In a year that has seen the usually crammed film festival circuit thrown into disarray by coronavirus, January’s Sundance film festival was one of the lucky few such events to unfold without disruption — and nary a murmur about how the film industry would grind to a halt in a matter of weeks. The festival’s British offshoot, Sundance London, has not been so fortunate. Normally it’s a hot ticket in the early summer, bringing selected highlights from Park City, Utah, to local cinema screens for the first time. Like most other summer cultural events, it seemed that 2020 was simply going to be a washout — yet, happily, Sundance London has been revived in a smaller, streaming-based form, with a mini-programme available to view at home this week from 7-9 August.
The selection comprises three feature films and eight shorts: a fraction of what the lineup would be in a physical edition, yet still a pleasingly diverse snapshot that captures the festival’s progressive, conscientious programming spirit. Via the Sundance London site, punters can book individual digital tickets to a single feature premiere (or the whole shorts programme) for £5.99, while a £20 festival pass offers access to everything shown over the weekend. An assortment of online panel discussions, meanwhile, will be free to stream internationally, though having the context of the films would probably help.
Of the three features chosen, one was the festival’s clearest non-fiction sensation, winning the documentary grand jury prize on top of critical raves and a joint distribution deal with Apple and beloved indie outfit A24: Boys State, directed by Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss, is a funny, fascinating depiction of an annual Texan educational tradition, whereby a thousand teenage schoolboys gather to form a mock government, complete with parties, campaigns and elections. It’s been run since 1935 by the conservative American Legion, which explains the male-only remit — there is a separate Girls State event — though as Boys State tacitly points out, it’s merely an extreme representation of the American political patriarchy. The film’s individual story arcs and character studies are compelling and occasionally endearing in the tradition of oddball school-based docs such as Spellbound and Science Fair, but its political acuity cuts sharply through the cuteness — the teens’ government parallels problems and conflicts in the current US political system.
The two fiction film selections are less surefire crowdpleasers, but I was particularly taken with Luxor, an elliptical, shimmery character drama grounded by a subtly piercing performance from the ever interesting Andrea Riseborough. She’s an aid worker adrift in the eponymous Egyptian city, taking time off from presumably harrowing duty at a Syrian war trauma unit. What she’s looking for is uncertain and elusive even to her; a chance meeting with a former lover (Karim Saleh) provides some answers, though British director Zeina Durra’s interests are more mature and mysterious than hokey holiday romance. The third feature, Uncle Frank, is the first feature film in 13 years from Alan Ball, the writer of American Beauty and Six Feet Under, and is less intriguing. Tracking a quirky 1970s road trip undertaken by a gay academic (Paul Bettany) and his teenage niece, it rambles along amiably enough, but the acid has drained out of Ball’s writing.
The shorts selection, meanwhile, is not just an afterthought: collectively, they cover a jagged, exciting range of styles and topics. A number of them are British, my favourite being Harry Lighton, Marco Alessi and Matthew Jacobs Morgan’s Pompeii, a lively anatomy of a gay man’s night out in London told wholly via jangly, chaotic Instagram stories. In White Girl, theatre director Nadia Latif (of recent Fairview acclaim) offers a visceral, macabre critique of non-intersectional feminism via the horrors of a teenager’s night-time wanderings through the East End. Natalie Cubides-Brady’s Beyond the North Winds: A Post-Nuclear Reverie is a stark, shivery experimental doc study of a decommissioned nuclear plant in Scotland; Dylan Holmes Williams’s The Devil’s Harmony balances out its minimalism with a daffy musical revenge fantasy that cycles through a dozen genres in as many minutes. All whet your appetite for longer works from these film-makers: perhaps at a real live Sundance festival in the future.
Also new to streaming and DVD
The Whistlers
(Curzon Artificial Eye, 15)
Romanian new wave master Corneliu Porumboiu heads to the Canary Islands and duly lightens his tone for an entertainingly knotty film noir with an unexpectedly whimsical sense of humour.
The Hater
(Netflix, 15)
Fresh off his Oscar nomination earlier this year for the priest-impostor drama Corpus Christi, Polish director Jan Komasa won the top prize at the Tribeca festival for this heated, somewhat far-fetched but engrossing thriller about online manipulation and sabotage.
Shine Your Eyes
(Netflix)
Another festival success from earlier in the year heading straight to Netflix, this Berlinale-approved Brazilian mood piece about a Nigerian new arrival searching São Paulo for his missing brother offers dreamlike rewards when you settle into its woozy pace.
Toto the Hero
(Arrow, 15)
Celebrated by critics on its 1991 release, this richly fanciful, quick-witted debut by Jaco Van Dormael — in which an elderly man’s memories and parallel-life fantasies are elaborately braided — isn’t much mentioned these days. This smart new Blu-ray release should help.
