A hasty decision: attending the virtual 2023 Sundance Film Festival. While mindlessly scrolling on Twitter, riding the subway on New Year’s Eve, little to no cell reception between stops (thank you New York City), I saw a film critic’s tweet about the festival’s January dates, hardly registering that it was only a few weeks away. My mind was occupied. At that point my family was on their second week of their visit to Washington D.C., their first East Coast city in over ten years, my home for the last two. With my roommate gone for the break, they stayed with me in my 650 sq. ft. apartment for nearly three weeks in December. This was intentional. I wanted them to save some money, which Appa appreciated, and wanted us to be together, which Amma appreciated. My Myers-Briggs test results did say personality type: “mediator.” Apparently, I play the role of “diplomat.” It was an absolutely bonkers idea for us to actually go through with. Perhaps my family was taken by my audacity, perhaps they believed I knew what I was doing, because they also agreed to my idea for a road trip to NYC, staying there the week after Christmas until New Year’s Day.
All of us were much older since we last vacationed together, especially one that required any of us to fly thousands of miles. For most of those three weeks, but especially in NYC, my sister and I shared the responsibility of looking out for our parents. Hosting them in my D.C. apartment had its challenges. They had aged considerably. The chinks in their armor began showing a few years ago; injuries and illnesses took longer to recover from; their recovery almost always meant lingering pain, dietary limits, the works. Traveling to a city like NYC that seemed ambivalent to their station in life was hard on all of us, but especially on my parents. To our collective surprise, we ended up doing more in three weeks than we had done in four years. Daytrips, multi-day road trips, and on days we stayed in D.C., stepping out to explore the city in negative temperatures. Warriors. Champions. Ageing bodies are no match for spirited souls. Of course, on both this trip and in life, my sister was our fulcrum.
Their departure from D.C. belied the usual momentum that comes with the turning of the year – to set goals, to have a generous imagination for how the new year would turn out. Being able to vacation together? Seemingly small feat. But what we had all managed to accomplish those three weeks was nothing short of miraculous. I was proud of us. I missed them. The sudden absence of three large personalities left an eerie silence that I was anxious to fill; the welcome kind that invites you into your loneliness.
Naturally, I turned to old faithful: cinema. Cinema has always been a balm for when I’m emotionally overwhelmed – it makes me think; when it doesn’t, it makes me laugh. Either way, I’m in tears.
My journey probing the depths of my love for cinema, a monthslong process at that point, collided with Sundance going hybrid for the first time this year. The months leading up to it, I had been on a movie-watching pace that had begun to wear on me. Starting in October my goal was to watch a film a day knowing I wouldn’t ever hit 30 films in a month. The pressure I was putting on myself helped me average anywhere from 17 to 20 films a month from October to December.
Film viewing has always been a sacred experience for me. Whether I’m watching films at home or in a movie theater, the phone always goes on airplane mode; I try not to munch on snacks and try even harder to not get mad at those who do. I love a film’s silences and do my best to not fill them. I don’t speak when the characters are speaking. I certainly don’t talk to the characters (my sister, among my favorite moviegoing partners, is a fan of this anxiety-management technique and I adore her for it). So far, just your classic “no talking, no texting” etiquette followed strictly. But here’s something else I love doing: if a film leaves me transfixed, I sit through the credits till the screen goes dark. Wanting to protect what will soon become a cherished memory, I wait to reenter the world until I am ready, much like protecting a freshly snapped polaroid from direct sunlight till it’s ready. For those 90-120 minutes, I do my best to not let intrusive thoughts get in the way of finishing a film.
Attending Sundance was going to be the biggest test yet of my love for cinema, but maybe it would also give me the best shot at hitting 30 films for January. Was there more to this goal than being able to say that I had? There had to be.
I watched Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Shoplifters on a cross-country flight last year from D.C. to Sacramento, heading back to spend Thanksgiving with my family. Nonstop flights and assigned window seats often make the usually inhumane experience of flying domestically mildly acceptable. But sleepy middle and aisle seat passengers quickly turn these common Ws into anxiety inducing Ls, especially if you are watching a Kore-eda film—an hour into Shoplifters I found myself looking for tissues I didn’t have. Unable to use the lavatory and using my hoodie like I would a washcloth, I did my best to not wake my sleeping neighbors as I watched, stunned into silence.
Shoplifters is a story about five poor, seemingly unrelated individuals posing as a family in present-day Japan. Using their setup as cover, they engage in petty theft to get by. They take care of each other, but each of them is also pulling their own weight. The adults have jobs while the youngest help fill gaps, facilitating petty theft as needed. When they add an abused and neglected four-year-old to their family unit, their bonds are tested; their delicate arrangement further strained by having to provide for and take care of a child. Does this group manage to transcend the self-interest of its individual members? What if such a group is greater than the sum of its parts? Perhaps that is all that family is: greater than the sum of its parts. It had been some time since a film jolted me like Shoplifters did. Its radical proposition: our ugliest contradictions can help us transcend the worst of our circumstances; that the platonic ideal of family lives and dies with the choices of its individual members.
Cinema has taught me much about the world, often opening my eyes up to the universality, if not the Oneness, of human experience. Watching John Carney’s Sing Street at 16, I learned that to love someone, painful and complicated as it may be, is to experience one of life’s greatest joys. Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea taught me about the insidious nature of grief ignored, but our superhuman capacity for forgiveness. Just as I was at the end of those films, credits rolling, so I was bowled over by Shoplifters.
Among the crowded field of awards contenders, the slew of fall indie horror, and mainstream blockbusters filling up October and November, Shoplifters was a reprieve. Deciding which film to watch each day of the week involved a mix of planning and chaos. I would plan my theater-goings and leave home-viewing to the frivolity of my emotional state. What did I feel like watching? A question I would take on with much disdain because of the decision paralysis that would follow. Born out of that planned chaos was this airplane viewing of Shoplifters. My mind was racing. So was my heart. Yet, they were in harmony; oddly enough, a rare but familiar feeling. A call to action of sorts. I had happened upon a film that helped set the table for the new year.
When I returned home from dropping off my family at the airport, my heart was heavy. I had been stubborn about them visiting me in D.C. instead of me heading to California for the winter. My invitation to them and them accepting it had culminated from a series of real attempts at reconciling years of accumulated distance. That distance had eroded trust, making it difficult for us to understand one another. Attempts at care felt like attacks on character. Crisis became the threshold for our presence of mind.
Love is an action word. Perhaps we would all show up to support each other in our crises. Perhaps most families would. We love each other. But what a sign of health it is to want, not need, to be around each other; an end in itself. We’ve made lots of progress to that end. Their departure from D.C. left a Kore-eda sized hole in my life. And as much as I wanted M3GAN to fill it, she fell short; not for her lack of trying.
A half dozen films into January, I decided that planned chaos wasn’t going to cut it. After all, I was watching films to learn, not just about the world, but about the craft of filmmaking. I had The Big Picture podcast playing as I drove home from the airport. Ever since I started listening to them in 2020, hosts Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins have always kept film conversations accessible, informative, and downright hilarious. Their “23 Most Anticipated Movies of 2023” episode had recently come out and firmly moved Sundance into my central focus, bringing my year’s film and writing goals into view.
Sundance sold several online packages to watch nearly 80 of the over 100 titles featured at the festival. I purchased the World Cinema Package. Patrons with this package were given 10 online tickets to watch international cinema. You got to pick from a selection of 12 feature films competing in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition and films that were featured in the Spotlight, Indie Episodic, and Shorts programs. The Spotlight program features films that have premiered at other film festivals but perhaps don’t get their due. The Indie Episodic program premieres miniseries and documentaries, and the Shorts program premieres fiction, non-fiction, and animated short films. You got to pick any films featured in the above program categories to fill out your 10 slots and were given a window of six days to watch them (January 24-29). After starting to stream a film, you had five hours to finish watching it.
In addition to the World Cinema Package, which cost $150, I bought two Single Film Tickets ($20 each) for the film Fair Play, and the feature that won the U.S. Dramatic Competition’s Grand Jury Prize (A Thousand and One being the eventual winner, currently in theaters). Other options included the Festival Package ($300 for 10 tickets to all films premiering online and early access to purchase additional individual film tickets); the Award-Winners Package ($200 for access to the festival’s awards winners, but only two days to watch them); and the most affordable Explorer Pass ($25 for access to Indie Episodic screenings and select Short Films). I would have likely bought either the Festival or Award-Winners Package had they not sold out (haste in play).
10 international features, two domestic. I finished watching nine of them. The films I chose had recurring themes of familial love, romantic love, trauma, loss, grief, identity, among other things. I really liked all the films I watched (L’Immensità, Bad Behaviour, A Thousand and One, Heroic, and Shayda) but the following four are my favorites.
Here are my Sundance picks!
Mamacruz (Spain, Dir. Patricia Ortega)
Patricia Ortega’s Mamacruz is as unafraid as they come. Via the titular Mamacruz, Ortega explores female passion, desire, and sexual pleasure, asks questions about how and why they are repressed, and has plenty to say about female friendship and the power of sex-positive discourse among older women.
Mamacruz takes the discomfort of change seriously. Within the constraints of parochial Spanish society, Grandma Cruz confronts her own obstinance in the face of instincts that make her human. Much of her transformation is delicate and internal, making her breakthroughs that much more rewarding to witness (with a glorious final shot that left me beaming).
Kiti Mánver is nothing short of spectacular as Grandma Cruz. In a muted but affecting performance, Pepe Quero plays her husband, who is more uncomfortable with her transformation than she is.
More grandmas should orgasm!
Slow (Lithuania, Dir. Marija Kavtaradzė)
Well-made romances always work their magic on me. The visual imagery of two people falling in love is deeply familiar, isn’t it? Everything about the world in that shared moment is just right; everything is in equilibrium. Slow offers up plenty of just-right magic. But it also asks lofty questions about the very source of romantic love, centering an asexual character, Dovydas (Kęstutis Cicėnas), in a relationship with Elena (Greta Grinevičiūtė). Dovydas meets Elena, a dancer, at a class she teaches, working as an interpreter for her deaf students.
The film opens with Elena hooking up with a man who makes an odd request: for Elena to say she loves him because he can’t perform sexually unless she does. She doesn’t have to mean it. He just needs to hear it. How important is sex to the experience of romantic love?
The film is less interested in definitively declaring that human beings can form loving romantic relationships without sex and more interested in decentering our heteronormative understandings of romantic love. Slow boldly explores connection, intimacy, and other emotional epicenters of love, having no problem letting us watch Elena and Dovydas fall in love with each other over and over again in familiar filmic contexts – long scenes of conversation as they walk down streets, some excellently framed non-verbal gazing and dancing at bars; we even get a wedding! The film often cuts abruptly away from scenes involving sex, almost as if to share in Elena and Dovydas’ exasperation with it coming in the way of their romance.
Slow ends with Dovydas signing to the song Troškimas by Monica LIU. Just as she croons in the song, it seemed like for both Dovydas and Elena, there was nothing more beautiful in the world than their love for each other because they “had already seen in each other’s eyes all that has happened, and all that will.”
Joyland (Pakistan, Dir. Saim Sadiq)
Joyland is an achievement in storytelling for obvious reasons – it centers queer narratives and tackles patriarchy’s repression of gender, rooting its story of pain and tragedy in the strength and humanity of its characters. In a South Asian, and specifically Pakistani ethno-religious context, however, the achievements become clearer.
I had invited three of my close friends in D.C. over to watch Joyland, one of whom is Pakistani and had put the film on my radar several weeks before Sundance. Before starting, we watched a video on the current state of transgender rights in Pakistan and learned that a lot of the work of activists who helped pass the landmark transgender rights bill in 2018 is being undone by religio-political leaders with conservative agendas; that the fight for trans rights, and broader LGBTQ rights in Pakistan involves the language of Ishq, a multilayered, indigenous, and ethno-religious expression of queer love and pride that isn’t U.S. or Western-centric; and that Joyland itself has been banned in Pakistan’s most populous Punjab region (population 110 million) despite it being Pakistan’s first submission to the Academy Awards to be shortlisted in the Best International Feature Film category.
Joyland is about a lot of things – a conservative family in a not-so-conservative and rapidly changing Pakistan; a closeted queer man, Haider (Ali Junejo), his lively and ambitious wife, Mumtaz (Rasti Farooq), and their complicated yet human expressions of desire and search for love; a transwoman, Biba (Alina Khan), who finds strength and community in her self-advocacy. But it works because it is all of these things at the same time. The film is interested in how people wear their identities; that which we hide; that which we are socialized into; that which we can and can’t change. It is also interested in our individual responsibility to ourselves and the ones we love. The characters make decisions, but Director Saim Sadiq doesn’t leave much of who is right and who is wrong up to the imagination. And why should he? Why blame Pakistani society writ large for tragically preventable outcomes that individuals are responsible for?
Though Joyland did not make the final list of 2023 Oscar nominees, it has been making the rounds in many American cities, with its American premiere at Sundance. I highly recommend watching it with others. Processing the film right after I watched it without the help of my friends would have been a tall task.
The Eight Mountains (Italy/Belgium, Dirs. Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch)
I’d avoided watching this film for as long as I could. After nearly two to three films a day for four days – films mostly involving heavy themes of trauma and personal tragedy – I was hoping for something lighter. Like with the other films I eventually willed myself to press play. When I finished, much to my surprise and happiness, my spirit was rejuvenated.
Pietro Guasti (Luca Marinelli) and his city-dwelling family visit Grana, a small Italian mountain town, when Pietro is twelve years old. Seemingly an escape from the city for his adventuring father, Giovanni (Filippo Timi), Pietro is less than enthusiastic about his father’s passions. He befriends Bruno, Grana’s last remaining child, and they spend many teenage summers together, forming a relationship worth returning to.
The film reintroduces Berio, as Bruno endearingly called Pietro, to Bruno when Pietro’s father passes. Even as it attempts to tell the decade-spanning story of a sprawling friendship that began when the two were boys, The Eight Mountains never loses itself. It is specific, self-contained, and satisfied telling a simple, but densely layered story about male friendship, brotherhood, and family, offering much of itself to unearth the meaning of a life well-lived, a life fulfilled.
I am reminded of something Preacher John Ames says in Gilead, that “writing has often felt like praying.” That, “you feel you are with someone,” in anticipation of their joy, in regret of their sadness. Directors Van Groeningen and Vandermeersch understand this feeling. Pietro functions as the story’s narrator and his narration often feels like prayer; especially when he finds the many journals his father left behind on mountaintops when they were estranged from one another. How beautiful! To consider that one’s prose is another’s prayer.
Attending Sundance was a remarkable, if challenging, experience. For what felt like my first time, I was privy to the works of some incredible filmmakers before relevant cultural discourse found its way into my head. What a privilege it was to receive films simply on their merits and my instincts. Watching films everyday was also an exercise in fine-tuning those instincts—taste. I found that I was developing a clearer sense of what I liked and disliked watching and why; not just which films, but about the medium itself. This piece is the result of paying attention to what stuck around in my mind weeks after the festival ended. I took a break from watching films in February (only watched 7!) but have since resumed at my pace of 15-17 films a month. The ones with staying power? The humanist, character dramas. Well-written, of course, but with a quiet and gentle visual language. The characters’ settings may be small, but their stories are anything but. I am aching to write about them.
I was in the middle of watching Shayda, my final Sundance film, when I felt myself reaching for my phone, my practiced mental resistance to that habit stomped down by the sheer force of fatigue. A close friend had texted me. I was relieved. To pause to respond to him felt easier to justify than to do so because I wanted to see how the Niners were doing. It was the last day of Sundance. My film etiquette had unraveled at this point, and I was finishing films any which way I could get through them. My friend had reached out to tell me that Novak Djokovic had won the Australian Open title. As a self-proclaimed “Rafa Truther,” I couldn’t stomach that he and Nadal were now tied for Grand Slam titles at 22 each. A vulnerable moment. An opening to admit to him that I was tired. I told him that the Sundance marathon had been hard on me, to which he texted, “I’ll proffer that it’s the easiest type of marathon.”
Child… this is so beautifully written. I share your sentiments about Shoplifters! I, too, watched it on an international flight and do not wish that airline blanket on anyone after me… and it made me immensely happy to hear about the rethreading of your familial bonds… good luck in this new venture!