efore I had actually attended a film festival, I assumed they were
deeply social occasions, in which critics hobnobbed with stars, all
brought together and bonded by close proximity and their shared
love of cinema. My preconceptions were swiftly shattered when I finally
started to attend these events for work, and realised that – while festivals
can indeed be hubs of socialising and network activity – mostly, away from
my home and my friends in unfamiliar surroundings, I was lonely. The first
few festivals I attended, I was short on industry friends and armed with a
crippling social anxiety disorder. Sometimes, amid the glow of the cinema
screens, I shuffled in and out of up to five films a day, and I would go long
stretches of time without meaningful human contact. I was crushed by
a sense that everyone around me was working harder, having more fun,
“doing the festival better” than I was, and that I had absolutely no right to
even be there.
I flew out to Park City for my first Sundance in 2019 and had a strange
five days. I only knew one other journalist attending the festival, so I spent
most of my time either in screening rooms, browsing grocery stores, or
holed up in my Airbnb sampling the weird varieties of crisps we don’t get
in the UK. The location was beautiful and the volunteers welcoming, but I
felt completely alone, surrounded by people who all knew one another and
understood the intricacies of the festival better than I could ever hope to.
There are worse business trips, and I understand my privileged position
to attend festivals in the first place, but I also know sometimes my anxiety
and mental health mean these events can take a toll on me. I’ve always told
myself I like being alone, and I’m happiest when I can please myself, but
part of the joy of festivals is having people to share it all with.
I decided to apply for Sundance again because I had a hunch our cover
film, Promising Young Woman, would premiere in the mountains, and
when the programme was released, I became even more determined to
get there based on the strength of the full line-up. Of the 144 films initially
announced, 44 per cent were directed or co-directed by a woman, and
34 per cent were directed by one or more filmmakers of colour. These
stats put the line-ups of Cannes and Venice to shame and confirmed that
Sundance seemed more committed to promises of diverse programming
than most (if not all) of their festival peers.
So off I went, forgoing the lonely guest room in a family’s suburban
house to rent a poky little studio with some friends who would be
attending for the first time. The sleeping arrangement involved four beds
squashed into one room and I had to perform a sort of tuck-and-roll every
morning to get out of bed without stepping on someone else, but it was
worth it for the camaraderie of staying with people I very much like ratherthan wallowing in solitude for a week. Getting up in the dark and braving
-12° temperatures in the name of cinema didn’t seem so bad when I was
doing it with someone else. Amid all the chaos and the self-doubt, you need
people who believe in you.
It’s fitting that, while I accepted that no woman is an island, the best
films I saw at the festival seemed to understand this too. Josephine
Decker’s sublime Shirley (inspired by the life of renowned mystery author
Shirley Jackson) bewitched me completely. It’s a vital text on female desire
and longing that I can’t wait to watch again. Meanwhile Miranda July’s
Kajillionaire, her first film in nine years, left me in tears as it inadvertently
recalled the age-old Larkin line, “They fuck you up, your mum and dad
/ They may not mean to, but they do”. One of the biggest surprises of
the festival was Phyllida Lloyd’s Herself, in which Clare Dunne gives a
performance for the ages as a young mother trying to build a life for herself
following an abusive relationship. I could go on – there’s Kitty Green’s
haunting The Assistant (review p.87), reflecting on the insidiousness and
banality of sexual assault in the entertainment industry, Eliza Hittman’s
stark, tender Never Rarely Sometimes Always about two teenage girls
travelling to get an abortion, and even Romola Garai’s Amulet, an unsettling
supernatural horror about female vengeance. It might just be down to my
own good fortune in choosing screenings, but female filmmakers were
responsible for the best films I saw at the festival (though it would be
remiss of me to not shout out Lee Isaac Chung ’s incredible Minari, based
on his own childhood and featuring the greatest grandson-grandmother
double act I’ve ever seen in Alan Kim and Yuh-Jung Youn).
The world of film (and by extension film criticism) has never been a
meritocracy, and I’m sure it never will be. There are so many doors that
have only ever opened for a certain type of person, and particularly for
those entering the realm, it’s easy to think the industry is at capacity,
especially if you’ve never seen yourself reflected by the people that came
before. Awful people and abusers still continue to prosper, because
increased awareness isn’t equivalent to action. But I’m feeling less lonely
now, less hopeless, surrounded by people – mostly women – who give
me hope for the future of the art form and industry. Sundance might still
be dominated by the rich and famous who see art as a business first and
foremost, but its programmers and staff continue to show a commitment
to giving a platform to artists changing our perception of what and who
films are for. It’s a Sisyphian task, changing the change-resistant world,
but the first step is acknowledging it’s up to all of us to be more critical
about the art we consume and how we consume it. Nothing worth doing is
ever easy, after allThe Sundance
Film Festival
Female companionship – both on and off the screen – marked
the 2020 Sundance Film Festival as a classic vintage.
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JOURNEYS Words by HANNAH WOODHEAD Illustration by STÉPHANIE SERGEANTFEATURE 093