Hot ticket: The first half of the Sundance and Slamdance Film Festivals

Park City, Utah — If mainstream Hollywood cinema is the movie equivalent of pop music, then independent film, which finds its greatest venue at the annual Sundance and Slamdance Film Festivals, is the medium’s version of punk rock. For 10 days in January, Park City, Utah, transforms into a celebration of independent voices that tell stories of iconoclasts, dissenters and mavericks. In this venue, films are the shows, the filmmakers and their subjects are the stars, and audiences queue for hours for a chance to be in the room for the world premiere of a hot ticket. Here are 10 films that managed to make themselves heard above the noise in the first half.

While U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s personal taste runs more toward opera, the Sunday premiere of Betsy West and Julie Cohen’s documentary RBG had all the earmarks of a rock concert. The film debuted to a packed house crackling with electricity with the knowledge that the gender justice advocate was in the building. Although not much can compete with a Q&A with a sitting Supreme Court justice, RBG in its own right is a powerful glimpse into Ginsburg’s life and struggles in light of her recent resurgence as a pop culture icon. A straight-ahead doc that details the reserved Ginsburg’s rise to the highest court in the land, RBG’s narrative structure mirrors Ginsburg’s own step-by-step strategy to challenge gender discrimination in her early years on the other side of the bench. RBG is most notable though for its nuanced presentation of a partnership that allowed one member to reach such career heights, as the film reveals Ginsburg’s late husband Marty’s long support of her ambitions and his personal campaign to get her nominated to the Supreme Court.

In a completely different fashion but surprisingly with a similar message, Trevor Stevens’ Rock Steady Row offered another standout during the first half of Slamdance. With its more youthful vibe and punk rock spirit, Slamdance screenings are intimate celebrations of films made by first-time feature directors for under a million dollars. Monday’s encore screening of Rock Steady Row was a packed affair, with spectators lining the aisles for Stevens & co.’s gonzo depiction of a world not too far from our own, where college has become a pure moneymaking venture and where rival gangs vie for control of the greatest campus resource: the bicycle. In one of the most original films I have seen in a while, Rock Steady Row repurposes the spaghetti western, most notably Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars, and the martial arts film for the university set. The film depicts a stylized world of two fraternities — the Kappas and High Society — into which a freshman intervenes, playing both sides against each other but only succeeding with the help of sorority women who have gone underground. The film is a blast of pure energy with sure-footed visuals that transform a banal but common problem (campus bike theft) into an epic saga.

Tyrel, Sundance veteran Sebastián Silva’s latest film and which premiered to a capacity crowd on Saturday night, offered another high dose of testosterone in a premise that on its surface would seem to offer little nuance but is deceptively complex. The film follows Tyler (Jason Mitchell, who garnered notice last year in Mudbound), a twentysomething who attends a weekend birthday retreat with a friend from work only to discover that he’s the only person of color in the group. Tyler’s isolation and alienation from the group is subtle but everywhere. In the snowy world of the Catskills, everything is white — the other guys, the setting, even his host’s dog. In a film that offers comparisons to Get Out, Tyrel explores the comic side of racial gaslighting in which Tyler questions both the microaggressions of the other guys and his own reactions to them. This is a film that will bear repeat viewing as a time capsule of 2018. Michael Cera, Christopher Abbott, and Ann Dowd also star.

One common thread in standout films this year is the theme of boundary crossing and how far one will go in the pursuit of wealth, social distinction, or both. In American rapper Boots Riley’s highly original debut, Sorry to Bother You, Lakeith Stanfield (Get Out) plays an African American telemarketer who finds success when he taps into his “white voice” and must decide what side of corporate America he wants to be on, especially when the film reveals that it is just as much of a fantasy as a comedy. I won’t give away the ending but the film’s look and final plot twist suggest the offspring of Spike Lee’s Bamboozled and Bong Joon-ho’s Okja.

 In a similar fashion Sara Colangelo’s The Kindergarten Teacher is a film that would make any educator profoundly uncomfortable in its investigation of when art appreciation becomes a criminal act. Maggie Gyllenhaal gives a strong performance as a Staten Island kindergarten teacher, wife, and mother who finds a breath of fresh air in a poetry-spouting phenom hiding in her song circle. However her wish to nurture her student’s talent soon leads to questionable decisions.

The gripping drama American Animals, directed by Bart Layton, previously best known for his documentary work, follows a similar thread as it seamlessly integrates fact and fiction in the true story of four male undergraduates’ botched attempt to steal rare books from the Transylvania University library in the early 2000s. As the young men in 2004 (played by Evan Peters, Barry Keoghan, Blake Jenner, and Jared Abrahamson) pursue the heist in an attempt, like Gyllenhaal’s character, to escape the mundane, their current selves (played by the real men) reflect on the stories often told to make peace with crossing a moral boundary.

Another theme at Sundance this year is the power of storytelling and two notable films reflect on the power of filmmaking in particular. Sandi Tan’s engrossing documentary, Shirkers, reveals the forgotten history of an independent film by the same name produced in Singapore in the early 1990s by three teenage women and one mysterious older man. After succeeding against all odds to shoot the original film, director (and writer and star of the 1990s version) Sandi Tan is dismayed when director Georges Cardona takes the footage hostage for almost twenty years. The investigation of Cardona’s persona as an influence and hindrance to these three female filmmakers stands in for larger structural issues that accompany the act of telling female stories in a patriarchal society.

Anthony Mandler’s Monster, an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Walter Dean Myers, offers the premise that the American criminal justice system is just as melodramatic as a fiction film and the goal of a successful criminal defense is the same as cinema: to convince viewers that someone different from you is just as human as you are. Kelvin Harrison Jr., who also anchors fellow U.S. Dramatic competition entry Monsters and Men, gives an arresting performance as Steve Harmon, a middle-class New York City kid who aspires to be a filmmaker but falls in with less than desirable associates in his pursuit to see the world from a different point of view. The film intercuts his trial for robbery and murder with the events leading up to the crime as Steve comes to realize that in order to be free, one must make others aware of your truth.

My final two films to watch out for could not be more different. Summer of ’84, directed by the trio of François Simard, Anouk Whissell and Yoann-Karl Whissell, is a 1980s-set horror film in the vein of Stranger Things and Fright Night that proved a hot ticket at its midnight debut on Monday. Davey Armstrong (Graham Verchere) is convinced that his neighbor (Richard Sommer) is a serial killer and that he and his trio of friends must investigate. Through a series of twists and turns, the film offers a most uncomfortable ending.

Finally Sebastián and Rodrigo Barriuso’s Un Traductor tells the little-known story of Cuba’s welcoming of thousands of Russian child victims of the Chernobyl disaster for medical treatment in the late 1980s. Told from the perspective of a Russian literature professor (Rodrigo Santoro) who is tasked to serve as a translator for these children, Un Traductor offers rare view of middle-class existence in Cuba and Santoro gives a strong performance as a man at first reluctant to take on this new duty who then learns to balance the traumas of the job with opening up to his family.

This article appears in Jan 25 – Feb 1, 2018.