FILM
NO NEWS IS GOOD NEWS? The future of the Sundance Film Festival still to come BY MICHAEL J. CASEY
I
t’s like a grade school love note: Do you like me? (check one) Yes No Maybe And right now, Boulder is still waiting patiently for a reply. On Jan. 23, the 2025 Sundance Film Festival got underway with no announcement as to the future of the fest. Three cities are in the running: Boulder, Cincinnati and the one-two punch of Salt Lake and Park City, Utah, for the next 10 years of Sundance beginning in 2027. The process, which began roughly a year ago, won’t see a resolution until after the festival, though the announcement might not come until late winter or early spring. For local businesses and anyone interested in the future of cinema along the Front Range, hope springs eternal. But back in the snowy Wasatch Mountains of Park City, the 41st Sundance Film Festival kicked off under the cloud of smoke from Los Angeles. The Sundance Institute’s founding director and honoree of this year’s gala, Michelle Satter, lost her home to the Palisades Fire, and Meera Menon and Paul Gleason, the husband and wife team behind the zombie apocalypse drama, Didn’t Die, lost theirs to the Eaton Fire. Add to the mix the announcements of the 97th Academy Award Nominations, which were delayed because of the fires and announced on the morning of Sundance’s opening, plus the general unease about the political climate, and it seems like minds were constantly elsewhere. But for those who packed the theaters and streets of Park City, the movies BOULDER WEEKLY
managed to distract in 90 and 120-minute increments. That rang true even in the films where the collision of narrative and reality clanged the loudest. In Rebuilding, a rancher (Josh O’Connor) looks for a way forward after a forest fire takes his Southern Colorado home. “Film is an act of imagination,” Rebuilding director Max Walker-Silverman told the audience of nearly 1,300 attending the movie’s world premiere. “It’s the bright light in a dark room. So I made this film, John Lennon and Yoko Ono appear in One to One: John & Yoko by Kevin Macdonald, an official selection of the because only through 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy: Sundance Institute | Credit: Ben Ross Photography imagining a better world the doc almost exclusively from Florida are stories you think you know. And, in can we hope for one. And only through Police Officer body cam footage to show both, the filmmakers plunder their familhoping for a better world can we fight for how a disagreement between neighbors iar subjects for overlooked and forgotten one.” escalated into something tragic. moments that tell us so much about who This sentiment permeates Kevin Neighbor is the kind of movie that lures we are as an American society. Macdonald’s electrifying documentary you into thinking you know what’s hapYou’ll find traces of this theme in The One to One: John & Yoko — 18 crucial Librarians, Kim A. Snyder’s by-the-num- pening before Gandbhir starts turning the months in the lives of Lennon and Ono screws ever so slightly. bers reportage doc about the organizain the tumultuous early 1970s — and The Perfect Neighbor should be a contions behind the fight to ban books with SLY LIVES! (aka the Burden of Black tender for the Grand Jury Prize for Best LGBTQ+ and BIPOC content in public Genius) from musician and filmmaker Documentary, maybe even one of the school libraries, and in the formally innoAhmir “Questlove” Thompson about the five nominated for next year’s Oscar. But vative The Perfect Neighbor. In the latmulti-talented artist behind the essential I have a feeling few will want to see the ter, director Geeta Gandbhir constructs funk band Sly & the Family Stone. Both movie simply because the surface appears familiar. That won’t be the case with Laura Casabé’s The Virgin of Quarry Lake, a teen coming-of-age story set in a steamy and rotting Buenos Aires suburb in 2001. The film is a tricky little thing, not quite drama and not quite horror. It’s a movie that plays in the same crooked sandbox David Lynch built. It’s magnificent. The Sundance Film Festival continues through Feb. 2. On Jan. 30, a selection of the lineup will be available for online screening at festival.sundance. org. Tickets are limited, but there’s plenty to see while those of us in Boulder — and Cincinnati and Utah — remain Josh O’Connor and Lily LaTorre appear in Rebuilding by Max Walker-Silverman, an official selection of the in a wait-and-see mentality. 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy: Sundance Institute | Credit: Jesse Hope JANUARY 30, 2025
15