I wrote this for my Mom to read, but you can read it, too. It’s important to write about events that happen very quickly so you don’t forget! This post is about the Sundance Film festival we attended in January 2020.
Table of Contents
Introduction
For those of you who don’t know, the Sundance Film Festival is a film festival that started in Sundance by Robert Redford (yes, he is still alive, we checked). It has since expanded to take place in Park City and Salt Lake City. I guess it was originally focussed on independent films, but has not expanded to include movies that really famous people star in in addition to the artsy independent films you might associate with the festival. You can look that up though, I don’t really know the facts about the origins. I just went and watched.
Anway, being Salt Lake City residents, Bae and I wanted to check it out this year. We were joined by Bae’s older sister, Hwashington, and her older sister’s fiance, Danielson. They were visiting from a part of Maryland that’s basically in DC.
Now let me tell you kids something important. You can’t just show up to Sundance and watch films. There are all these secret initiation steps you need to go through. It goes something like this:
- Figure out what pass you need to see movies and go to events given the expected number of people.
- Create an account with Sundance.
- Sign in to your account at some very specific time and date in October and purchase your pass.
- Forget everything about the rest of the process because you don’t gotta do nothing for 3 months.
- Remember that you have to sign in and select your movie tickets (if you did indeed purchase a 10 ticket package, like we each did) at some specific date and time in January
- Sign in on that specific time on that specific date and pick your 10 tickets.
- Now you are ready to go to Sundance once you figure out how the hell to navigate Park City when the city is at 8000% capacity.
- Enjoy the films!
The Festival In Park City
We courageously plowed through steps 1-6 thanks to Bae’s reading comprehension and Hwashington’s organizational spreadsheets. If you are disorganized heading into the ticket buying stage, you ain’t gonna make it.
Having been to Park City many times we figured it would be an absolute shit show during the festival. Therefore, we only planned to go there one day/night to watch films. We ended up going there on Friday January 24th, which was the first full day of the festival. The thing lasts 10 days total, or something.
The cool thing about buying the pass we bought is that we each got a “credential”, which is what you need to get into all the cool lounges and stuff. We got to go to these lounges in Park City and watch panels of various films speak to us. Specifically, we went to a panel with the director and cast of the movie “Worth”, which Bae and Hwashington saw later on. That movie is based on these two people who were in charge of figuring out how to distribute the 9/11 aid fund after it was passed by Congress shortly after the attacks.
We also went to a panel entitled “Woman on the Front Lines”, or something like that. It was a panel of 5 women filmmakers. There was some great discussion in this panel, but first I need to tell you some of the more…interesting things that happened. First off, the room was not at all set up properly. It was some sort of art show room…maybe? There were chairs distributed in the back corners of the room with a ton of standing room in front of them. So we just piled in this standing room in front of a ton of people sitting down who could no longer see thanks to us. We had to do it, though, as that’s where we were herded to. No escape. Then, the dude introducing the panel kept trying to get people to move around so that there was some sort of “path” for the “fire marshal”. I can tell you right now that we were easily exceeding the holding capacity of that room. Also, I know there was no fire marshall, because at the beginning of the panel this poor girl fainted and ain’t nobody useful come and help (she ended up being just fine).
Anyway, the panel was interesting, and two things really struck me. First off, there was a Saudi Arabian woman who had made a film for the festival. I would love to hear more about her back story. Secondly, there was a woman from Africa, and in one response to a question, she led with, “I come from a place where animals are depicted more often than the people…”. Yup. The only movie that immediately comes to mind “portraying” people of sub-Saharan Africa is “Ace Ventura 2: When Nature Calls”. Something to think about it.
After some of that it was time for Bae and I to see our first Sundance movie!
The Earth is Blue as an Orange
Now Park City is a pretty small place. There ain’t many roads, so we didn’t even bother driving into town. We parked about 10 miles outside of town and took the ski bus in. Apparently, Park City has a pretty extensive bus system, and it’s all free. I picked up one of the transportation guides and studied it intently to make sure we knew all our bus options at all times. I must have been the only one. SO many people were getting on busses all day, and then asking the driver, “DOES THIS BUS GO TO KIMBALL JUNCTION?”, or, “DOES THIS BUS GO TO TOWN?!?!?”. Man, read the booklet and figure it the fuck out. Those poor bus drivers probably lost their got damn minds.
To see our first movie we had to take a bus back outside of town a bit, then take another designated shuttle to get to the theater. This trip was flawless and Bae and I got to the movie exactly when we wanted to.
When you do Sundance you’ll learn that waiting in line is just how the game works. For the busy movies in Park City you definitely want to arrive close to an hour before the film starts to make sure you are able to sit next to your squad. If you don’t have a squad, then you don’t really need to get there early unless you really prefer a certain part of the theater. The bigger the squad, the earlier you should get there…especially because they allegedly have a very strict “No Seat Saving” policy. Remember this “policy” for later.
This film, “The Earth is Blue as an Orange”, was decent. It was film that followed a family in Ukraine making a movie about what their lives have been like living in the war zone portion of Ukraine since Russia started fucking with Ukraine in 2014. While nowadays there isn’t a ton of violence, I guess in the past some shells exploded close to their home, even knocking down a wall of their neighbor’s house. To sort of confront this trauma, the family makes a movie about what things have been like. Most people in their city left when war broke out. The film focussed on the mom and the eldest sister. There were…5 kids in total, I think. No husband. The film focussed on the family making their film (so meta, right?!?!?) as well as the journey of the eldest daughter to film school. She got into a good film school in Kiev, so that was pretty dope.
The movie definitely offered a nice perspective in how some people are living right now in Ukraine. After the movie, the director, a young Ukranian woman, and the eldest daughter from the film were around for questions, so that was cool. The mom was not there because….she was pregnant again.
I did enjoy the film, but found some of the shots a little insufferable. There were many shots that just sort of beat your head in with symbolism, with the general theme being something like, “these are great people, but the war is just not letting them reach their full potential”. Some examples are a shot of a helium-filled balloon stuck in a tree, or a car not being able to get up an icy hill. Those things took me out of the movie a bit because it made it seem like it was made as part of some Film School 301 assignment. “Remember class, never forget to convey symbolism in your shot. Your assignment is to make a film with 3 examples of the symbology of some common theme”. That’s just me being picky, but I’m allowed to be picky because I’ve been to Sundance now.
The film did inspire me a bit. There was nothing in this film that some friends and I couldn’t do. Obviously we would have to come up with a great idea like this Ukranian woman did, but it didn’t feel like the technical aspects were that far out of reach (besides living in a war zone, obviously).
After the film it was a SHIT SHOW to try to take the busses back to Park City to meet up with Hwashington and Danielson (we all had planned to see different films, for the most part). They had been hanging out watching more panels. It took us forever to get on a bus that wasn’t full, then another forever to get back to town. Lyft/Uber drivers along with dumbasses who thought they could park in Park City (don’t let the name fool you) had just totally clogged the roads and fucked the busses.
When we finally got back to town, we immediately went to eat some food. We lucked out and were able to get a table at a bar by walking up to a table right as people were leaving it. Luck had changed for the better after the traffic shitshow. After dinner, we drank free beer at the Acura lounge and watched some band called Johnnyswim play. They are apparently pretty famous, very Christian, and actually had a few decent songs. The 3 of us then left Danielson to watch his late night scary movie, and we headed home. Don’t worry, he made it back to our house some time in the night. Danielson said the film was alright, but apparently the director stood up at the beginning of the film, introduced it, then said, “I hope you enjoy the twist at the end!” Lol, seriously?
Ironbark
So Park City was exactly the shit show we expected. Since we’re really smart, we planned on watching the rest of the movies in Salt Lake City. The only movie that all 4 of us went to was this movie “Ironbark”. It was a much higher budget movie than the Ukranian movie, starring Benedict Cumberbatch! That dude really is a next-level actor. He’s able to portray so much emotion without using many words, and it’s pretty chilling to see his performances in serious movies.
This movie is based on real events that happened during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Apparently some Russian dude high up the food chain wanted to leak the Russian-Cuban missile strategy to the Americans so that the two countries didn’t end up going nuclear. To do this, he makes first contact by giving a package to two American students in Russia. The Americans and British spy people then get together and find a guy to make contact with the Russian. They choose this British businessman named Greville Wynne to be the courier.
I don’t want to give away too much of the movie because I think everyone should go see it, but it was funny to hear what the writer had to say about this movie afterwards during the Q and A. Basically, there was almost no source material for the movie. The Russian guy existed, Greville Wynne existed, and the secrets of the Cuban Missile plan were indeed fed to the Americans through this connection. However, all of the details of the movie were basically just made up. Greville Wynne wrote some books about the event, but apparently they contained so much information that was easily verified as false. Essentially, Greville wrote a book where he was the main character and some sort of super spy. Talk about delusions of grandeur.
Solid film, though, and as I said, Benedict was fantastic in it. The Georgian guy who played the Russian spy was also a very good actor.
Boys State
This film I watched solo. When I read that this film was in the lineup for Sundance, I absolutely had to see it! Boys State was something I did in high school, and I can only describe it as “strange”.
So what is Boys State? Well, many people have asked me lately, and it turns out it’s really hard to remember and explain. The basic idea is the “top” high school juniors from around your state get selected to participate in this summer camp for a week. At this camp you are to participate in a fake government where you pass laws, run for office, and just be political. At Virginia Boys State in 2008, which I attended, I remember we also had the governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, and other politicians speak to us. I guess we were all supposed to be leaders, or something. It is sponsored by the American Legion, and was set up in the 30s, no doubt as some sort of counter to the Hitler Youth.
The film really jogged my memory, but to sort of illustrate how strange the experience was, let me tell you the only things I remembered about the experience before watching this film. First off, I hardly remember any of the learning government aspect, which is apparently the point. I went to this thing with 6 other boys from my school, all of whom were friends of mine. Some were even my really good friends. As soon as we showed up to Liberty University (RED FLAG, RED FLAG), we were all separated from each other. All boys are divided into something like 16 different “cities”. My city was Henry City, supposedly named after Patrick Henry.
I remember the other boys in my city were pretty cool and we all got along. My roommate was a really smart band dude from somewhere outside of Richmond. I remember playing him this Meshuggah song that was notorious for being in some impossible time signature, and he fucking told me the exact time signature. He called it “Five and a quarter, four”, which lines up well with the 21/16 often associated with guitar tabs of this particular song. It blew my mind he could do that then, but it blows my mind even more now. He figured that shit out almost immediately. I wonder what he’s doing now. His name was Travis.
Anway, all I really remember doing is marching up and down the campus with our city and trying to earn points for our city. The city with the most points at the end got a prize, or something. I remember we had a really good chant that was started by the person we elected major, Joe Frazier. I remember thinking he could have been a reincarnation of the actual Joe Frazier, and not just because he was black. He looked like he could knock somebody the fuck out if he had to, but was such a nice guy you know that would be the last resort. The chant was he would say, “Hen-who?!?!?!?!” and then we would respond, “Hen-ree!!!!”. It was by far the best chant out of all the other cities. Too bad we didn’t win a prize, at least I don’t think we did.
But I digress…the point is that it was a whirlwind week where the government stuff could not have been farther from the focus of the week. The only things I learned about government was that in Virginia, the Governor and Lieutenant Governor could be from different parties, and that politics is all about wheelin’ and dealin’. “Hey, you guys vote for our land commissioner candidate and we’ll vote for your piece of legislation”. The reality is probably that that may have been the most important lesson one could learn about American politics, and once you begin to master this, you will become the perfect “groomed” politician, courtesy of the American Legion.
The film followed 4 boys who went to Boys State in Texas. You might imagine this would not be as diverse as a Boys State in Virginia, and you would be correct. At first, I really didn’t like the film. The beginning made it seem like all boys take this Boys State thing very seriously. The truth is 80% of us are doing this ONLY to make our college apps looks better (as we were told), so when we were instructed to participate in some wacky fake government, we only played the game so hard. The kids in the film were EXTREMELY driven to make their mark at Boys State. I bet there were some kids like this at my Boys State, but I wouldn’t have known.. I was way too busy laughing a metric fuckload at things like the display at the Liberty University “Biology” department that tried to disprove evolution, or something.
The filmmakers were not dumb in who they picked to follow with the cameras. There was a kid who was the son of Mexican (?) immigrants. He was like the “ideal” candidate, wanting to do what was right for the people of his party. He reminded me a lot of Bernie Sanders or Beto O’Rourke. Yes, I know the latter looked like an idiot this past election run, but he was all about going door to door to actually know his constituents back when he was a congressperson. That’s pretty cool, and what this kid did at Boys State. Then there was a black kid from Chicago named Rene whom they followed. This dude was absolutely hilarious.
So those were like the two liberal minority kids. Then there were two white kids. One was a kid that I’m pretty sure others would consider a “stereotypical Texan”, but knowing a lot of Texans, I think this is way harder to pin down than people think. I would say that there are 3 versions of a stereotypical Texan, and the only thing they have in common is that none of them drive particularly fast. The fourth kid was like baby Ronald Reagan. He realllllly wanted to go into politics. It turns out he was missing both legs and had a bum arm. That didn’t end up being super relevant to the story, but I’ll just say it for completeness.
So the movie followed these four kids through their time at Boys State. The funny thing about the film for me is that I had apparently forgotten about THE MOST IMPORTANT PART about Boys State. When you show up, you are put into a political party. You are either a Federalist of a Nationalist. This is different from your City. Each City had an even split of Federalists and Nationalist. Each party had to come up with their own platform, then pick their candidates for all the elected positions via primaries, then run against the other party. It’s so funny that I forgot all about this because it’s kind of the point of Boys State. These kids were taking this part so seriously, too.
Since I’ve already written a ton, I don’t want to say too much more about the film. Basically, the film underscores the hyperpartisianship that exists in politics today (maybe it’s always existed!), and this hyperpartisianship can even manifest itself in this Boys State experiment. I wonder what it looks like for Girls State? Maybe they don’t adopt a win for party at all costs mentality?
Do watch the film if you can, it is very interesting and the message of the film is quite good, I think. The director, editor, and 3 of the boys answered questions at the end of the film. I’ll save this discussion for my segment written at the end of this post entitled, “White People Say and Do the Darndest Things”.
Blast Beat
This movie was my top movie by far. It’s about a Colombian family who moves to America to avoid paying extortion money. It is a family of 4: dad, mom, and two brothers. The older brother, who is about to be a senior in high school, loves death metal and really wants to work for NASA. Remind you of anyone? Yes, I know I’m not Colombian, but I do sort of speak Spanish.
This movie you just need to watch, but let me tell you some awesome parts about the movie. First off, during some of the scene transitions, the film played LOUD AS FUCK death metal. A couple times, people got up and left because it was so loud. These were easily my favorite parts of the film.
Also, the older brother has a little shrine where he keeps things that are most dear to him. In the shrine is the album “Sound of Perseverance” by Death. This is easily in my top 10 favorite albums of all times, and I’ve listened to it consistently since 2007 or so. I asked the director why they included this particular album, and sadly did not get the answer I wanted to hear. “Well, obviously we wanted an iconic metal album, but the reality is we only had so much to work with since we needed this law agency in London to get us the permission for thing. We were also playing with the red theme in his room.” Not sure what I was expecting, but it would have been cool if he just stared at me and said, “Because that’s the best album ever made ever. We should have made the entire movie just multiple shots of that artwork and the album as the soundtrack.”
Go see this film.
Assassins
This film was definitely a dark horse for me. It was about the assassination of Kim-Jon-Un’s (I dunno how you spell his name, the new chubby dictator of North Korea) half brother. I remember hearing about this in the news, but I did not remember the associated story. It turns out the story actually just finished several months ago!
I don’t think I want to write much for this film because I think it’s best if you go in knowing little about the story. I will say that someone asked a great question at the end. They wanted to know when editing began as the events of the end of the film had only happened a few months ago. Apparently they had indeed charged in and started editing like a year ago. I dunno how many of you guys make films on the reg like me, but the thought of trying to make a film before you have the full story is insane to me. It turned out really well, too.
White People Say and Do the Darndest Things
Woke. It’s a term that means a lot these days, especially amongst the millenials in academia. I’m not gonna lie, when this whole movement first started, I didn’t care much for it. Looking back, I think it’s because people assumed I was automatically “un-woke” and felt that I needed to learn about cultural sensitivity, microaggressions, etc. I also won’t lie and say that I definitely did need to learn some of that stuff. HOWEVER, people telling me these things often had no friends who were non-white, and were just speaking off of Internet talking points. I’ve always had a lot friends who happen to be non-white because I lived in many places, and my Mama always said to be nice to everyone. So I guess I sort of took offense due to the lack of practicing what thoust was preaching.
ANYWAY, enough about me being woke before woke was cool. At Sundance, we witnessed SO many people who were totally unwoke and just all around ignorant of things that happen outside of America. Like, I now no longer fault those people for assuming I was less woke than them. The woke level of some of these people at the festival was all the way down with whatever weird sea cucumber shits live in the Marianas Trench.
This leads me to write about some things we saw/heard in the festival in my final segment of this post, “White People Say and Do the Darndest Things”. I will try to put them in chronological order as I remember them.
The Ukraine Geography Expert
Bae overheard this on the bus after our viewing of “The Earth is Blue as an Orange”: “I know geography of Ukraine really well, and that family wasn’t even in one of the bad spots!!!” This was probably just a chance for this young white woman to show off her knowledge of geography (wow so goddamn amazing, you look at maps), but the horrors of war was such a secondary theme in this movie. Nothing was presented as “look at how bad it is for them!!!”. It was a mainly observational piece where the message was, “look at how this family uses film making to cope with growing up in a modern day war zone”. Anyway, silly as fuck.
The Ironbark Seat Saver
So this young woman was technically asian, but we’ll put her in this section anyway. As I mentioned, this was the only movie that all 4 of us went to see. We thought we were in the top 10% of the line, but it turns out you can spend more money to get some sort of pass that gets you in early. A lot of people who wanted to see this film had those passes. Therefore, when we got into the theater, it was a total shit show, and we could barely find any 4 seats in a row. It was also hard because EVERYONE saves seats, too, so what a fucken pain in the ass. All those “NO SEAT SAVING” signs don’t mean a goddamn thing. So as we are walking out to check the upstairs, we see this volunteer removing these “reserved” seat signs. We ask her, “Hey can we sit here now?” Before we got an answer, this college student comes barreling through, pushes Ikumi out of the way, and starts putting jackets on seats. “Sorry, I need 8 of these seats!!” Maybe it was 6. Whatever. In the confusion, we lost the other side of the row to some older couple that stumbled in my pure luck. Writing about it now, we really should have just thrown all those jackets on the floor and punched the would be seat saver in the face. Cooler heads prevailed. Fortunately the movie was amazing.
I’m so Woke I Hiss
Even though the movie had nothing to do with masculinity, toxic or otherwise, most people asked questions about the masculinity portrayed by the boys in Boys State. First off, when a man asked a question about it (don’t remember the specifics, but it was innocuous enough), people in the room hissed. I did not understand why at all. If he had said something like, “I like how you boys were really chanting and hollering and doing pushups!!!!”, then I could see the hissing. But I think he was just asking the kids about what they did for the rest of the time. Anyway, when one of the kids answered the question, more people hissed. I just did not understand this exchange at all. It was like a contest where when someone says the word “masculinity”, you gotta hiss. It was bizarre and quite frankly, rude as fuck. This bothered me. A lot.
That’s Something Trump Would Say!!!
Also at Boys State, one of the boys in the film who was at the Q and A was addressing a follow-up question to this “masculinity” question that was hissed at for no reason, and he tried to explain that you get max 5 hours of sleep per night (this is definitely what I remember!!!!). Also, a lot of time is spent just marching and standing around (also what I remember!!!!), so boys end up just yelling and doing stupid shit. Nothing in the film was anything close to harmful. I know I’m just a cisgender white male shitlord, so maybe I don’t know what’s harmful, but trust me, there was nothing there. Anyway, this kid said something like, “It’s actually boys being boys in this case”, and someone behind me screamed, “That sounds like something Trump would say!!!!!!!!”. While that’s technically correct, there was no reason to bully this kid who was a boy at Boys State. Idk, it was just a shitty thing to do to bully this particular kid, who probably had been bullied throughout his life and knows damn well what toxic masculinity is. This was the kid who had no legs. It was like people in the audience had to be mean to him because he was like the “dirty republican politician” in the film, but the audience forgot that it was a film and that he was a person. A very young person at that.
The Former Marine
So in Boys State and a film Danielson watched, someone, perhaps the same guy, started their questions with, “I’m a former marine…”. You know, that’s cool and all, but I just don’t understand what we are supposed to take away from that. Just ask your question, please.
Some Movies are Just Movies
This one is a minor one, but someone asked the filmmakers of Blast Beat, which is not a true story, where the kids are now. The filmmakers pretended to not understand the question and said something general about their own families. This one was sort of just more cringey than anything else. Similarly, in Assassins, someone asked a question that was pretty clearly explained in the film. Effin’ White People, man.
Immigrants Are People, Too
This was one of my personal favorites. Many people really liked Blast Beat. It was a good story with a happy ending, but not like a happy Disney ending. It was not perfect, nor necessarily ideal, but people mostly got what they wanted. Anyway, this woman said something like, “You know, we don’t usually see immigrant stories like this. I was surprised to see that they had a perfectly good job and life in Colombia, but had decided to come to America for not too terrible a reason, well the extortion money was bad, but they weren’t actively being threatened or anything. It’s just interesting to see a story like this where we see that they were skilled laborers in their home country, so it must have been hard for them to come to America and paint.” So let’s address the first issue. Having to pay extortion money is really bad. Of course you would want to leave a country where you were in danger of that happening on the reg, then it actually fucking happening!!!! Now the second issue. Yes people who come to America often have REAL jobs in their home country. You know why? BECAUSE THEY ARE REAL PEOPLE. Someone should have smacked this woman in the mouth. Also, the fact that she used, “we” in her question was insufferable. Don’t loop me into your ignorance.
Why haven’t I heard about Chechnya?!?!?!?
This one is second-hand as I did not attend the film, Danielson did. The film was entitled, “Welcome to Chechnya”, and it was about how gay people get murdered all the time for being gay. Now, I admittedly don’t know much about this situation, but I do know Chechyna is run by a dictator installed by Russia who hates the fuck out of gay people and kills them. What I didn’t know is that it’s often the families of the gay people who end up killing them. Look it up. It’s brutal as fuck. Anyway, during the Q and A, some woman asked, “How have I not heard of this?!?!? It seems like this should be all over the mainstream media! I don’t understand!”. I mean, you have to fucking read, I guess. Also, this is totally on the mainstream media pretty frequently. She probably just tunes her brain off when something she doesn’t know about comes on the TV. I know it’s hard to care about all issues all the time, but if you aren’t aware of something, don’t get mad at the media (yes, ok fine, sometimes they are at fault). Get mad at yourself for not paying enough attention and seeking out actual journalism.