4 Sundance Documentaries You Should Watch Online This Weekend
The window for online viewing closes at 1:55 am on Monday, January 29th.
One of the few good things to come from the pandemic aside from remote work is remote film festivals. As I mentioned in my inaugural edition of “Doc of the Town,” many of the major film festivals now offer online streaming platforms that give anyone the chance to do Park City from Park Slope (sorry, that was a little too cute).
Sundance kicked off last week in Utah and this week online. You can buy tickets to nearly any movie for $25 here, and you have until 1:55 am on Monday, January 29th to press play before the viewing window closes. You can watch from your laptop or on a smart TV by downloading the 2024 Sundance Film Festival app.
If that sounds like a good excuse to stay in on a Saturday night or stave off the Sunday Scaries, I forced my long-suffering boyfriend (Michael) to watch films with me in shifts (having a job puts a damper on how much time I can spend on the couch watching movies) so that we could recommend a few that we think are worth your time.
My picks:
“I know there are countless numbers of you out there in the world who have experienced sexual violence,” begins Black Box Diaries. It’s a trigger warning – and one you should take seriously if this sort of topic isn’t for you as this is a heavy and difficult story to sit with. But it’s a trigger warning that sets the tone for the rest of the film – journalist and filmmaker Shiori Ito knows who she’s speaking to.
After she’s assaulted by a high-profile colleague with ties to then-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Ito finds herself faced with a police force and judicial system conspiring to silence her. Turning a journalistic lens on her own experience of sexual violence, Black Box Diaries finds Ito searching for justice with the only thing she has left: her profession. What follows is a chronicle of her years-long investigation that weaves together cell phone video and richly shot verité. Though there are plenty of documentaries that aren’t sure whether they are works of art or works of journalism, Black Box Diaries is very clear about what it is. We see Ito interview sources, record phone calls and conversations, pull security footage, and track down documents – all while trying to process the deep trauma that still sits heavy in her chest. Ito is 25 when this journey begins – before the #MeToo movement in the United States – and she’s 33 when the film ends.
All I can really say is that this is an incredibly brave project by a woman who risked everything to try and change a broken system. I’m in awe of her and in awe of her film. It absolutely deserves your attention.
In the beginning, man wanted to climb the world’s highest mountains. Then, man wanted to climb seven, eight, fourteen of the world’s highest mountains back-to-back. At some point, man decided he wanted to scale cliffs. Then, he decided he wanted to scale cliffs without any protective gear on. Now, man is building a massive following on Instagram by scaling buildings.
No but for real, this is one of my favorite doc genres, best described as “crazy people doing things that will probably someday kill them.” It’s giving Fire of Love. It’s giving The Deepest Breath. It’s giving Grizzly Man. Guys: Alex Honnold walked so Vanya Beerkus and Angela Nikolau could run (up scaffolding)!
Watching this film is kind of like watching one long Tik Tok (one where you’re having heart palpitations and are potentially on the verge of a panic attack the whole time), but it doesn’t shy away from the hard stuff: the war in Ukraine, COVID, family legacy and family trauma, the challenges of loving and learning to trust. I spent a lot of this film furiously muttering “these people are insane” to myself, simultaneously rooting for them and hoping someone would stop them and put an end to the madness. If you’re afraid of heights in any way shape or form, stay very far away from this film. But if you find the human race kind of baffling and entrancing all at once, I can’t recommend it enough.
Michael’s picks:
The experience of time in film is one of the great assets of the medium. In the documentary form, it is particularly powerful.
For instance, Garrett Bradley’s aptly titled Time, a Sundance 2020 award winner, chronicles Sibil Fox’s 21-year struggle to secure the release of her incarcerated husband. Through self-shot material and methodical camerawork bridged monochromatically, Bradley brilliantly emphasizes the day-by-day pain of separation and the suffocating power of the carceral state.
It is easy to find similarities between Time and Daughters, which received the “Festival Favorite Award” at this year’s festival. Both intimately portray families of incarcerated men over several years and explore how our retributive system of justice is deeply inhumane. But in Daughters, co-directors Angela Patton and Natalie Rae do not overemphasize the system itself and liberate their camera to explore the world from the perspective of their participants.
Daughters initially appears to be mainly about the ten-week leadup to a Date with Dad dance. Organized by Patton herself, this program allows incarcerated fathers to spend time with their daughters who would otherwise be unable to physically interact with them. The daughters are introduced one by one through vignettes that show their complex feelings towards their fathers and the harsh reality of this separation. These vignettes are intercut with a men’s group inside the prison in which their fathers lay bare their pain and their fatherhood struggles.
The film allows us to feel the same anticipation and apprehension as the participants, so when the dance finally occurs, we are experiencing the complex mixture of catharsis and melancholy of these families. A lesser film would have ended with a short denouement following the end of the dance but with their editors, Troy Lewis and Adelina Bichis, Patton and Rae manage to deliver a gut punch of time that puts the reality of incarceration in perspective.
I highly encourage anyone who can handle the waves of emotion in this film to seek it out. It forces us to imagine a less destructive system in which we value humanity over punishment.
“It’s difficult to live your life and find joy in the countless opportunities when the opportunities of a loved one grow ever more limited,” says Mia, the sister of Mats Steen, towards the beginning of Benjamin Ree’s Sundance award-winning film Ibelin. The film’s introduction takes on the perspective of the Steen family as they watch Mats fatally deteriorate from Duchenne muscular dystrophy, but their perspective is widened upon announcing his passing on Mats’ blog. They are overwhelmed with emails that tell a far more expansive narrative about his life.
It turns out that Mats, despite his physical limitations, led a fully realized life as Ibelin, his alter ego in the MMORPG World of Warcraft (WoW). In the videogame world, Mats could run, love, insult, and break hearts, and he ultimately developed what many of us seek – a supportive community. The film expertly transports us into WoW by expanding the aspect ratio from square 4:3 home video footage to the full screen landscapes of Azeroth, mirroring the possibility Mats saw through gaming.
Using logs saved by Starlight, the WoW guild that Mats joined, Ree animates scenes within the game to tell the full story of Mats’ life. The animation created by True Potential is cinematic, emotional and convinced me of the power of these online connections. Through well-crafted transitions, Ree uses deft storytelling to weave us in and out of this fantasy world that ultimately feels inextricably connected to the “real world.”
A technique that began with machinima in the early part of this century has matured and evolved to tell a deeply moving narrative about the meaning Mats gleaned from video games. Having been acquired by Netflix, this film will be readily available soon on their platform. However you watch it, I recommend giving it a try, even if you have no connection to gaming or online communities.
 | A guest post by
|