April 2020 | Sight&Sound | 7Rushes
NEWS AND VIEWSBy Ela Bittencourt
This year’s edition of the Sundance Film
Festival confirmed it as a hotbed for American
documentaries, while both fiction and
nonfiction films conveyed dread in an era of
global populism. From Jesse Moss and Amanda
McBaine’s excellent Boys State, to Elyse Steinberg,
Josh Kriegman and Eli Despres’s The Fight, Kim
A. Snyder’s Us Kids, and Shalini Kantayya’s
Coded Bias, the US Documentary Competition
reflected alarm in a country where the far right
is poised to throttle reproductive, immigration
and voting rights, where gun manufacturers
rule, and big tech perpetuates racist bias. Still
others, such as Kirsten Johnson’s darkly comic
Dick Johnson Is Dead, which imagines her ailing
father’s demise, and the Ross brothers’ ecstatic
Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets, about a bar in Las
Vegas, showed the documentary form can be
fertile ground for ingenious auto-fictions.
It was a strong year for female directors, not
just in documentaries, with Josephine Decker’s
Shirley, Eliza Hittman’s Never Rarely Sometimes
Always and Miranda July’s Kajillionaire – three
gorgeous fictions exploring nonconformity. The
World Cinema competitions featured at least
two films bound to pique cinephiles’ interests- Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese’s stunning This
Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection in the Dramatic
Competition, and Hubert Sauper’s Epicentro in
the documentary programme. Set respectively
in Lesotho and Cuba, these films stood out
for their narrative and visual richness.
It was disappointing to see ambitious art films
buried in ill-defined sections. Sky Hopinka’s
evocative małni – towards the ocean, towards the
shore, in which his Ho-Chunk Native American
friends contemplate their identity, and Miwa
Matreyek’s ecological animation and pantomime
Infinitely Yours both played in the New Frontier
section, alongside flawed films by renowned
international artists: Ai Weiwei’s Vivos and Francis
Alÿs’s Sandlines. There was too much emphasis
on Virtual Reality (experiences I had included
exploring fungus and watching my breath
materialise as colourful dots). Experimental
cinema was sorely missed. The challenge is
balancing the push for new technologies with
an all-encompassing perspective of the avant-
garde. Barbara Hammer, who was on this year’s
in memoriam list at the Oscars, showed Nitrate
Kisses at Sundance in 1993: to maintain its edge,
the festival needs to embrace experimental
directors who follow in her footsteps.
Sundance threw up a fine batch
of docs on the dismal state of the
world – but do we really need so
much virtual reality? Plus, overleaf,
we choose ten festival highlightsREALITIES,
VIRTUAL AND
OTHERWISE
Cuba, sí: Hubert Sauper explores the legacy of colonialism in his affectionate portrait of Cuba and its people, Epicentro