I have spent the last week and a half attending films in Salt Lake and Park City for the Sundance Film Festival. I have lived in Utah my entire life and been aware of the festival, but I have never attended. For one thing, I'm not rich. For another, I'm not really a movie person.
But last fall, I accepted an editing job with the Sundance Institute. We editors worked on the festival's print materials, including the catalog describing all the movies. One of the perks of working for Sundance was getting ten free tickets, and since I spent weeks and months reviewing the descriptions of the movies, I got a good idea of the films I wanted to see. I'm a nonfiction kind of guy: eight of my chosen movies were nonfiction, and the two fiction ones were kids movies.
So, now, if you will imagine those old Disney movies where the book opens itself and shows you the story, I will tell you about my experience at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival.
On Friday, January 25, I got up early to drive to Park City. I parked at the park and ride and luckily maneuvered the city's free shuttle system to get to the MARC Theatre right in time for my first film.
Apollo 11. This documentary features archival footage from the moon landing of July 1969. The makers of the film combed through hundreds of hours of audio and video recordings. None of the video had audio, so they had to sync all the audio and video, a truly remarkable feat. Using only archival recordings and a few animations and captions, this shows the story of the moon landing from the astronauts boarding the ship, the takeoff, landing on the moon, leaving the moon, and splashing down on earth on July 24. Instead of telling you about the story, they make you feel like you were actually there. They have footage of all the spectators so eager to see the exploration of this new frontier (and there were some chuckles at the 1960s fashions). I was full of adrenaline myself as the ship landed on the moon.
8/10.
Probable rating: PG for some mild language. Possibly G.
After the film, they had a Q&A with the director, and Neil Armstrong's son was there. Unfortunately, I missed some of it, because I was going to die if I didn't use the restroom. (Maybe that's why I was so full of adrenaline during the movie.)
That was my only film for the day, but rather than go home, I hopped on the shuttle to head to Park City's main street, where I looked at some of the touristy stores. I got a pair of Halloween owl witch socks. Acura was one of the festival sponsors, so they had a venue where they had live music. I stuck around because one of their musicians was BYU alum Ryan Innes. I remember seeing him at Provo's Rooftop Concert Series, and he was well received. But at Sundance, he seemed like a nobody.
After the music, I hopped on shuttles to head home, but I ended up getting on the wrong shuttle. But I was glad of it, because it taught me more about the way the shuttles operated, and it happened when I was in no hurry.
My next movie wasn't until Monday, January 28, and that was at the Salt Lake Library.
Anthropocene: The Human Epoch. Since I minored in geology, I was eager to see this movie. In geological terms, an epoch is a (relatively) small unit of time. We are in the Holocene epoch; the ice age was the Pleistocene, the previous epoch. Some scientists say that the Holocene epoch has ended and we have begun a new one, the Anthropocene epoch, because of our human impact on the earth. This movie tries to support this idea of a new epoch by showing ways we humans have affected the earth. There are occasional brief narrations, but mostly it's footage and some brief interviews. We travel all around the world: elephant preservation ceremonies in Africa, a Russian metallurgy town, an Italian quarry, a Chilean lithium plant, an English indoor farm, and more. The bulk of the movie was just footage of machines and sometimes of people celebrating. If that sounds boring to you, that's how I felt. It's not that the footage itself is necessarily uninteresting, but it was too long. There was no explanation on how much of it was affecting the earth. Some of it was obvious, but much of it seemed irrelevant. (Why are we watching this African church service?) Their idea in making the film was not to
tell people what to think but to let them think for themselves. I can understand why they did it that way, but I don't think it was the most effective way to convince people we are in a new epoch. I was mostly just bored.
3/10.
Probable rating: PG-13 for brief strong language.
My next movie was the next day, also in Salt Lake, at the Broadway Theatre.
Honeyland. I don't have any connection to Macedonia, honey, the Turkish language, or agriculture, yet somehow this documentary, in Turkish with (poorly rendered) subtitles, resonated with me. I found it fascinating. The filmmakers wanted to make a nature documentary when they met Hatidze, a middle-aged woman caring for her aged mother in an abandoned rural village. Hatidze makes a living by collecting honey from various natural hives in the area, making sure to leave half of the honey for the bees. She takes the pure honey into Skopje to sell at ten euros a jar. Her quiet way of life is disrupted when a nomadic family with seven kids comes into the area; they make their living by raising cattle and selling the calves. The father of this family tries a beekeeping enterprise himself, but he ignores all of Hatidze's advice about saving honey for the bees. His negligence spells disaster both for him and for Hatidze. You do gain sympathy for this family, even though the dad is a jerk. I really enjoyed this film, but it is not a happy one. It was amazing to see this way of life that is so different from my own—people eking out a living in the middle of nowhere. I found myself shocked by the hazardous way of life: kids roughly handling cattle, kids getting stung by bees, kids literally pulling calves out of cows. My jaw literally dropped many times.
9/10.
Probable rating: PG-13 for strong language in the subtitles, as well as intense scenes of cattle herding, cattle deaths, questionable parenting, and other hazards.
After the movie was over, the Macedonian filmmakers had a Q&A, and they even let us sample Macedonian honey.
My next movie, on Wednesday, was my first kids movie, and there were lots of kids in the audience. It was weird to be around so many kids after a few days of only adults. Before each film, they show a recap of the previous day's events, and occasionally those scenes are a bit more adult, so I questioned them showing the recaps before kids films.
The Elephant Queen. This is one of three kids movies at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. It's a nature documentary that follows Athena, an elephant matriarch, as she leads a group of female elephants and their young across the savanna to water. Chiwetel Ejiofor narrates the story of the elephants and their neighbors: frogs, fish, terrapins, geese, dung beetles, and more. The cinematography is absolutely stunning, from close-ups of fish and frog eggs to broad pictures of elephant herds and rainstorms. All the animals do things that I didn't know they did. For me, the biggest drawback was the narration. It's geared toward kids, but I felt like they sacrificed scientific preciseness for the entertainment factor. They anthropomorphize all the animals, which made it hard to know how smart elephants actually are, because they kept speculating and making stuff up. By trying to make the elephants seem human, it actually made them seem less human. There's a scene where dung beetles fight over a dung ball, and they include punching sounds and fake chattering. I found it embarrassing, and kids might not realize that the bugs don't actually make those noises (as evidenced by a boy asking the directors how they got the punching sounds during the Q&A). There were lots of kids in the theater, and they loved it. There are some genuine laughs (even for adults), and some kids were crying during one sad scene. But I guess I'm a stuffy academic, because the kid-friendly parts were the parts I enjoyed least.
7/10.
Probable rating: PG for the facts of life: frogs reproducing, frogs engaging in cannibalism, elephants nursing, animals dying. Possibly G.
One of the perks of being festival staff was that we could stand in the waitlist line to see movies for free. I didn't see any films besides the ones I got tickets for. But I accidentally got a ticket for Sunday night, which I didn't want to do, so on Thursday, I waitlisted and got into it that day instead. That theater was at a Jewish property in Park City; the waitlist room was a Jewish preschool, with Hanukkah window clings and Hebrew clocks.
One Child Nation. This is a brutal, shocking, disturbing, and amazing documentary about China's one-child policy from 1979 to 2015. The director, Nanfu Wang, a new mother herself who lives in the United States, was born during the time of the policy, but her family was allowed to have a son as well, since they lived in a rural area, as long as they waited another five years. Wang shows us governmental propaganda for the policy, including TV commercials of kids singing songs about the policy and warning people they will be punished for breaking it. People's homes were destroyed and their property taken if they violated the law. Wang interviews a doctor who performed thousands of abortions, sterilizations, and even infanticides because it was the law. Government officials would capture women and tie them up like pigs to be brought in for sterilization. This doctor felt so guilty that she decided to only treat infertility cases to try to atone for her sins. Wang interviews an artist who was working with garbage, and he kept finding fetuses in plastic bags labeled as "medical waste." He shifted his art to preserving and remembering the fetuses. Further compounding the tragedies is the sexist Chinese culture that values sons over daughters. Wang asks her grandfather if her brother's son means more to him than her own son does. Her grandfather unashamedly says that he does, because daughters marry into other families and are not as closely related. (!) Indeed, she doesn't have any pictures with her grandfather; only her brother does. Wang interviews other members of her family and other people. Since sons were valued over daughters, and they could only keep one child, families would abandon their baby daughters in markets and on roadsides, hoping that people would care for them. Many of the babies died. Others were "rescued" by traffickers, who would sell them to orphanages. Then these orphanages would make money by adopting them out to families from the United States. Even twins were forcibly taken from families and sent to orphanages. A family from Lehi, Utah, has undertaken efforts to find what happened to these displaced children, but the results have been mostly fruitless, in part because the orphanages would invent lies about where the babies came from. As Wang interviews her family and others all over China, she finds a common attitude: the policy was very strict, so there was nothing they could do, and the policy was essential to keep China from collapsing. China is now struggling from a lack of people to care for the elderly, so even though the policy has changed, the propaganda is still there. There are televised songs extolling the virtues of having two children. This is a bleak film, but it was very well done.
8/10.
Probable rating: PG-13 for language, a grave subject, and some disturbing images.
Unfortunately, I could not stay for the Q&A, because I had to get on the shuttle for my next film, which I was really excited for. At one shuttle stop, I asked one of the volunteer helpers when the next shuttle would be coming. I didn't think it would come fast enough.
If only there was a way I could travel a short distance in a short amount of time! Good thing I'm a runner. I made it to Prospector Theatre, but if it had been a full theater, I might not have made it in time.
Abe. This is one of two fiction films I saw and one of the three kids offerings. Abe is a twelve-year-old kid living in Brooklyn who loves food and posts about it on social media. His paternal grandparents are Palestinian Muslims, but his dad is a hostile atheist; his maternal grandparents are Israeli Jewish, while his mom is more of an agnostic. On his twelfth birthday, these sides of the family get into a tense conflict. Abe hates the divisiveness, and he wants to be part of both cultures—for example, attending a bar mitzvah while fasting for Ramadan. His parents enroll him in a juvenile summer cooking camp, but he sneaks away and forces himself into working for a Brazilian chef who enjoys blending flavors from different regions. When his parents find out what he has done, he is grounded. When his parents tell him they are separating, he wants to bring everyone together by preparing a Thanksgiving dinner that combines Palestinian and Israeli food. I really wanted to like this film, since there is so little in the Thanksgiving movie canon. Unfortunately, this movie is for no one. The plot is OK, but it's a little unrealistic, with some entirely unneeded, irrelevant scenes. The acting is a little awkward, and much of the internet footage is corny. Even though it's a "kids" movie, there are at least three or four f-bombs and other bad language. I can't imagine most families wanting to see this, and yet it's still too juvenile for adults. It's not hostile to religion, but I still feel like it's geared toward people of no religion. Even so, some fair-minded atheists might bristle at the intolerance of the father, while those militant atheists will find it too soft on religion. If they did some editing, this movie might be OK. But as is, it's not going anywhere, and it doesn't deserve to.
2/10.
Probable rating: PG-13 for language, bullying, and drug references.
I didn't have any tickets for Friday, but I had four on Saturday, and one of them was in Salt Lake, and I didn't think I'd be able to make it back to Salt Lake in time. So on Friday, I headed up to Redstone Theatre in Park City to waitlist for that movie.
Aquarela. This is a documentary that just shows the majesty and power of water. That's it. The movie begins with a body of water in Russia, where cars drive over the ice and fall in, so crews have to remove the cars from the water. While they were filming, another car broke through the ice, and two of the passengers got out in time, but one did not. Then the movie shows glaciers calving, ocean waves, flooded towns, and massive waterfalls. There is no narration or explanation, but they never claimed to have any, so that's fine with me. There were two main flaws I found. One was that you'd be watching serene images of water when suddenly heavy metal would start playing. I don't have anything against heavy metal, but it was laughably out of place. The other was that there was no explanation of where in the world we were. Are those Arctic or Antarctic glaciers? That ship has a Portuguese flag, but where's it going? Where is that flooded city? And I only knew the waterfall was in South America because I edited the film description. It was gorgeous, but I was at a disadvantage because I had to sit close to the screen, and I could see the texture of the screen itself.
4/10.
Probable rating: PG for the scene described. There might have been some language too.
Then Saturday, February 2, was my last day of movies. I headed to Park City's Eccles Theatre and got in line early.
Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile. This is the film you all heard about: the Ted Bundy biopic starring Zac Efron. (Until recently, I thought "biopic" rhymed with "bionic.") The story follows Liz, Ted's girlfriend, as she balances her love for him while being in denial about all the charges he faces. Ted, of course, denies all the charges, and tries to make it sound like the police were out to get him and then made the evidence fit him. Efron is great as Ted Bundy, and the film really shows how manipulative he was. It's full of period-appropriate music and costuming. This certainly isn't a film to take the kiddies to, but it's not as brutal as you might expect from a movie about a serial killer; it focuses more on his manipulation and his legal experiences. However, just as I was thinking the sexuality was pretty tame, there came a scene that made me change my mind. I mostly wanted to see this movie because I'm an amateur Utah historian, and I wondered how historically accurate it was. I know they took some liberties, but during the credits, they showed real archival footage that illustrated that some of the dialogue (and costuming) was very true to what actually happened. Ted Bundy was executed by electric chair and then cremated, but I think they should have skipped the electrocution and gone straight to the cremation.
8/10.
Probable rating: R for language, sexual content, some disturbing images, rear nudity, and the subject matter. Possibly PG-13.
Then I headed back to Redstone Theatre for another film. This was the least attended I saw.
The Witch Hunters. This is the other fictional kids film I saw, in Serbian with English subtitles. Jovan is a boy with partial cerebral palsy who is not happy when a new girl, Milica, moves in and sits next to him in class. Jovan likes to imagine that he is a superhero named Shade, and he and Milica become friends. Milica's parents are divorcing, and Milica believes that you can only fall in love once, so she thinks her dad's new girlfriend is a witch who bewitched her dad. In reality, the girlfriend is interested in Eastern cultures, and Milica interprets yoga, kombucha, and "om" as witchy behaviors. Jovan believes you can kill someone by stabbing them with a needle on the back of the neck, so he and Milica plot to destroy her. I feel bad criticizing this movie, because it was so sincere in trying to be cute, and Serbian filmmakers don't have the same resources as Americans. (This is the first Serbian kids film in ten years.) But it just wasn't that great. The plot got a little slow, they didn't really know what to do with the cerebral palsy element, and the kids seemed a little too old to believe in witches. Also, they didn't do a great job translating the subtitles; they seemed overly formal.
4/10.
Probable rating: PG for mild language and marital difficulties.
My final film started only an hour after
The Witch Hunters ended, and it was at the Park City Library, at the opposite end of the city. I knew I wouldn't make it in time if I used the shuttle. But I had prearranged to take a Lyft, the first time I ever used it. The moment the credits started on
The Witch Hunters, I walked out of the theater, and my Lyft driver, Robert, pulled up right as I walked out. Perfect timing! And he got me to the next movie in plenty of time.
The Biggest Little Farm. John (the filmmaker) and Molly are a couple who have a pipe dream of operating a storybook farm one day. They adopt a dog, Todd, and promise him he will never live in another home. It turns out that Todd cannot be trained not to bark, so the apartment management sends them an eviction notice. John and Molly take this as their chance to make their dream a reality, and they create Apricot Lane Farms in California. The idea of the farm is to have a large variety of plants and animals, and they enlist a hippie farmer named Allen (or Alan?) to help them get started. Allen gives them advice on how to make the farm as natural as possible, and they try to make it its own ecosystem, with seventy species of fruit trees, overgrowth, chickens, ducks, pigs, sheep, and more. Unfortunately, as they make one good decision, it will have unforeseen consequences: coyotes, snails, gophers, starlings, etc. But John notices that Todd (the dog) seems to just watch and observe, so John decides to watch and observe as well. They are able to use natural forces to counter the negative side effects, and the negative side effects can become assets. For example, gophers aerate the soil, while coyotes and other animals help balance the gopher population. Too many ducks make the pond full of algae, but ducks love eating snails. John and Molly are able to transform a dead plot of old farmland and turn it into a vibrant paradise. The film does not have an apparent agenda, but it does make the viewer ponder questions of sustainability and the environment. This documentary doesn't
sound that interesting, and at the beginning, I wasn't too interested. I'm not a farmer, and who can just magically buy a farm and know what to do? But as it progressed, it was really fascinating. And this was the most visually beautiful film I saw at the whole festival. It also hits you with all the feels. Animal lovers, and especially dog lovers, will love it, though there are sad moments. "Aww" was a frequent audience reaction. Even my coldhearted, crazy-cat-lady eyes watered at the end. This film hits theaters in April. Go see it. It was a perfect way to end the festival.
9/10.
Rating: PG for language and for some grisly scenes of animal deaths and injuries. I would say it straddles the line between PG and PG-13.
Then it was time to leave the festival. The shuttles were jam-packed on the way out of Park City. But I got in my car, and it was all over. I no longer have any need to go to Park City.
I don't think I'd pay to go again. But it was a lot of fun.
