The documentary sections at Sundance are often where you find some of the festival’s consistently strongest work, and this year was no exception. There’s a natural double bill to be had with “Judy Blume Forever” and “Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project,” each of which provide insightful, entertaining career overviews of wonderfully scrappy writers. Both “Judy Blume” (directed by Davina Pardo and Leah Wolchok) and “Nikki Giovanni” (Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson) track their subjects across their respective event-filled lives as a children’s book author and as a poet, pausing on their career triumphs, revisiting personal milestones and surveying political battles with original interviews, great archival material and some animated flourishes.
Both of these documentaries, like most of the nonfiction work I saw at this year’s Sundance, were more intellectually engaging than formally revelatory, even with their visual flights of fancy. One of the nice things about documentaries, though, is that a movie can grab hold of you simply through the power of its subject. That’s true of “Bad Press,” an absorbing, eye-opening look at the fight for a free and open press in the Muscogee (Creek) Nation directed by Rebecca Landsberry-Baker and Joe Peeler. That’s also the case with “Victim/Suspect,” Nancy Schwartzman’s blood-boiler about a reporter investigating cases in which women who, after reporting their sexual assault to the police, are accused of lying, then arrested and prosecuted.
Despite its popularity and generally positive press, Sundance has often been the target of a certain amount of mockery, both good-natured and meanspirited. Its earlier years are still, fondly and not, branded as its granola period, a characterization that speaks to the kinds of modest, regionally minded movies that the festival often presented. To a degree, some of the gibes also reflected some observers’ feelings about Redford, whose earnestness has long made him a very big and obviously irresistible target (when he’s not dazzling everyone with his stardom). The mockery continued even as Sundance’s imprint on the industry greatly expanded — partly because it expanded. Steven Soderbergh broke there, and so did Dee Rees.
This year, I didn’t hear any jokes about Redford or the experiment in community and storytelling that he created so many years ago. More instructively, I didn’t even hear many complaints about the lineup, which was solid if not exceptional, and chock-full of fine, good and very good movies, most of which will land at your local theater or, more likely, on one of your streaming platforms. After several years of being away from the festival and so much bad and bleak news about the industry, and despite the usual logistic complaints about the festival, I think that a lot of us were simply grateful to be back in Park City, watching movies, discovering talent, finding new ideas and visiting other worlds. I know that I was.
