Sundance Film Festival returns in physical form pregnant with possibilities

Even before the pandemic, the Sundance Film Festival seemed an unlikely proposition: 10 days in the frigid cold of a costly mountain resort town in Utah . . . to watch movies? But this storied launching pad for US independent cinema remains a fixture at the top of the cultural calendar. Here a number of notable films and film-makers will begin their 2023 journey, premiering and hopefully percolating out to theatres with a little help from an ambitious distributor.

Last year, in the incredible case of the Sundance selection CODA, that path led all the way to the Academy Award for Best Picture. That was a boon for a festival forced to stream its movies for the second year running because of pandemic restrictions. For the hundred-plus features that will premiere this year, both in-person and online, the Sundance imprimatur remains relevant, especially for standing out in an era of entertainment glut.

Some titles boast ready-made pedigrees. Cat Person, starring Nicholas Braun and Emilia Jones, adapts the infamous New Yorker story of a sour romance, while Julia Louis-Dreyfus plays a disgruntled novelist in Nicole Holofcener’s You Hurt My Feelings. New generations of directors step into the spotlight, such as Raven Jackson with All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, which is backed by buzzy distributor A24 and executive-produced by Barry Jenkins; and Alice Englert with Bad Behaviour, which stars Jennifer Connelly as a former child actor.

But some of the greatest fun at Sundance comes from the discovery of unsung talent. Take for example Animalia, the debut feature of Casablanca-born director Sofia Alaoui. The premise finds a pregnant Moroccan woman, Itto (newcomer Oumaïma Barid), navigating the wealthy family she has married into. She faces a fathomless new challenge when she stays home one day and a mysterious frenzy grips the countryside. Stranded alone on a lakeside estate, she must pick her way through valleys and villages in search of safety. What at first resembles a climate-change cataclysm slowly reveals itself to be something otherworldly.

Filmed in the panoramic landscapes of the Atlas Mountains, Animalia offers a beguiling mix of survival drama, class-conscious observation and mind-expanding science fiction with a spiritual tinge. One kind of Sundance pleasure is a film that both impresses you with what it’s doing and immediately makes you wonder what the director will do next. As Itto picks her way through tradition-minded hinterlands as a woman alone, Alaoui creates a genuinely unpredictable sense of suspense, a “something in the air” that leaves the viewer hanging on each minute.

Besides fiction finds, another hallmark of Sundance is its annual showcase of documentaries. The festival has a demonstrated weakness for biographical subjects (comprising more than half the slate in some years), which lend the easy boost of name recognition. That means films this year on the Indigo Girls, Brooke Shields, Little Richard and Judy Blume — but also on video artist Nam June Paik, journalists in Ukraine and transgender sex workers in New York’s Meatpacking District.

One doc highlight arrives early with the opening-day selection Kim’s Video from directors David Redmon and Ashley Sabin. The succinct title derives from the glorious video stores opened in Manhattan by one-time dry cleaner Yongman Kim, beginning in 1987. Most famed for its locations on Avenue A and on St Mark’s Place — the latter a multistorey bazaar christened “Mondo Kim’s” — this was a New York institution, a heaving library of auteur, cult, genre, avant-garde, bootleg and otherwise rare movies. Redmon and Sabin begin by sketching out the history with awed voiceover and clips, assisted by former clerks including film-makers Robert Greene and Alex Ross Perry.

Then the film veers into delightfully mind-boggling territory to follow the bizarre trajectory of the Kim’s Video collection. When the stores finally closed down, the VHS tapes and DVDs were shipped in bulk to the historic town of Salemi, Sicily. At this point the documentary’s style plunges into investigative cinema vérité, as the film-makers hit the streets of Salemi to seek answers from politicians, policemen and a shady character or two.

The precise nature of the film’s twists and turns are best left unrevealed, but suffice to say that Kim’s Video offers an opening-day dose of movie love and moxie — a satisfying overture for the latest edition of Sundance.

Festival to January 29, sundance.org