An animated flashback from Dawn Porter's "When A Witness Recants". Photo / Sundance Institute
On the ground at the last-ever Sundance Film Festival in Park City – before the festival moves to Boulder, Colorado – the air has been thick with nostalgia, the end-of-camp vibes out of control.
Men in their 60s and 70s have teared up talking about seeing their last screenings in Eccles Theatre, otherwise known as the Park City High School auditorium. Charli xcx, Steve Buscemi and Giancarlo Esposito have spoken at screenings about how honoured they are to be among the last to experience a premiere at the end of an era – the finality of it all giving each screening, each panel, each shuttle ride a heightened importance.
What didn’t change, though, was the movies, a motley lineup from voices familiar and new that resulted in some of the most lively sales Sundance has seen in years.
What should you, the excited moviegoer, look forward to? Here are the most electric films we caught at this year’s Sundance.
No one made a bigger splash this year than Olivia Wilde, whose third directorial feature, The Invite, sparked a feeding frenzy among film buyers the second the audience rose to give her a standing ovation. An overwhelmed Wilde wiped away tears.
The film is an uproarious chamber comedy reminiscent of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? – but with polyamory. Wilde and Seth Rogen star as a constantly warring couple who throw a dinner party for their upstairs neighbours (Edward Norton and Penélope Cruz), who may have come for something other than the lavish cheese plate. Variety reports A24 nabbed it for “north of US$12 million ($19.8m),” Wilde insisting it get a theatrical release.
The actor-director also capped off her terrific Sundance with another horny turn in Greg Araki’s I Want Your Sex as a button-pushing artist who turns her 22-year-old assistant (Cooper Hoffman) into her willing S&M sex muse.
The biggest word-of-mouth hit of this festival was Leviticus, a genuinely scary Australian horror take on conversion therapy that had everyone in my midnight screening clutching their armrests and muttering, “No, no, no!” and “Don’t do it, don’t do it, don’t do it!” In writer-director Adrian Chiarella’s wildly assured debut feature, Naim (Joe Bird) and Ryan (Stacy Clausen), two teenage boys in an isolated town, start experimenting with their undeniable attraction to one another while wrestling in an abandoned warehouse. But when word leaks, adults in their fundamentalist community bring in a “deliverance healer”. What follows is a wrenching supernatural take on the “curse” of queerness, as they’re each hunted down by a violent being that takes the form of the person they desire most. Guess who?
Honestly, it was the most touching love story I saw all festival. It got snatched up by Neon, the people who brought us The Substance. If you thought Heated Rivalry could use more gore and demonic possessions, this is the film for you.
To call Once Upon a Time in Harlem a documentary seems too simplistic. This film, a sensation at the festival, is more like a happening we just feel lucky to witness. In 1972, pioneering Black film-maker William Greaves threw a once-in-a-lifetime party at Duke Ellington’s townhouse, inviting the “living luminaries” of the Harlem Renaissance to have a joyous reunion and passionately debate the impact of the seminal period of black culture in the 1920s that they all shaped and lived through. It’s a joy to sit with photographer James Van der Zee, society editor Gerri Major, and 96-year-old actor Leigh Whipper as they tease each other, tell frank stories of racism and recite Langston Hughes poems from memory.
Greaves spent 50 years trying to figure out what to do with this footage, and died in 2014 before he could turn it into a film. His widow, Louise Archambault Greaves, continued the work until her death, and then Greaves’ son David and David’s daughter Liani finally brought it home. At the premiere, Moonlight director Barry Jenkins called it “one of the most moving things I’ve seen in my life”. (No distributor yet.)
Audiences don’t know yet how much they need the absurdist delights of Wicker, a sex-positive British period comedy from directors Eleanor Wilson and Alex Huston Fischer about an ostracised fisherwoman (Olivia Colman) who decides to take her lonely life in her own hands and pay a basket weaver (Peter Dinklage) to make her a husband. A month later, she walks into a chapel and marries a handsome fellow played by Alexander Skarsgård, only with straw hair and skin – and abs and marvellous pecs – made of woven reeds.
This raunchy romp will have you wondering about the mechanics of lots and lots of enthusiastic intercourse between a human wife and her “wicker husband”. But it also has some deeper messages about how one loving relationship can start a feminist revolution. A sale hasn’t yet been announced, but it’s widely seen as one of the festival’s big success stories alongside The Invite and Leviticus.
Rarely has a movie premiered at Sundance to as much universal consensus as Josephine, a haunting look at trauma through the eyes of an 8-year-old girl (newcomer Mason Reeves) who witnesses a brutal sexual assault that shapes her outlook on the world. Inspired by writer-director Beth de Araújo’s own experiences, the film stays centred on Josephine while simultaneously exploring the complex reactions of her parents (Gemma Chan and an outstanding Channing Tatum) as they struggle to guide their daughter back from an event from which she will never fully recover.
It left every audience member of my screening stunned, and won both the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award for US Dramatic. No distribution deal yet, but it’s certainly something a smart studio could use as an Oscars play.
Whatever you think you know of the 2022 knife attack that nearly took Salman Rushdie’s life, it cannot compare to witnessing intimate footage of his gaping wounds. Alex Gibney’s Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie hinges on footage captured by Rushdie’s wife, poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths, as she grapples with her own grief and anger while trying to cheer up and care for her husband, all while pulling off masterful cinematography. With sly humour and carefully chosen archival film clips, often referencing knives and eyes (Rushdie lost his right eye in the attack), Gibney takes us back to 1989 when the author went into hiding because of a fatwa against him for his novel The Satanic Verses – and then forward through Rushdie’s mind as he imagines calmly asking his attacker why he felt the need to stab him 15 times.
A remarkable portrait of love and how to keep your sense of humour after almost being killed for your beliefs, it struck a chord at its Sundance premiere, where the audience gave Rushdie two standing ovations. (No distributor yet.)
No film had me wanting to reach for popcorn more than Nuisance Bear, a documentary about polar bears in far northern Canada who’ve lost their fear of humans. Directors Gabriela Osio Vanden and Jack Weisman upend our notions of human-animal relationships by dropping us squarely in the perspective of the bears, who are pursued relentlessly for encroaching on towns that somehow expect them to stay away from landfills filled with tasty garbage. The first half plays out like The Fugitive, while the second half, told from the perspective of an Inuit population inundated with bears that white wildlife conservationists have let loose on their land, feels like a zombie movie.
It won the Grand Jury Prize for US Documentary and raises questions about who’s the real menace in this scenario. (No distributor yet.)
Many in the Mid-Atlantic may be familiar with the case of the Harlem Park Three, a trio of black teens – Alfred Chestnut, Andrew Stewart and Ransom Watkins – falsely accused in 1983 of murdering 14-year-old Baltimore high school student DeWitt Duckett over his coveted Georgetown Starter jacket. The tale of their exoneration in 2019 after 36 years in prison was detailed in a New Yorker article by Jennifer Gonnerman. Now it’s being revisited in When a Witness Recants, a powerful HBO documentary from director Dawn Porter and produced by author Ta-Nehisi Coates, who was an 8-year-old kid in Baltimore when the boys went to prison and has been obsessed with the case his entire life.
The injustices are maddening. Porter illustrates the timeline of events with striking black-and-white animation, and weaves in interviews with Ron Bishop, their friend, who lied on the stand to identify them. At the premiere, the audience wept as the men recounted all they’d lost behind bars: family members they’d never see again, the chance to be a father. This seems likely to spark the same furious debates as 2025’s The Perfect Neighbour.
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