2020 Sundance Film Festival

Every year, the Sundance Film Festival has one big controversial documentary on their schedule. Just remember Alex Gibney’s anti-Scientology film Going Clear, and last year’s Leaving Neverland, a multiple-part HBO doc about Michael Jackson’s pedophilia.

 In August 2017, Swedish journalist Kim Wall was brutally murdered and dismembered by self-proclaimed Danish inventor Peter Madsen in his homemade submarine. At the time Australian documentarian Emma Sullivan was following Madsen in order to tell a completely different story about the eccentric self-made inventor’s Rocket-Madsen’s Space Laboratory.

After surprising the world with his stellar performance as Pablo Escobar in Narcos, for which he received a Golden Globes nomination in 2016, Wagner Moura disappeared as an actor until last September, when The Wasp Network, not still released commercially, was shown in Venice. So it is a big surprise to see him in his first leading role in English in Sergio, a Netflix production that was part of the Premieres program at the Sundance Film Festival, where he also was a member of the International Jury.

Writer and director Veronica Chen presented her feature film debut, Smokers Only, at Sundance in 2002. Now, the Argentinian filmmaker is back with her film High Tide – a film about female sexuality, class, and power.

In the early 1990s, children’s cable network Nickelodeon, seeking animated programming different from the medium’s traditional powerhouse providers, opened itself up to outside pitches and turned to a hyperactive, highly imaginative upstart, John Kricfalusi, giving him a shot with a six-episode order for Ren & Stimpy, a TV show about an emotionally imbalanced chihuahua and his good-natured but dimwitted feline best friend. When the series premiered in August 1991, it was an out-of-the-gate smash hit, breaking rating records, immediately challenging The Simpsons (then just entering its third season) for domination among animation fans, and eventually raking in, at its peak, several billion dollars in merchandising per year.

The Hollywood Foreign Press Association sponsored the third annual Women Breaking Barriers panel at the Sundance Film Festival, which this year focused on “How Far Have We Come”.  A way to take stock of the changes and progress in inclusivity since the industry was roiled by the #metoo movement, it was a fitting debate on the backdrop of a festival in which this year 44% of the films were directed by women.

Since the onset of the Arab Spring, the Sundance Film Festival has been a platform for in-depth documentaries. From Egypt, Libya, Syria, Iraq, and the Yemen, audiences have been taken behind the news headlines and introduced to the people who risk their lives facing brutal regimes for freedom and democracy.

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For the third year in a row,  Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) hosted the panel Women Breaking Barriers: How Far Have We Come? at the SundanceTV Headquarters. Moderated by HFPA member Elisabeth Sereda, this year's panelists represented diverse aspects of the entertainment industry: actress Kerry Washington, director and filmmaker Julie Taymor, actress, producer, writer, and director Frankie Shaw, and filmmaker and #1 New York Times Bestselling author Lisa Jackson.

In recent years, Sundance has drawn quite a few politicians and activists to the snow-capped mountains of Park City, most notably Al Gore and Ruth Bader Ginsberg, the former a two-time producer of environmental documentaries, the latter the subject of a doc on her life. This year it was none lesser than the former First Lady, New York Senator, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who flew in from New York (on a commercial flight, not private), to promote Hillary, a four-part, four-hour documentary that will start airing on Hulu in March.