This year, Sundance is returning to the ski slopes. But happily, it will be in one of its most accessible forms ever because it already has the virtual infrastructure from a couple of years that were exclusively online: A hybrid online and offline distribution strategy that eventually makes its films available to everyone in the United States with an internet connection. The festival is promoting the same kinds of independent films you’d expect, but with a much greater interest in underrepresented communities (Deaf filmmakers and Indigenous filmmakers first come to mind), boundary-pushing multimedia, and a sizable slate of international cinema. Sundance has gone from 72 feature films in 2021 to 82 in 2022 to over a hundred in 2023.
With the help of some sneak peeks (and a few that are simply too excitingly filled with talent to ignore), Paste has been able to identify a few films that shouldn’t be missed while the festival is being covered remotely through the publication of reviews from January 19 to 29. You can discover the complete schedule here if these catch your attention and you’d like to learn more about them, or if you just want to watch the onslaught of movies that might soon take over Film Twitter conversations for the next year and a half.
The following are Paste’s top ten movies for the 2023 Sundance Film Festival:
Bad Press
Is there anyone in our country who is more despised and misunderstood than journalists and Indigenous people? The response is affirmative—Indigenous journalists exist. Bad Press, a compelling documentary by Rebecca Landsberry-Baker and Joe Peeler, finds hard, general truths about the relationship between the people and the reporters who serve them and the ease with which those being reported upon manipulate that relationship. It does this by focusing intensely on Mvskoke Media and the Muscogee Nation. The political and journalistic non-fiction book Bad Press, which is about a location and people near and dear to my heart, is fantastic. It accomplishes what small-scale films excel at and have been doing since Harlan County, USA: uncovering the universal in the particular and the subjective in the ideological. Whereas Landsberry-Baker and Peeler discovered vigilance, accountability, and the institutions in place to discourage both at the centre of a Muscogee newsroom, Barbara Kopple discovered feminism, solidarity, tradition, and rampant, violent corporate greed at the centre of her Kentucky miner’s strike.
Fancy Dance
Fancy Dance has a pervading dryness. The Seneca-Cayuga Reservation in northeastern Oklahoma is equally as dusty as the rest of the region, but not in terms of climate. People who live there see shocking injustices at a systematic pace that seem predetermined because they are so generationally familiar. Mundane. The only one who feels any urgency when a lady vanishes is her sister, Jax (Lily Gladstone). Even Jax’s niece, Roki (Isabel Deroy-Olson), who is now in his care, doesn’t fully understand the ramifications. Filmmaker Erica Tremblay follows the women’s quest with understated charm and an everyday seriousness, navigating their search amid a culture that would prefer they sit down, shut up, and accept that this just Happens Sometimes. The coming-of-age investigation in Fancy Dance is the visual equivalent of a slow-motion chase, closely captured from the shoulder, right next to the wrecked pickup forcing the pursuing police to reevaluate their objectives.
In My Mother’s Skin
A fanciful horror with the spirit of Guillermo del Toro and the violence of Joko Anwar comes from Filipino director Kenneth Dagatan. A child’s unexpected meeting with a cunning fairy, intricate and elegant in her insectile outfit, is combined with a World War II backdrop in In My Mother’s Skin to create a really unsettling midnight story. It is full of subtext and conflicting cultural imagery, as well as body horror, uncertainty about God, and enough luscious flesh to satisfy even the most fervent gorehounds.
Infinity Pool
Possessor director Brandon Cronenberg is following it up with a film that takes a scathing look at the creative process and all the consequences it has. Infinity Pool, starring two of the hottest genre actors right now in Alexander Skarsgrd and Mia Goth, aims to bring the concept of body horror back to the forefront in the greatest possible way—with lots of gross, uncomfortable conflicts of personal and professional identity.
Kokomo City
Four Black transgender workers speak out from a radical, on-the-ground pulpit in one of the most intriguing non-fiction entries to Sundance this year. Kokomo City lifts the curtain to unveil four stars: Daniella Carter, Dominique Silver, Liyah Mitchell, and Koko Da Doll, putting transphobia both within and without Black society on display. Actually, I’ll go with five. We laugh, weep, and commiserate with women whose experiences and perspectives are only outweighed by their personalities as director D. Smith, a trans musician making her feature film debut, keeps the lively chats and righteously angry monologues barreling forward in magnificent black-and-white.
Magazine Dreams
If all this article had to say was “Jonathan Majors,” it should be enough to convince you to buy. Jonathan Majors, really. Elijah Bynum provides him with a part that is as meaty as his talent warrants: that of a tormented bodybuilding fanatic whose outer physical perfection betrays a suffering mental health condition and a physique that can’t support these activities. The implications of this topic are clear to anyone who has even a passing familiarity with bodybuilding forums and the online culture they helped to establish, and Majors looks set up for a repulsive, dramatic turn. He should put down the movies for a moment and focus on acting in this situation.
Mamacruz
The beginning of what Mamacruz’s look at a woman’s third-quarter life crisis has to offer is a spectacular performance from Kiti Mánver. All the symbolic dominoes fall into place as a result of a grandmother’s sexual (re)awakening in a close-knit Catholic community, but director Patricia Ortega topples them with her endearing charm, unreserved sensuality, and heartfelt honesty. Mamacruz makes the most of its lusty matriarch and is a lively and charming character study.
Polite Society
Creator of We Are Lady Parts Nida Manzoor makes her big screen debut with a genre-defying celebration that includes heists, weddings, martial arts fights, and more. Polite Society is simultaneously referred to be “Austenesque” and said to have borrowed part of its exuberant tonal blend from Bollywood. Indeed, that is the law.
Run Rabbit Run
Run Rabbit Run is a taut psychological thriller with matrilineal elements that relies on Sarah Snook. And for something like this to rest on, those shoulders are pretty darn good. If it tells you anything, Elisabeth Moss was replaced by Snook in the lead role. If it tells you anything else, the fact that the director Daina Reid was nominated for an Emmy for her work on The Handmaid’s Tale should. The film’s credentials go well beyond its problems, and dang it, I absolutely adore it when the past reappears in a story.
The Tuba Thieves
I could tell you that The Tuba Thieves’ account of a ridiculous crime—a wave of band programme thefts throughout Los Angeles—was a fascinating documentary that was as bizarre as its subject. That would be just as much of a misrepresentation as what the nonfiction movie by Alison O’Daniel actually gives. The Tuba Thieves is a formally daring and challenging work of art that rejects narrative in favour of following the fluid, flowing route of sound (and its absence). It’s unlike much you’d find outside of a museum exhibit, with the clever use of open captions and sound design that’ll have you reconsidering how you view movies, and, for a particular breed of filmgoer, just as amusing, stimulating, and inspiring.
