I encountered a model of this phenomenon on the primary morning of my first Sundance. Trying to seek out my approach round pageant headquarters, I ran right into a colleague from Variety, my employer on the time, who blurted out the information that Fox Searchlight Pictures had simply purchased “Little Miss Sunshine” for a whopping ten and a half million {dollars}. What the hell was “Little Miss Sunshine”? I came upon at a press screening a couple of days later: a crowd-pleasing dysfunctional-family road-trip comedy that left a lot of the viewers in stitches and that, in time, would grow to be a significant indie hit and a a number of Oscar winner. It was the sort of breakout success, in brief, that retains Sundance in enterprise. For the following few years, the pageant appeared to function beneath a sort of residual “Little Miss Sunshine” haze, with filmmakers, publicists, and distributors making an attempt—and customarily failing—to copy the movie’s system for industrial and important success.
Alas, although gross sales exercise naturally ebbs and flows over time, it does really feel like such boom-town phenomena are artifacts of yesteryear. From a purely acquisitions standpoint, probably the most hotly chased title at this yr’s pageant was “The Invite,” a bickersome marital dramedy directed by Olivia Wilde and starring Wilde, Seth Rogen, Penélope Cruz, and Ed Norton. The film’s eventual buy—by A24, which spent greater than eleven million {dollars}—definitely generated buzz, however, on condition that the director and forged are recognized portions, it was hardly the surge of pleasure and discovery that was as soon as a mark of the pageant. The crises that Sundance faces—the lingering shadow of the pandemic, the perilous state of theatrical exhibition—are hardly Sundance’s alone. They replicate a movie business in existential turmoil. But they’re issues which may require greater than a brand new host metropolis and extra infrastructure to unravel.
My final Sundance in Park City was an uncommon one, for causes that benefit full disclosure. I served on the jury for the U.S. documentary competitors, and was attending the pageant not in my common capability as a journalist however as an invitee. The expertise of assembly the opposite jurors grew to become its personal sort of journey down reminiscence lane—a Sundance historical past lesson. Here was Azazel Jacobs, a member of the U.S. dramatic competitors’s jury; I first encountered his work at Sundance in 2008, when he unveiled his movie “Momma’s Man,” an exquisitely tender portrait of his mother and father, Ken and Flo Jacobs, who have been New York avant-garde cinema luminaries, and who each died final yr. Here was A.V. Rockwell, the director of one other terrific New York indie, “A Thousand and One” (2023), which gained the Grand Jury Prize in the U.S. dramatic competitors in 2023.(Rockwell was there as a juror for the short-film-program competitors.) Here was So Yong Kim, whose beautiful début characteristic, “In Between Days,” confirmed at that first pageant I attended, in 2006. And right here have been John Cooper and Trevor Groth, two former leaders of the Sundance programming group, who have been reunited and tasked with jury obligation in NEXT, a piece of the pageant for low-budget and experimental work, which that they had launched in 2010.
My fellow-jurors in the American documentary part, the filmmakers Natalia Almada and Jennie Livingston, have been each Sundance laureates, too. Almada has gained two directing prizes on the pageant, for “El General” (2009) and “Users” (2021), and Livingston has gained the Grand Jury Prize, for “Paris Is Burning” (1990). Together, we screened ten nonfiction films from rising American filmmakers. For now, I’m going to remain quiet about what I considered them (although the prizes, and people of the opposite classes, have simply been introduced), and point out as an alternative the flicks outdoors that pool—or not less than the few I used to be in a position to slot in—that caught my eye.
On a cold Monday afternoon, I succumbed to the overwhelming warmth of “Chasing Summer,” a nimble, attractive, and infectiously humorous collaboration between the director Josephine Decker and the comic and screenwriter Iliza Shlesinger. The film follows Jamie (Shlesinger), a fortysomething humanitarian-aid employee who, after being blindsided by private {and professional} uncertainty, returns to her house in suburban Texas for a summer time of ribaldry and revelation. There she endures unceasing verbal jabs from her mom (Megan Mullally) and her older sister (Cassidy Freeman) and likewise renews her acquaintance with previous pals and an previous flame (Tom Welling) from highschool. In different phrases, on paper, “Chasing Summer” sounds like all variety of flat, formulaic indie quirkfests concerning the unspeakable horrors of going house once more. But that simply goes to indicate you could by no means decide a film from its plot. Although the movie skews surprisingly extra mainstream than Decker’s earlier work—her movie “Madeline’s Madeline” (2018) was a wildly imaginative, form-blurring fantasia—the conventionality of the fabric throws the bristling intelligence of the filmmaker’s method into sharp reduction. As the digicam glides in and round a roller-skating rink, the place a lot of the motion takes place, Decker and Shlesinger obtain and maintain a terrific stability of comedian velocity and erotic languor.
