One Last Sundance in Park City

I encountered a version of this phenomenon on the first morning of my first Sundance. Trying to find my way around festival headquarters, I ran into a colleague from Variety, my employer at the time, who blurted out the news that Fox Searchlight Pictures had just bought “Little Miss Sunshine” for a whopping ten and a half million dollars. What the hell was “Little Miss Sunshine”? I found out at a press screening a few days later: a crowd-pleasing dysfunctional-family road-trip comedy that left most of the audience in stitches and that, in time, would become a major indie hit and a multiple Oscar winner. It was the kind of breakout success, in short, that keeps Sundance in business. For the next few years, the festival seemed to operate under a kind of residual “Little Miss Sunshine” haze, with filmmakers, publicists, and distributors trying—and generally failing—to replicate the film’s formula for commercial and critical success.

Alas, though sales activity naturally ebbs and flows over the years, it does feel like such boom-town phenomena are artifacts of yesteryear. From a purely acquisitions standpoint, the most hotly chased title at this year’s festival was “The Invite,” a bickersome marital dramedy directed by Olivia Wilde and starring Wilde, Seth Rogen, Penélope Cruz, and Ed Norton. The movie’s eventual purchase—by A24, which spent more than eleven million dollars—certainly generated buzz, but, given that the director and cast are known quantities, it was hardly the surge of excitement and discovery that was once a mark of the festival. The crises that Sundance faces—the lingering shadow of the pandemic, the perilous state of theatrical exhibition—are hardly Sundance’s alone. They reflect a film industry in existential turmoil. But they are problems that might require more than a new host city and additional infrastructure to solve.

My last Sundance in Park City was an unusual one, for reasons that merit full disclosure. I served on the jury for the U.S. documentary competition, and was attending the festival not in my usual capacity as a journalist but as an invitee. The experience of meeting the other jurors became its own kind of trip down memory lane—a Sundance history lesson. Here was Azazel Jacobs, a member of the U.S. dramatic competition’s jury; I first encountered his work at Sundance in 2008, when he unveiled his film “Momma’s Man,” an exquisitely tender portrait of his parents, Ken and Flo Jacobs, who were New York avant-garde cinema luminaries, and who both died last year. Here was A.V. Rockwell, the director of another terrific New York indie, “A Thousand and One” (2023), which won the Grand Jury Prize in the U.S. dramatic competition in 2023.(Rockwell was there as a juror for the short-film-program competition.) Here was So Yong Kim, whose exquisite début feature, “In Between Days,” showed at that first festival I attended, in 2006. And here were John Cooper and Trevor Groth, two former leaders of the Sundance programming team, who were reunited and tasked with jury duty in NEXT, a section of the festival for low-budget and experimental work, which they had launched in 2010.

My fellow-jurors in the American documentary section, the filmmakers Natalia Almada and Jennie Livingston, were both Sundance laureates, too. Almada has won two directing prizes at the festival, for “El General” (2009) and “Users” (2021), and Livingston has won the Grand Jury Prize, for “Paris Is Burning” (1990). Together, we screened ten nonfiction movies from emerging American filmmakers. For now, I’m going to stay quiet about what I thought of them (though the prizes, and those of the other categories, have just been announced), and mention instead the movies outside that pool—or at least the few I was able to slot in—that caught my eye.

On a chilly Monday afternoon, I succumbed to the overpowering heat of “Chasing Summer,” a nimble, sexy, and infectiously funny collaboration between the director Josephine Decker and the comedian and screenwriter Iliza Shlesinger. The movie follows Jamie (Shlesinger), a fortysomething humanitarian-aid worker who, after being blindsided by personal and professional uncertainty, returns to her home in suburban Texas for a summer of ribaldry and revelation. There she endures unceasing verbal jabs from her mother (Megan Mullally) and her older sister (Cassidy Freeman) and also renews her acquaintance with old friends and an old flame (Tom Welling) from high school. In other words, on paper, “Chasing Summer” sounds like any number of flat, formulaic indie quirkfests about the unspeakable horrors of going home again. But that just goes to show that you can never judge a movie from its plot. Although the film skews surprisingly more mainstream than Decker’s previous work—her film “Madeline’s Madeline” (2018) was a wildly imaginative, form-blurring fantasia—the conventionality of the material throws the bristling intelligence of the filmmaker’s approach into sharp relief. As the camera glides in and around a roller-skating rink, where much of the action takes place, Decker and Shlesinger achieve and sustain a terrific balance of comic velocity and erotic languor.