This year’s Sundance Film Festival will probably not be that well-remembered. Independent filmmaking right now is at a crucial crossroads as smaller-scaled films struggle at the box-office and, by miracle, whatever does get made is quickly snatched up by streamers.
AV Rockwell’s grittily realized, but painfully familiar, “A Thousand And One” just won the US Dramatic Grand Jury Prize. The film tackles a struggling, but unapologetic, black mother, living in mid-1990s New York City, who kidnaps her 6-year-old son Terry from foster care and tries to build a new life with him.
Rockwell’s film is a handsomely shot one about Black motherhood, crushed dreams, and the ramifications of New York City’s white-led political system. It’s a near two-hour, tonally uneven movie that never finds the groove necessary to hold your attention.
With that being said, despite the US dramatic competition not being very good this year, there were exceptions in quality. I watched all 12 films in competition, and two titles particularly stood out.
Laurel Parmet’s absorbing “The Starling Girl” has a 17-year-old girl (Eliza Scanlen) from a Christian fundamentalist community struggling to hide her affair with a youth pastor twice her age. Chloe Domont’s explosive feature debut, “Fair Play,” which sold to Netflix for $20 million, tackles a Wall Street power couple who can’t get enough of each other, until a coveted promotion turns the gender dynamics around in their relationship.
Meanwhile, the directing prize went to Sing J. Lee for his respectful, but sluggish debut, “The Accidental Getaway Driver,” a film that tackles the true story of an elderly Vietnamese cab driver taken hostage at gunpoint by three escaped Orange County convicts.
Speaking of sluggish, no prize was given to Raven Jackson’s “All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt,” an A24/Barry Jenkins production that ploddingly tells the story of a Black woman in Mississippi, from her childhood through her adult years. Despite some critics going gaga over the movie, I’m firmly in agreement with David Ehrlich in that this was a beautiful, but misguided Malick-ian statement filled with episodic vignettes that don’t fully work as a whole.
If anything, it was the Premieres section that delivered the best films at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. I’ll tackle them in my next dispatch, which will most likely be in the form of a top 10.