Currently a senior programmer and Director of Strategic Initiatives, John Nein has worked at the Sundance Film Festival since 2001. He also curates the festival’s preservation initiative, Los Angeles Library’s “Lost & Found at the Movies” conversation series; and serves as the consultant for American cinema at the Locarno Film Festival. 

His credits come hand-in-hand with a passion for film coupled with a keen ability for analysis. He is able to make comparisons without either inflating or underestimating the subtle transformations of the art in general.

“Cinema is always evolving,” he says, “and I’m usually reluctant to say that a certain period is more robust or energetic in its reimagining of cinema than others.” Rather than abrupt changes happening all at once, he prefers regarding the art form as “gradually evolving, rethinking of what we tell stories about, what it is that filmmakers want to shed light upon.”

That is not to say that there are no generalities that can be drawn during the process of reviewing artistic output. This year, the programmer has noticed that the nonfiction documentary form is developing in “radically imaginative ways,” accentuating a direction involving a decade. He refers to new titles like Fire of Love, Riotsville USA, Framing Agnes, We Met in Virtual Reality, I Didn’t See You There, as “rewritings of the language.”

These ‘rewritings’ challenge “the cliché, somewhat unreasonable way people have viewed documentary for too long – [with] the idea that [documentary] somehow embodies an objective truth.” Artists who are willing to “stretch the boundaries of the form [help us] expand the way that we think about certain aspects of our society, of our lives.”

“This is not a new trend,” he reiterates. “This is just something that we see as a continuing evolution of what nonfiction is able to do. We’ve always seen [fiction and nonfiction] as separate, when in fact their commonalities in terms of the language of cinema are more pronounced than their differences.”

Another unfolding observed in this year’s output has to do with films about the environmental crisis. “You’re seeing a slightly more oblique way of telling stories about climate,” Nein mentions. The Bolivian Utama – the international winner at Sundance this year, directed by Alejandro Loayza Grisi – “expresses the incredibly destructive power of the changing climate in such a small community; and yet, the lives of those people fill the screen.”

Localized, focused stories like the one of Utama test our notion “of what it means to tell a ‘big story,’ the idea that in order for something to be ‘big’ it has to affect a million people or have this huge series of impacts.”

Similarly, the feature The Cow Who Sang a Song into the Future, directed by Francisca Alegría, can be seen as a reflection of “the wounding of the planet as it relates to the wounds of a family.” “This is a story in which the natural world narrates the film,” Nein continues. “A cow warns us of impending doom, which sounds on the surface perhaps silly, and yet it’s so evocative and so beautiful that – through the poetry of the form – you actually feel nature, you feel the wound.”

 “I think these are filmmakers who are aware of how people have told stories about climate change, and they want to do it in a different way,” he concludes.

Several film selections at Sundance this year were deliberately slow-paced. Could it be that we are witnessing a filmmaker-driven counteraction to the extreme speeds of the mainstream? “Slow cinema is nothing new,” Nein responds with a benevolent grin, “and yet, what I think makes it interesting at this moment in time is whether or not there is a desire amongst artists to slow down, to recognize that there is something disingenuous – or at least [something] against our nature – to move as quickly through the world as we are.”

He goes on to mention Jamie Dack’s Palm Trees and Power Lines, which won the directing award, as a film that is “calculated, purposeful, expanding of these deeply uncomfortable moments.” “Letting things play out,” he continues, “can be really powerful, because it kind of forces you to live within these challenging spaces – and I think that is incredibly effective.”

“The notion of expanding time in cinema has probably never been turned off,” he cautions once again, “but I do think that it relates to where people are right now.”

Slowness may also indicate a need for contemplative reflection among the filmmakers. There have been very few films directly about the pandemic, “but what we did see [was] artists expressing something about the world and its fragility, and the idea of loss and grieving.”

When questioned about the recent abundance of female-driven stories, however, Nein becomes a lot more definitive.

“A lot of the films within the genre space are made by women filmmakers,” he observes. Then, he points to the feature Watcher by Chloe Okuno. “The film posits a woman protagonist who is feeling as though there is a menace out there … But what I think is most striking about the movie is this idea that nobody listens to her. There is a patriarchal world around her, whether it’s her husband or the police.”

There were quite a few films in this year’s program “centered on the idea of women fighting back.” Even though “protagonists going against an oppressive system have always been part of cinema,” in women’s films like Alice, Watcher, or Nanny, “this resistance is framed in very particular terms having to do with women’s experiences.”

 

On the other side of the spectrum of female stories, a film like Girl Picture by Alli Haapasalo, fosters young women protagonists who go through life’s moments “completely on their terms. There’s no element that is introduced into the story that creates an artificial sense of antagonism,” he explains. “[This] allows for the young women at the heart of the story to define a way in which they are going to process their relationships or their sense of who they are. This may not be as pronounced a feminism that we ascribe to films, but I think it is just as interesting.”

Above all, the overarching movement in the current evolution of cinema according to Nein has to do with the proliferation “of films which are appropriating genre conventions and reframing them to completely new ends.” Alice, Nanny, Master, and Emergency are singled out as instances of new American films which are “deeply indebted to the traditions of genre while, at the same time, they are completely reframing those conventions.”

Taking conventions out of context, he argues, reframes not only the artistic form but also the content. Mariama Diallo’s Master leads a “conversation about race in America,” and “what the notion of escape for Black Americans is today,” all through the use of the horror genre.

This tendency is certainly not confined to American filmmaking. Anisia Uzeyman’s Neptune Frost, a feature from Rwanda, is “African futurism, cyberpunk, musical – all mashed together in a way that is so original that it’s completely mind-blowing,” he says with excitement. “You’ve never seen anything like this film, and yet it draws from genres in literature, film, painting.”

 

Genres in film are like archetypes in psychology: “Genre can feel so original, even though there are ways in which it hasn’t changed as a series of ideas for decades.”

“The idea of supernatural presence has existed through almost the entire history of film,” he continues, searching for the exact words. “But what makes it feel fresh and original is a sense of unease or a sense of anxiety [as it] relates to something that is grounded in the real world.” Then, he asks: “What is the implication of having this fearsome, supernatural presence that is outside of our control – in society?”

“It will take years for us to recognize the way in which certain cinematic devices are a reflection of the time,” he admits. Even so, he is “tempted” to say that the reemergence of the horror genre has to do with “so much deep uncertainty about the world that we live in” that is akin to how “science fiction in the 50s reflects the anxiety about the idea of a nuclear world, a world that can end immediately.”

These cinematic elements are “a reflection of evolution – artists are embracing the cinema that they love … but are twisting that cinema, rewriting the language that we associate with that kind of style or genre.”  Cinematic development is a gradual, tentative process, and we can never be sure whether our views are tinted by preconceptions. But John Nein feels unambivalent about the fact that film art constantly and consistently presents us with representations of the essence of humanity, one way or another, whether we perceive it or not.