Festivals

Offering rich historical material, All Light, Everywhere, Theo Anthony's chilling documentary deals with the increasing presence of sophisticated and subtle surveillance in our everyday lives. World premiering at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, it was honored with a special jury prize in nonfiction experimentation.

Winner of the 2021 Sundance Documentary competition, Summer of Soul, can perhaps best be described as an engrossing history lesson with an irresistible beat. The documentary marks the directing debut of Ahmir Questlove Thompson and it takes us back to the torrid summer of 1969, when a public concert series, collectively dubbed the Harlem Cultural Festival, took place in Harlem’s Mount Morris Park.

As if the pandemic wasn’t enough to worry us, now we have to be concerned about an asteroid on a trajectory to hit Earth. At least that’s the premise of Zoe Lister-Jones’ comedy How It Ends.

Eight for Silver is a unique reinvention of the horror genre that offers up werewolves, gypsy curses and old English elitism. Written and directed by Sean Ellis, who has a fine time playing with archetypical tropes and at times manages to both physical disgust and emotionally engage in the space of a few frames.

The scholastic pressures facing academically motivated, high-achieving teenagers are as great as they’ve ever been, a fact engagingly chronicled by director Debbie Lum in Try Harder!, a recent world premiere and U. S.

If you have never had the pleasure to escape to France, Ma Belle, My Beauty, introduces us first to Bertie and Fred (Lucien Guignard and Idella Johnson) who live in an exquisite farmhouse in the south of France. Recently married musicians, the couple are about to depart on a tour; that is if Fred can transition his wife out of her depressed state.

In Knocking, a psychological thriller by Swedish director Frida Kempff, Molly (Cecilia Milocco) has been discharged from a mental institution, and her life is set to begin when she moves into a new apartment. But just as a heatwave sets in, her habitat turns menacing.

The closing credits, featuring some of the names of the filmmakers juxtaposed on a cave wall, beneath the sound of a crackling fire, speak in a powerfully direct and simple way to the need for storytelling, which is long hardwired into mankind. So, is this director Rodney Ascher’s sly way of acknowledging that his latest film, A Glitch in the Matrix, is itself an exercise in flamboyant narrative indulgence, despite its nonfiction roots? If so, it’s perhaps too cute by half, but also emblematic of the fitful engagement of this intellectually playful yet ultimately frustrating documentary, which unfolds as a mixture of epistemological surveying and philosophical spitballing.

The Guit brothers, Harpo and Lenny, are bringing their directorial debut movie, Mother Schmuckers, to the 2021 virtual edition of Sundance as the first ever Belgian entry to the famed Midnight Section devoted to genre and extreme cinema. Set in Brussels, the story follows two brothers, Issachar (Maxi Delmelle) and Zabulon (Harpo Guit – also co-director), both in their twenties, who have not quite emotionally evolved into manhood.

The ongoing fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic has forced significant changes to the 2021 edition of the Sundance Film Festival, along with the rest of the world. But for the fourth consecutive year, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) presented its panel this year titled: “Women Breaking Barriers: An Industry Shift” panel – in an exclusively virtual presentation on Saturday, January 30.