is to produce a product worthy of her family’s name, she is also understood to be one who provides—most importantly, one who provides jobs in a community entirely dependent on agave agriculture and the distilleries’ success. This responsibility is implicit in Doña María’s seemingly casual dialogue with a young woman, Rafaela (Rafaela Fuentes), at an employee’s child’s birthday party. “Yes,” Doña María admits, finally. “I have a need for someone with your profile.” The physical implications of the comment are notable, in that something like a mutual seduction develops between the two women as times grow ever harder, exposing both tender and cryptic new facets of Doña María’s character. And just as we understand that Rafaela had been fishing for a job in their first meeting without ever saying so, we begin to wonder if there’s even more she’s fishing for once she’s been put in charge of the distillery’s accounts.

Like the rain, the river, the sun and the shade trees, such personal mysteries make the terroir of Dos Estaciones ever richer, make it a film requiring deep attention. You have to listen and look carefully to fully understand the drama running under the surface. Love is there, as is deep hatred, and while the outcome may not be inevitable, it feels sorely earned, laying bare a difficult and ineluctable truth that can be addressed in no other way. For the elegant, documentary-style presentation of its subject, for its nuanced performances, and its exquisitely quiet drama, Dos Estaciones is most definitely one to be savored right now.

As a filmmaker, now I am asking myself, where does the camera go? What am I looking at? Am I showing what it feels like to be looked at? Am I showing how it feels to see while I’m being looked at? What is the heroine’s journey?” asks Joey Soloway (producer and director of Transparent and I Love Dick), one of the interviewees in Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power. Soloway sums up the views of the filmmakers, actors, activists and researchers in Brainwashed, calling the objectification of women in cinema “a state of emergency.” 

With Brainwashed, director Nina Menkes (Queen of Diamonds, The Bloody Child, Phantom Love) draws a straight line from the language of visual storytelling in film to gender discrimination in the film industry and to a culture of sexual violence and abuse against women. But, much of the work of supporting this argument has already been done, leaving Menkes with the task of presenting it in a new and engaging way and trying to answer the question, “where do we go from here?”

The documentary is structured around a lecture given by Menkes and supplemented by professional interviews and a barrage of clips that hammer home how radically different the camera shoots women compared to how it shoots men. Menkes explains that women are frequently displayed as objects for the use, support and pleasure of male subjects. “This systematic law of cinematic language can be seen in almost all the ‘best films,’ the ones young women are told to study, absorb and emulate when they arrive at film school.” 

Brainwashed doesn’t hesitate from pulling examples of gendered shot design from Academy Award-winning films, blockbusters or long-proclaimed cinematic masterpieces. (Even a scene with festival founder Robert Redford in Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid gets called out.) At first, the seemingly endless film clips of female actors and female bodies—often shot from the same angles, with the same perspectives, with the same lighting and same slow camera movements and close-ups of disparate body parts—seems novel. Then the barrage starts to feel like compelling visual evidence for Menkes’ argument, then it’s disquieting and then sickening by the time we are seeing violence against women presented through the same kind of objectifying lens and sensual shot design. All-told, Brainwashed contains 175 film clips, ranging from 1896 through the present.

Brainwashed isn’t the first time someone has made an argument about how visual storytelling in film, firstly, is gendered and, secondly, contributes to a culture of misogyny, sexism, discrimination and sexual violence. The evidence for that has been well-tread and is re-tread in Brainwashed. After all, the #MeToo movement is a few years old now and, before that, film theorist Laura Mulvey, who is interviewed in Brainwashed, coined the term “male gaze” back in the 70s with her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” This documentary feels unique not for its dissection of films clips, nor the inclusion of psychoanalysts proving both the societal and personal impacts, nor the stories of people in the industry who had careers destroyed for saying “no,” but for trying to show another way to visually tell stories other than the way we have come to consider the (problematic) standard.

When Menkes tries to show “another way” of visual storytelling, she often begins with the phrase, “in my own films.” Indeed, we see scenes from Menkes’ films in which she endeavors to make external the internal experiences of women as truthfully as possible, including their experiences during sex. Thankfully, Menkes doesn’t just use her own work as examples of another way. She asks the question, “what would desire look like on film when it’s not about subject and object?” They use Portrait Of A Lady On Fire (2019), which features a mutual desire between two women, to show how an “object” can discover their own subjectivity, i.e.: power, within a story. They use films like Promising Young Woman (2020) which attempt to subvert the standard narrative and upend power dynamics. They also argue that Oscar wins for Nomadland (2020), told from the perspective of a woman in her 60s (Frances McDormand), and director Chloé Zhao as a hopeful herald of changing times.

The documentary concludes with a series of questions, imploring the audience to examine their own lives and their own world and compare their truth to what they have been taught to believe instead: the world we see on film. “How do I actually experience desire? How do I actually experience my day? Because we’ve been taught what is time, what is sex, what a man is, what a woman is—we’ve been taught all of these things. And if we just accept it, we are trapped in a collective consciousness.”

To other filmmakers Menkes asks, “What happens if you try to listen inward? What happens if you try to tune in, in a very delicate and quiet way, to what you’re actually experiencing? And what would actually be a true expression of that experience translated into a shot?”

If you’re familiar with the work of the #MeToo movement, the revelations following the accusation and conviction of Harvey Weinstein, or any of the body of work and research that forms the pillars of this documentary (like The Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film or The Women’s Media Center), Brainwashed might not present anything new. The effect of the film clips presented one after the other in an endless string of evidence is upsetting but aids the argument in a way a scholarly article cannot. However, even though the problem was pointed out long before Brainwashed, it still can’t give us a satisfactory answer to what comes next. For just under two hours, Brainwashed offers a thorough examination of sex and power in shot design and the personal and societal ills that stem from it. But, as far as presenting a manual of how filmmaking and the industry should proceed from here, we’re left with a lot of questions. 

Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power premiered on day three of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival and is available for ticket-holders to watch online until 8 a.m. (MST) Jan. 25. 

ABOUT PRODUCER/DIRECTOR NINA MENKES

Called “brilliant, one of the most provocative artists in film today,” by The Los Angeles Times, and a “cinematic sorceress” by The New York Times, Menkes’ films synthesize inner dream worlds with brutal, outer realities. Her work has been shown widely in major international film festivals, including Sundance (four feature premieres), the Berlinale, Locarno, Toronto, and MOMA in NYC. She has had numerous international retrospectives and her early work has been selected for restoration by the Academy Film Archive and Scorsese’s Film Foundation. Menkes is a Fulbright and Guggenheim Fellow and on the faculty at California Institute of the Arts. For more information: ninamenkes.com

In the opening sequence of Goran Stolevski’s haunting and philosophical new film You Won’t Be Alone, a mother comes face-to-face with an awful spirit, a witch, a legend, an old wives’ tale, known as Old Maid Maria. Seated beside the woman’s newborn baby, Maria is a frightful thing, with thin, stringy hair, her nude body livid and puckered, as if it’s been burned. In the language of the film’s Macedonian peasants, Maria is not a witch, but a sheep-eateress, something more like a vampire, a thing that feeds off the blood of the living—animal as well as human—opening bodies, including its own, using its long, black claws. The sheep-eateress is a shapeshifter, too, capable of inhabiting the corpse of its victim and of making others like itself. 

And yet, an “it,” Maria is not. Not quite. Played with exquisite subtlety and sensitivity by Anamaria Marinca, Old Maid Maria has arrived to feed on the peasant woman’s baby, but she’s willing, for a moment, to listen to the mother’s pleas of forbearance. The woman begs Maria to let the baby live for now, to let the mother see her child grow, and then, when the girl turns 16, the sheep-eateress can have her, a daughter of her own, the mother says, to look after her in her old age. Maria takes the deal, rendering the girl mute as a down payment. But the mother immediately attempts to get out of her bargain by hiding the baby in a nearby cave. She raises her daughter in total isolation, the girl’s only contact with the outside world, her only means for understanding her body and her inner life, coming through a few inaccessible gaps in the stone. When Old Maid Maria finally comes to collect, she releases the girl from one captivity only to condemn her to another, making her a sheep-eateress like herself, an eternal outcast from society. But the girl is too struck by wonder at the landscapes and beings she’s been introduced to to feed and wander aimlessly like her “witch-mama.” Finally frustrated by her protégé’s reluctance and intransigence, Maria casts the girl aside to fend for herself. You’ll see, she warns. Just you wait. She may be a monster now, but Maria has a history, as we’ll come to learn, and her cynicism about the humans upon which she preys is hard earned. But is it fate?

By way of an answer, the now independent girl uses her shapeshifting powers to take refuge among a family of peasants, to live as one of them, though oddly, still mute and uncomfortable in her new body. Suddenly thrust into the role of mother and wife, she finds she’s landed in yet another prison, though one she’ll eventually leverage for a kind of liberation. 

You Won’t Be Alone is an intoxicating and affecting exploration of humanity through estrangement, a study of the rudiments of society, the dangers and pleasures of being with and without others. The film’s camerawork, defamiliarizing the natural and naturalizing the marvelous, matches the lyricism of the girl’s strange, poetic inner monologue. And Stolevski’s cast does a remarkable job of passing the developing entity of the girl around, maintaining consistency of character while embodying growth as she seeks to educate herself through many forms—female and male, human and animal—always following her inherently loving curiosity against the expectations of the singular Maria, looking on from the margins, skeptical, resentful, envious and cruel. Maybe being born a woman among these brutish clans is the real root of Old Maid Maria’s curse, as suggested by her mocking name. But her protégé’s more-than-human pursuit of joy over revenge or escape suggests another possible way of surviving this “burning, hurting thing” that is the world.

Well, it’s official. We just can’t have nice things these days. That dastardly old Omicron variant has given COVID a whole new flavor to kick off 2022, and the surge it’s set off has gone ahead and derailed the in-person portion of Park City’s dueling Sundance and Slamdance Film Festivals. The hybrid festival lineups were supposed to mark the triumphant return of Park City as the epicenter of the independent film universe, but as we’ve so often recently found the best laid plans are pretty much worthless these days.

Festival organizers had tried their best to stem the Omicron tide. Sundance was requiring all attendees, including filmmakers, talent, volunteers and ticket holders to show proof of vaccination (including boosters for all eligible people) and wear masks. Dates for the festival remain unchanged, however single ticket sales which were supposed to be available this week will now go on sale next week on Jan. 12 (for Sundance Members) and 13 (for the general public). People who have already bought passes and ticket packages will be updated to have online access for the films during the festival.

Curiously, Sundance screenings at seven satellite venues Amherst, Mass.; Baltimore; Lawrence, Kan.; Memphis; San Diego; Seattle; and Winston-Salem, N.C. are still scheduled even though events throughout Utah have been canceled.

The decision to take Sundance online follows that of the Slamdance Film Festival, which announced in December it would be rescheduling its dates and taking the entire program online. Originally planned for Jan. 20-23, Slamdance’s indie lineup is now scheduled for Jan. 27-Feb. 6.

This is quite the bummer for everyone involved, including certain writers who were planning on attending the event under the guise doing actual work. But there’s still a great lineup of creative indie films available for aficionados to check out. Support the film festivals from the comfort of your own home for the second year in a row, and cross your fingers while hoping the bustle and energy of Sundance and Slamdance will return to Park City next January.  

Sundance and Slamdance have released the lineups for their 2022 film festivals. The dueling events—one which has grown since its inception into an international spectacle and the other which adheres strictly to its independent, DIY ethos—will take place concurrently in Park City, beginning on Jan. 20, 2022. Last year’s Sundance and Slamdance Film Festivals were derailed by Covid, but organizers and attendees are banking on vaccination and testing protocols to return the 2022 editions to their former glory with in person screenings and an interactive, welcoming atmosphere.

The Sundance Film Festival, which hardly needs an introduction at this point, has been a midwinter mainstay in Park City since 1981 and returns to the community from Jan. 20-30. Sundance’s profile has risen over the years as the film industry’s glitz, glamour and funding have become part of the production, but the festival’s always been a breeding ground for independent film that would go on to gain wider acclaim. The first edition of what was then called the Utah/U.S. Film Festival included canonical films such as “Deliverance,” “Mean Streets,” “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “Midnight Cowboy,” after all.

Audiences in 2022 can get excited about an enormous variety of independent film genres and visions. Highly anticipated selections from the lineup include IFC Midnight’s “Hatching,” a suspenseful feature about a young gymnast hiding a mysterious giant egg from her domineering mother, “Living,” a reimagining of Akira Kurosawa’s “Ikiru (To Live),” “Lucy and Desi,” a documentary examining the enduring legacy of the unlikely partners from director Amy Poehler and “Master,” a horror tinted psychological thriller about an elite New England university built on the site of a Salem-era gallows hill. Typical cinema fare these films certainly are not. For more details about the festival schedule and lineup, visit the Sundance website.

Slamdance has become, in its way, the antithesis of Sundance, eschewing the creep of Hollywood influence in favor of an unwavering independent spirit. To be eligible for Slamdance’s competition lineup, the 23 features chosen from more than 1,100 submissions are all directorial debuts with budgets under $1 million and without U.S. distribution.  

“We are anti-algorithm. That’s always been true, but it’s more urgent than ever as we continue to celebrate truly unique voices that defy simple classification and transcend analytics,” said Slamdance President and co-founder Peter Baxter. “This year our programmers gravitated towards films that embody the true DIY spirit of guerrilla filmmaking and push the boundaries of what’s possible in storytelling.”

Films audiences can look forward to run the gamut from “Facing Monsters,” a feature-length documentary about West Australian ‘slab wave’ surfer Kerby Brown, to “Killing the Eunuch,” a horror feature about a serial killer using his victims to kill further victims, to “Forget Me Not,” the story of a family fighting for their son with down syndrome to be included in the country’s most segregated school system. Click here to see the full festival lineup, and visit the Slamdance website to purchase passes for the January 20-23 in person portion and January 20-30 online portion of the festival.

We’ll have plenty more film festival coverage as Sundance and Slamdance take over Park City in the coming weeks, so stay tuned.

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Lyle Mitchell Corbine Jr.’s first feature, Wild Indian, opens with a brief historical sequence, tracking the final days, maybe moments, in the life of an Ojibwe man, stricken with smallpox. He’s weak and disoriented. He’s a little sick, we’re told, wandering West, attempting to escape his imminent death from the infection he’s received from contact with white colonists, an influence signified by the disfiguring smallpox rash covering the man’s body. “We are the last,” he whispers to a woman he refers to as Mother. Or maybe he’s speaking to some larger entity, the land around him.

Of course, his end is not the end. Wild Indian is a film about legacies, about the persistent presence of our founding trauma of violent dispossession and how it has shaped subsequent generations. The film’s initial apocalyptic moment leads us into the central narrative of two Native cousins, Makwa and Ted-O, also Ojibwe, vulnerable teens living on a reservation in Wisconsin. For Makwa, things are particularly rough. His father, a violent alcoholic, seems always to be inventing a reason to beat the boy, while his mother, blandly acknowledging Makwa’s fear, simply looks on. The little solace Ted-O can offer is taking his cousin out for walks in the woods after school, coaching him on how to shoot straight with his father’s rifle. After one particularly rough encounter, Makwa admits to Ted-O that he can’t take it anymore and urges his cousin to run off with him, to the city, where they can make their way, find something like success, like other people. White people is what he means, Ted-O seems to understand, and he responds with some confidence: “I don’t think it works that way.” The world as it is, as it’s been made for them, won’t allow that. But, among other things, the world around them is made of violence, and as desperation and resentment mount, it’s just a matter of time before empty bottles no longer suffice as the rifle’s only target. A not-quite-random killing seems to fulfill the boys’ destiny and maybe also to create a permanent rift between them, until Makwa makes a desperate and self-serving case for an alternative.

A stark divergence in the boys’ fortunes is revealed as the story leaps forward several decades. While Ted-O has remained in Wisconsin, mired in the desperate struggles of the reservation, we find Makwa, now known as Michael, out west, in California, apparently having found a way to penetrate the distant world of wealth, power, and status he’d once dreamed of. Like his ancestor, however, he’s not able to escape his infection. He may leverage the myths of his identity to his advantage within a system breathlessly excusing itself for—and never fully owning—the sins of colonization, but Michael’s barely concealed fury nevertheless exposes his deepest fears.

Michael Greyeyes plays the adult Makwa with a terrifying intensity, his cold menace never fully eclipsing the bewildered vulnerability of his younger self (played by Phoenix Wilson). Chaske Spencer is equally effective as the devastatingly wounded adult Ted-O, making the most of one particularly fine scene of revelation. Some weaker performances by minor characters and a few missteps in the script shave off a bit of the power of the film’s final third, but the emotional algebra of its larger narrative is never unclear. Wild Indian is a taut and essential testimony, not to be missed.

Read more of Salt Lake’s Sundance coverage here.