Sundance is here. Literally. It’s not just that it’s the time of year for the Sundance Film Festival, it’s that the festival is no longer just in Park City, Utah, but also in your living room or wherever you watch movies.
The festival’s global outreach is one of the few good things to come out of the 2020 pandemic. A limited number of tickets go on sale on January 11 and this year’s lineup will feature premieres, shorts and all the films in competition, from “Skywalkers: A Love Story,” a documentary about a couple who scale a super skyscraper to “Didi,” Sean Wang’s coming-of-age story about growing up Taiwanese-America in Fremont.
John Nein, Senior Programmer and Director of Strategic Initiatives, spoke recently by video about this year’s Sundance and how it has changed over the 40 years since it began. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. What are some highlights this year?
“Love Me,” starring Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun, is about a buoy that falls in love with a satellite. You’re like, ‘How is that going to work as a film?’ but it’s an incredibly fresh, smart and charming way of exploring being in consciousness in a very formally inventive way.
“The American Society of Magical Negroes” is a first film and it’s exceptional and a smart satire, the likes of which you do not very often.
“Freaky Tales,” from Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, is a mashup of genres set in Oakland in 1987 with this supernatural force that empowers the underdogs of Oakland against the wrongdoers of society.
And it’s great to have Steven Soderbergh back in the lineup with “Presence,” a hypnotic, poetic film, a ghost story told from the point of view of the ghost.
“Mother of All Lies” is the most extraordinary documentary I’ve seen all year, about the bread riots of Casablanca in the 1980s; the filmmaker created a diorama miniature model of the street on which she lived to engage her family and neighbors in this history that they do not want to talk about.
And “Agent of Happiness” is a documentary about the Bhutanese government’s effort to assess the happiness level of people in their society, but it turns into a sort of love story.
Q. How has the festival evolved over the years?
Nonfiction was always on par with fiction films from the beginning, but Sundance has become a more international festival, moving from having sidebar sections to an international competition. And I do think that the festival wants to evolve with the changing landscape of opportunity for independent artists. The New Frontier program looks at art and technology and the cross-pollination of artists there. And now we are recognizing that there are people working in episodic series doing interesting things. [Jane Campion and Gerard Lee]’s “Top of the Lake” premiered at Sundance.
Q. Are there themes in the lineup reflective of where filmmaking or society is now?
We don’t program for themes, but you step back at the end of that process and you look at what you’ve programmed and you can see the number of films that are about AI, whether it’s “Eternal You,” “Love Machina’ or “Love Me,” which I think is going to be one of the bigger films that comes out of the festival. You can also see so many people at this moment in time interested in family, connection and loss, which makes sense coming out of the pandemic in these uneasy times.
Q. When you’re looking through the 4,000 films submitted, what are you looking for?
There’s a notion that you are broadening the sense of storytelling, with people whose perspectives are different, with underrepresented voices, and a certain authenticity. We also look for subject matter that we’re not accustomed to seeing in mainstream media. Yet how we pick things is more amorphous: It’s just the idea that something somehow feels fresh; it feels like you haven’t had this experience watching a film before.
It’s hard to put into words but that’s one reason we have more than a dozen programmers who sit around a table and talk for eight to 10 hours every week about the films. Our group is more diverse than it was 20 years ago and our approach is unique in the world of film programming. There are many, many instances where maybe only two or three people are really passionate about a film but they can convince the rest of us.
Q. Are there films that surprise you once they’re shown at the festival?
You never know how the press, industry, jury or audiences, are going to respond to something. Last year, “Past Lives” had unanimous support in our group. We all loved it, but it’s a small drama mostly in Korean; it’s very subtle and character-driven and it’s hard to put your finger on about how that film affects you. You go into the festival not knowing how it will perform and then you see it become one of the most talked-about films of the year and a potential contender for awards.
Q. Does the success of “Past Lives” give you hope, not just for the festival but for movies in general at a time when it has gotten so difficult to get smaller movies made and sold?
These are challenging times for small films and the world of distribution and exhibition. Filmmakers and the industry see certain festivals, including Sundance, as being pivotal to their future. The notion of curation is key to how people engage with what is out there in a world that is quite full of content and a festival can put a spotlight on that work and the voice of a filmmaker and give it a certain context. That’s key to this notion of sustainability for a certain kind of film.
Q. There have been some major sales at Sundance recently, with “Palm Springs” surpassing $17 million and “CODA” hitting $25 million. Is that a good sign?
It’s important because it is one of the ways in which the health of the industry is assessed, but I think that it’s important to look beyond the headlines and the big sales. The health of the industry is more tied to finding smaller sales for a lot of films. The concern is about the ability of those films to be successful in distribution because that is tied to the question of whether people will continue financing them. That’s why “Past Lives” is encouraging. It represents a kind of film that conventional wisdom keeps telling us is not supposed to work and yet it’s a very successful film and shows that when a film is executed well, it does have market potential. We want to challenge some of the notions of what can and can’t work in the marketplace. The audience for these films is there. We just have to find a better way of getting the films to them.
Q. Is that why you’re continuing the online version of Sundance?
Yes. The audience to whom many of these films speak is not necessarily the audience that comes to Park City so the question is how can it enter the consciousness of the general public and how can we create opportunities. One virtue of the festival is the notion of discovery – audiences go into something they don’t quite know about to give it a shot and end up liking it and talking about it with their friends. We’re enabling that further by letting people view our films through the online platform.
