On the night of August 24, 2014, Lennon Lacy, a 17-year-old, African American high school student, was found hanging by his neck from a swing set in a park near his home in Bladenboro, North Carolina. Earlier in the evening, he’d packed his gear for the next night’s football game and promised his mother he’d bring in the wash hanging on the line. Signs of a defensive struggle were evident on Lennon’s forearms. He seemed to have everything to live for. And yet, despite a rather substantial amount of evidence that would warrant at least a deeper investigation, Lennon’s death was quickly ruled a suicide by local police. Always in Season, Jacqueline Olive’s powerful documentary takes its time to reveal the additional evidence—much of it collected by Lennon’s brother, Pierre—but don’t get impatient. Don’t jump at that bait. Don’t ask those questions just yet. As Sherrilyn Ifill—a lawyer for the NAACP’s Legal Fund who’s interviewed in the film—commented in the post-screening discussion: “This isn’t a whodunnit. It’s the story of why a process wasn’t followed.”

Who is likely to have done it, Always in Season asserts, was recorded decades ago in postcards of and newspaper invitations to the widely accepted practice of lynching, a phenomenon—a message crime, as it’s called in the film—particularly common in the region of North Carolina where Lennon Lacy lived, which is also no stranger to Klan rallies. But, as we learn, the Klan was never the biggest perpetrator of lynching. Rather, it was ordinary white people, people whose names were as visible around town as their faces are in the images they circulated to commemorate their crimes. Olive’s approach here is to position Lennon’s death within the history of lynching, interweaving the teen’s contemporary story with those of two 20th century incidents: the 1934 lynching of Claude Neal in Florida and the murders of George and Mae Murray Dorsey and Roger and Dorothy Malcom at the Moore’s Ford Bridge near Monroe, Georgia, in 1946. In both cases, as with Lennon’s, there was plenty of evidence to investigate those crimes. An invitation to Neal’s lynching printed in the newspaper actually referred to what was intended for the evening as a “murder,” and though the Federal government investigated the Moore’s Ford incident, no charges were ever filed. The convincing common thread throughout, alongside shoddy police work, is a shameful lack of public will to face the past as well as the present.

Perhaps the most troubling moments in Olive’s film come from her footage of annual re-enactments of the Moore’s Ford lynchings, performed at the original site by white and black residents. The horror of these performances, orchestrated by a black, Atlanta-based theater director, is clearly distressing to the local, mostly black audience—and also to the viewer. It’s awful enough to make one wonder about the value of re-traumatizing the community every year, of coaching white performers to spew the hateful speech of the murderers, to ask the black performers to give their all to their screams of pain and terror. What Olive and Lennon’s mother, Claudia, manage to convince us of is that telling all the story is the only way to justice and progress, regardless of where the story may lead. This isn’t a whodunnit. It’s the story of why a process wasn’t followed. Investigators as well as communities need to follow the process, to consider all the details. This kind of telling, Claudia says, is an act of grieving. An act we all have an opportunity, an obligation to share.

See all our Sundance coverage here.

Piper De Palma, daughter of famed director Brian De Palma, makes her feature film debut in Spiral Farm, a drama about a girl hoping to gain her independence . . . if she can actually leave her old life behind.

Seventeen-year-old Anahita (De Palma) lives in a commune in the hills of Southern California (inspired by those you remember from your ganja-filled days the late ‘60s), where she works on a farm and participates in ceremonies to bring forth tranquility (and stuff like that). But Anahita’s life isn’t as peaceful as you’d think; she takes on most of her family’s farm chores, including her lazy mother’s, and cares for her 8-year-old nephew, Ocean, while her sister regularly escapes the latter-day hippie refuge for civilization. Luckily, Anahita finds solace in sneaking off to practice her hip hop dance moves in the woods (yes, really). When her mother reunites with an old lover, the man’s attractive son encourages Anahita to attend a dance audition in the city. After busting some moves and experiencing city life, she sees her ticket out of the commune. She’ll just have to leave her mother and Ocean behind, and ask herself if she’s even capable of living off of the farm.

Spiral Farm touches on sex, duty and personal fulfillment through a coming-of-age tale, while spiraling through a range of emotions like an emo, death metal and gospel playlist set on shuffle (though you’ll leave with Donna Lewis’s “I Love You Always Forever” playing in your head). Though the story may feel somewhat stagnant at times, the film offers both dialogue and an ending that feel refreshingly realistic.

Written and directed by Alec Tibaldi, Spiral Farm is in the Narrative Competition at the 2019 Slamdance Film Festival.

Upcoming screening: Tuesday, Jan. 29, 7:45 p.m., Gallery Screening Room, Treasure Mountain Inn, Park City

Full Slamdance Schedule

And the sunshine did fall brightly upon the multitudes gathered in Park City for the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. And Lo! The elders at the Utah Office of Tourism and the Sundance Institute saw that it was good. And faithful and stalwart Stuart Graves did benefit much from the clear skies and warmer weather that brought the stars down from the firmament and out of their Accuras and AirBnBs amongst the people. Many #stuartselfies were taken and it was good.

What? We’re doing Bible talk? No idea. Anyway, Stuart. As if you didn’t know. He’s an official FOM (Friend of the Magazine). He loves finding famous faces on Main Street during the Sundance Film Festival. He’s had a lot of luck so far. Here’s the evidence. You can follow Stuart on (Instagram, Twitter, Facebook) for his star-studded #stuartselfie(s).

Video of Stuart on the Street below our photo gallery. Video by David Shuff.

Sundance 2019 – Street Seen With Stuart Graves -Salt Lake Magazine from Salt Lake Magazine on Vimeo.

We went to the Blue Carpet, they’re all blue this year for Late Night, late last night. katherine Newbury (Emma Thompson) is a pioneer and legendary host on the late-night talk-show circuit. When she’s accused of being a “woman who hates women,” she puts affirmative action on the to-do list, and—presto!—Molly (Mindy Kaling) is hired as the one woman in Katherine’s all-male writers’ room. But Molly might be too little too late, as the formidable Katherine also faces the reality of low ratings and a network that wants to replace her. Molly, wanting to prove she’s not simply a diversity hire who’s disrupting the comfort of the brotherhood, is determined to help Katherine by revitalizing her show and career—and possibly effect even bigger change at the same time.

Thompson brings pathos and amusingly severe charm to the pantsuit-clad Katherine. Smartly written by Kaling and snappily directed by Nisha Ganatra, Late Night takes on white privilege, entitlement, and a culture veering toward crassness and conservatism. Questioning how women in power are “supposed” to act, it delivers a winsome, sophisticated comedy about the times in which we live. See all our Sundance coverage here.

Photos by Natalie Simpson / Beehive Photography 

Justin Chon (Gook, 2017) returns to Sundance with an intense, though often humorous, family drama, pairing Tiffany Chu and Teddy Lee as a brother and sister struggling with their father’s imminent death and legacy of failure. Chu plays Kasie, a deeply devoted daughter, working as a hostess at a Los Angeles karaoke bar and moonlighting as a swaggering young businessman’s paid girlfriend to cover the bills for her bedridden father’s medical treatments. Though her father is mostly nonresponsive, Kasie seems to have sacrificed any ambitions she might have had (and that her father might have had for her) to keep him out of professional hospice care, to keep from taking him out of the home he worked for. Her brother, Carey, is equally adrift, without a job, or apparently a change of shirt, having virtually abandoned the family after escalating fights with his father. Nevertheless, he seems to gain a touch of traction when Kasie, without anyone else to turn to, reaches out to him for help.

With Kasie and Carey’s mother also out of the picture, abandonment is a central fear here, signifying not just a failure of familial devotion (perhaps a legacy of the family’s Korean heritage, though the viewer feels this as a universal value), but also a failure to thrive in a hostile emotional and economic landscape. There are some heavy moments of melodrama from time to time (made heavier still by Roger Suen’s sometimes overwhelming score and a tad too much slow motion), but mostly Chon and editor Reynolds Barney’s creative weaving together of the film’s fragmented timeline is impressive, effectively guiding us toward an understanding of the father’s core desire to give as much support as he needs.

As with Gook, Ms. Purple’s main characters are Korean-American (the father is actually an immigrant), surviving in a dark and deeply unglamorous LA. How often does public transportation feature so prominently in a film set in the city? That’s how needful Chon’s characters are. Ante Cheng’s beautifully atmospheric cinematography creates a persistent melancholy, a tragic, even violent, mood in a city of sun and light. Night and day, Ms. Purple is a film of great light, in fact, the strobes and intimate screens of the club and the long golden hour of Los Angeles, which frequently serves not just as a source of illumination, but as a kind of contemplative space for the characters, so often riven by devastating emotion.

Alongside its visual sense, Ms. Purple’s greatest strength is the natural chemistry between its leads. Chu and Lee capture the interplay of close siblings with a touch more honey than vinegar, but they also have great power when they hover at the edge of estrangement. If the film is sometimes too neatly scripted, this can be overlooked for the excellent performances and the satisfactions of its visual and thematic beauty.

See all our Sundance Coverage here.

Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerra, producer and director, respectively of 2015’s fantastic Embrace of the Serpent, team up to direct this quiet epic set in the Guajira region of Colombia, home to an indigenous people known as the Wayúu. As with their previous film, Gallego and Guerra preside over a disastrous clash of cultures, here between a desert-dwelling matriarchal society and an increasingly violent drug economy vaguely tying the Wayúus’ lives to American appetites.

The initial violation comes as a result of Rapayet, the film’s primary male protagonist’s need to come up with a steep dowry to earn the hand of Zaida, daughter of a fiercely protective mother, Ursula. Rapayet is Wayúu, but he’s used to doing business with outsiders, alijunas, which makes him both lax in his practice of folkways, and suspect to the dominant Ursula. Ursula’s substantial power in the community stems not just from her possession of a protective talisman, but also her rigor and her capacity to interpret dreams. Ursula knows and she knows how. Tribal traditions are mostly maintained through her vigilance and insistence. If belief is one foundational pillar of the tribe, the sanctity and primacy of the family is the other. In the moments before Zaida emerges from the ritual confinement that signals her arrival into adulthood, Ursula instructs her daughter that a Wayúu woman must be prepared to do anything to protect her family. Hence the seemingly impossible hurdle of Zaida’s dowry, her price as it were: 30 goats, 20 cows, and five necklaces. Despite the Wayúu’s valuing of the word and family reputation, it seems that property is nevertheless the real power in this particular neighborhood.

Rapayet, already involved in a minor smuggling operation with his alijuna friend Moises, sees an opportunity for advancement when the two are approached with a proposition to sell marijuana to some hippieish Peace Corps workers. As it happens, Rapayet’s mountain-dwelling cousin, Aníbal (also Wayúu, but from another clan), is growing the “wild grass” on a relatively humble scale. After some tense negotiations, Rapayet, Moises, and Aníbal strike a mutually profitable deal. This initial success not only gets Rapayet the dowry he needs, it leads to a burgeoning family business that brings everyone involved—in the desert and in the mountains—greater and greater measures of wealth and power.

As a mob film, the broad arc of the family’s rise and fall over the course of about 15 years (1968 to the early 1980s) is relatively predictable. What’s of maybe more interest is the development of the two clans’ enmity toward each other and the way the traditions that have bound them and their business practices are worn away by the accretion of their more or less distant connections with non-Wayúu culture. There are a number of subtle forms of erosion, as when Aníbal comes to rely on an alijuna bodyguard and begins to eschew his native Wayúu for Spanish, or when Rapayet’s son says he wants to learn to fly planes (like those that transport their drugs) rather than ride a horse. More troubling for Rapayet, Ursula, and their family, however, is that the seemingly natural magic intertwined with their tribe’s traditions, a magic tied visually to insects, birds, and the weather, gradually seems to lose its efficacy. With it goes respect for elders and all boundaries, until the family is left blind and afraid, cut loose from the perception of spiritual guidance, sunk in a chaos of personal choice.

Birds of Passage is beautifully shot and edited and features a remarkably strong ensemble cast with faces as memorable as their performances, a film well worth a watch.

See all our Sundance Coverage here.

The Vast of the Night doesn’t reel you in with its special effects, dark tones or ‘50s aesthetic — it relies on an element that predates Hollywood and movies altogether: storytelling.

In a small New Mexico town, at the dawn of the space race, a 16-year-old switchboard operator (Sierra McCormick) and a young radio DJ (Jake Horowitz) discover a weird noise coming through the radio and phone line, while nearly everyone else in town is at the local high school’s basketball game. As the duo attempts to discover the origin of the sound (even suspecting Soviet involvement), storytellers they meet along the way take them down a rabbit hole toward realizing the sound may not be from this planet. The first storyteller calls in to the radio station to relate the sound to his top-secret military experience. Later, an old shut in explains how it connects to losing her child many years earlier. These stories and others grip viewers like a well-written audio book, or just a really good call during open lines on Coast to Coast AM. As the mystery deepens, viewers are taken on a tour of Cayuga, New Mexico through long, uninterrupted shots amid empty streets. We also learn that the entire story exists in a Twilight Zone-type show.

Sierra McCormick plays a young switchboard operator who makes a startling discovery in The Vast of the Night. Photo courtesy of Mitch Swan (Millennial PR).

With a script reminiscent of a Rod Serling yarn, filled with witty dialogue, weird occurrences and ‘50s jargon, it’s a noteworthy tribute to the greatest show on television.

Directed by Andrew Patterson and written by James Montague and Craig W. Sanger, The Vast of the Night is in the Narrative Features section of the 2019 Slamdance Film Festival.

Upcoming screening: Monday, Jan. 28, 8 p.m., Ballroom Screening Room, Treasure Mountain Inn, Park City

Full Slamdance schedule

The cast of After The Wedding was on the Red, err, Blue Carpet last night (Jan. 25). The film is the story of Isabel (Michelle Williams) who has dedicated her life to working with the children in an orphanage in Calcutta. Theresa (Julianne Moore) is the multimillionaire head of a media company who lives with her handsome artist husband (Billy Crudup) and their two adorable twin boys in New York. When word comes to Isabel of a mysterious and generous grant for the financially struggling orphanage, she must travel to New York to meet the benefactor—Theresa—in person. And when Isabel is spontaneously invited to Theresa’s daughter’s wedding, Isabel discovers a connection to Theresa that takes her on an unexpected journey into her own past.

Adapting Susanne Bier’s Academy Award–nominated Danish film of the same title, writer/director Bart Freundlich has crafted an absorbing cinematic tale of secrets and intersecting lives. Both Williams and Moore give incredible performances and command the screen, adding nuance and depth to every scene they’re in. By cleverly changing the gender of Bier’s characters, Freundlich offers an elevated take on the film’s melodrama—and tells a rich, emotional story about strong women, motherhood, and fate.

Below: The cast of “After the Wedding” at the film’s Sundance 2019 premiere. Click to enlarge. Photos by Natalie Simpson – Beehive Photography

See all our Sundance Coverage here.

I suppose it’s a kind of truism in Hollywood that there’s an inevitable loss when adapting a literary novel into a film. How does one manage the complexity of a character’s internal world, so often the meat of a novel, in a medium that, for all its facility with time and place, nevertheless privileges observable presence, the visible, the gesture? But then, why should a film embrace the losing game of fidelity to the original text? Why not recognize filmic adaptation for what it always is: an interpretation, an opportunity to reflect on and perhaps critique the original?

Rashid Johnson, director of Native Son, an official selection of the U.S. Dramatic Competition at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by Eric Vogel

Okay, well, marketability aside, this seems like an understanding and an opportunity missed in Rashid Johnson’s Sundance 2019 opening night film Native Son, a contemporary adaptation of Richard Wright’s 1940 novel of the same name.

As in Wright’s novel, Johnson’s film centers on a young black man, Bigger (Big) Thomas, living with his family in a rat-troubled (if not quite infested) apartment in Chicago. Bigger (moodily performed by Moonlight’s Ashton Sanders) works as a bicycle courier, but dreams of the greater things of which he feels himself capable, even if he can’t yet imagine what those things might be. As his friends try to lure Bigger into various petty crimes in the neighborhood, his mother’s boyfriend offers him a better option: chauffeuring a wealthy white developer, his blind wife, and vapid, college-age daughter, Mary—room and board included. Readers of the novel will recognize these details as unchanged from the original, just as they will recognize the slaying of a rat with a frying pan in an opening sequence. Why is it that that pan, despite its fidelity (and efficacy), feels so archaic when it’s wielded by Sanders’ neo-punk Bigger—crowned with turf-green dyed hair—an aficionado of the Dead Kennedys as well as Beethoven, and a reader of Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), August Meier’s Negro Thought in America (1963), Claudia Rankine’s Citizen (2014), and Paul Beatty’s The Sellout (2016)—all elements of the film’s often meticulous and unsubtle mise en scène?

What sets that pan ringing is the struggle of the film’s misguided efforts to retain Wright’s mid-20^th century world (oh, that coal-burning furnace) in the present, to aggressively eschew being a period piece, but never actually living up to the challenge of imagining the complex continuities of a relentlessly oppressive culture that it so badly wants to show us, and that we so badly need to see. Suzan-Lori Parks’ script includes a few buzzy references to Occupy and The People’s Movement, name-checked by Mary, who, along with her feckless boyfriend, Jan (a Communist in the book), admits that she knows nothing about the lives of African Americans. Maybe that’s the reason she and Jan, wannabe activists, appear ignorant, too, of #BlackLivesMatter. The movement is never acknowledged, in fact—save for a single, significant departure from Wright’s original, which the film seems to prize.

The problem here is that the present and the post-Wright past exist mainly as set dressing, as Bigger’s reading material and as the film he and his friend sneak into at a theater where another friend works: Melvin van Peebles’ 1971 Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. The consciousness, self-representations, and movements that separate Johnson’s Native Son and Wright’s strangely don’t seem to have manifested in any of the black characters, while the overt and implicit racism of the white characters remain in place, evolving only as a kind of sexualized ally-ism. With Bigger deprived of the full power of a contemporary consciousness, the game is even more rigged against him, and the viewer, so that the realities of a continuum of psychological, economic, and physical violence done to non-white bodies feels flattened out, deeply oversimplified, and unanalyzed.

And yet…

As the Sweet Sweetback theme plays in that movie theater scene, I imagine an alternative version of this film, one that takes its interpretative role seriously and allows all this history to exist at once in the film’s contemporary moment, a version that abstracts Wright’s narrative into something more like a horrifying archetype played out over half a millennium, a revelation of our deadly intransigence, our incapacity to see.

What a film that might have been.

See all our Sundance Coverage here.