Sundance Favorites 2016: Eckerd goes to Park City

While it started out small in 1978 as the Utah/US Film Festival in Salt Lake City, Utah, the Sundance Film Festival expanded in 1985 and moved to the mountains of Park City with the support of Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute. That year saw the debut film of the Coen Brothers, Blood Simple, and Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger than Paradise, the film that was arguably the inspiration for a whole generation of independent film hits, starting with Stephen Soderbergh’s sex, lies and videotape in 1989 and Richard Linklater’s Slacker in 1991 and Kevin Smith’s Clerks in 1994. Soderbergh returns this year as the producer of a television series based on his 2009 film The Girlfriend Experience, and it is a mark of the critical and cultural importance of these once-unknown low budget filmmakers that the documentary lineup at Sundance 2016 includes a full-length feature about the prolific “slacker” himself (21 Years: Richard Linklater), whose Boyhood was the biggest hit at 2014’s festival. Kevin Smith was also back this year with the Yoga Hosers, starring his daughter Harley Quinn Smith and Johnny Depp’s daughter Lily-Rose Melody Depp, along with Mr. Depp himself who reprises his role from Tusk as the bumbling Québécois detective, Guy Lapointe.

While critics didn’t love it, and I myself deliberately missed it, several of my students were there at the premiere. Nearly every year I bring a crew of student reporters to Sundance from Eckerd College, who post pictures and video and write about their experiences on our Sundance blog. This year they got a picture with Smith and posted responses to the film that confirmed my initial sense that this was a film for another generation. Eckerd sophomore John Burdette, who said the film was number one on his list of things to see at Sundance this year, wrote: “it is a Kevin Smith film, so I was not expecting to walk in and be blown away by an amazing story and acting. I was simply entertained — something Kevin has mastered. The story was crazy, the characters were crazier and the whole thing perfectly embodies what a great bad film should be.” Bayley Cron, also a sophomore, wrote: “While, yes, it was absolutely terrible, it kept me entertained and laughing throughout the entire film.” Alek Pfeiffer, Eckerd College junior and double major in Marine Science and Film Studies, and a self-proclaimed superfan of Kevin Smith, found the film “outrageously funny” but admits that many viewers are likely to consider it both “juvenile and stupid.” Here’s how he described the plot:

Colleen Collette and Colleen McKenzie (played by Harley Quinn Smith and Lily-Rose Melody Depp) are high school sophomores whose lives revolve around their cell phones, their punk band "GlamThrax," and partying with cute senior boys.  Unfortunately, they have to work a shift at the local Eh-2-Zed convenient store at the same time as the party… seriously WTF?!?!?  The Colleens close shop early and invite the partiers to the Eh-2-Zed, but things go horribly wrong when tiny Canadian Nazi clones, made of bratwurst, begin killing the cute high school boys by entering them through their butts.  Luckily the girls are trained to destroy any enemy using the art of yoga, leading them to save Canada from an army of "Bratzis."

My students were required to see at least 15 films each, but most saw many more. I ended up seeing about 30. While for some the most exciting moments of the festival were getting pictures with celebrities such as Nick Jonas, John Krasinski, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Paul Rudd and Daniel Radcliffe, several were surprised by how much they loved the low-budget independent films starring actors they’d never heard of. Here are some of the highlights:

Easily the biggest hit at the festival this year was Birth of a Nation, a film that boldly justifies its appropriation and re-interpretation of the title of the highly influential but racist early film by D.W. Griffiths. This is the first feature film directed by Nate Parker, who overcame enormous challenges in bringing this story of Nat Turner’s 1831 slave rebellion to the screen.

The film won both the Grand Jury Award and the Audience Award for fiction films this year, and sold to Fox Searchlight for $17.5 million from a budget of $10 million, making it the biggest deal at Sundance 2016. It deserved the acclaim, as both a powerful and moving depiction of an important episode in the history of the United States, whose telling couldn’t be more timely in the context of recent events leading to the influential and essential Black Lives Matter movement. I would be very surprised if it isn’t nominated for Best Picture and Best Director and Best Actor for Nate Parker in the starring role at the 2016 Academy Awards, and I wouldn't be surprised if the film swept them all.

Other films I loved at the festival include Embrace of the Serpent, a Colombian film about early explorers in the Amazon jungle, which had already played at the Cannes Film Festival and will be playing again as the opening night film at the upcoming Eckerd College “Visions of Nature/Voices of Nature” Environmental Film Festival. Love and Friendship is Whit Stillman’s hilarious and highly effective adaptation of Jane Austen’s short epistolary novel Lady Susan. Kelly Reichardt was back at Sundance this year with two films: a restoration of her Miami-based first film River of Grass, that plays like a funnier cross between Godard's Breathless and Malick's Badlands, and that was one of only two films directed by women at Sundance when it debuted there in 1994; and her latest film Certain Women, a subtle and arresting anthology film about four introspective women who find themselves faced with tough decisions in morally ambiguous circumstances.

First Girl I Loved, written and directed by Kerem Sanga, also deals with a (much younger) woman who is caught up in an unsettling situation when she discovers she has fallen in love with the most popular girl at her high school. Faced with both intense longing and confusion about her sexual identity, Sasha confides in her longstanding best friend, but finds him less than supportive, since, as it turns out, he had always had a crush on her. While I, unfortunately, missed it, several of my students agreed that it was among the best films they saw at Sundance this year. Alek Pfeiffer wrote that the film “completely surpassed my expectations” and was “one of the most accurate depictions of high school relationships I have seen.” Vanessa Lieberman wrote that “seeing this movie could help those who are afraid to come out and to not be so concerned what people might think of them."

There were, remarkably, two films at the festival this year about the Sarasota-based reporter Christine Chubbuck, who took her own life in 1974 by shooting herself in the head on live television. One, titled simply Christine, was a fictional dramatization, directed by Antonio Campos, and starring Rebecca Hall in an impeccable and arresting performance as Chubbuck. The other, which I was lucky enough to be able to see after I’d seen Christine, was a fascinating experiment that blurred the lines between documentary and fiction. Kate Plays Christine was directed by Robert Greene, a documentary filmmaker and editor who, in a Q&A after the film claimed to be obsessed by the idea that who we are is always to some degree a performance, and in his last two films has become intrigued by the way that actors in particular manage to navigate the line between their lives and their performances. The film “stars” the actress Kate Lynn Sheil, as she prepares to take on the role of Christine Chubbuck in a (fictional) film about her life, a film that is never actually realized except in the excerpts we see brought to life in the documentary.

The best film I saw at Sundance this year, maybe the best film I've seen in the last few years, was Manchester by the Sea, which is appearing 16 years after its director and writer Kenneth Lonergan won the Grand Jury Prize and the screenwriting award at Sundance 2000 with his debut feature You Can Count on Me (starring Laura Linney, Matthew Broderick, and Mark Ruffalo.) In between, he directed only one film, the excellent Margaret, starring Anna Paquin and Matt Damon, completed in 2007 but never fully released until 2014, due to a legal battle that ensued when its producers decided the cut he delivered was too long. His latest film follows a handyman, based in Boston, who returns to his childhood home in Manchester when his older brother passes away. Through a series of flashbacks, we learn why he left in the first place and why the return is so painful. The writing is subtle and rich, the acting is impeccable, and the visuals sometimes astonishing; this is a sometimes emotionally devastating and yet deeply moving film, very obviously the work of a filmmaker who has fully mastered the art. This is why I come to Sundance.

This article appears in Jan 28 – Feb 3, 2016.