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Best 10 Films at Sundance 2017
Best 10 Films at Sundance 2017
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I didn't see every film at this year's Sundance Film Festival, but I did see enough to discover
that the cliché of the "Sundance film" has ceased to have any meaning.
The festival now premieres everything from Italian romances to Georgian family dramas to American
historical epics to avant-garde multimedia murder investigations — a tremendous development. Here
are my ten favorite films from the invigorated festival.
My Happy Family
Nana Ekvtimishvili and Simon Gross's masterful family drama begins with a 52-year-old Tbilisi woman
leaving her family to go find a quiet apartment of her own, a space where she can finally just be by
herself after living for everyone else. The filmmakers astutely follow the ripples and counter-ripples of
this decision in a family that loves and argues with equal ferocity. My Happy Familyunfolds as a
series of long takes following characters in and out of rooms, staying close enough to register
individual experiences while always making sure to keep the rest of the world in focus. As a result,
the urgency and tension of each scene emerges organically. And there isn't a second that doesn't
ring achingly true.
Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?
Travis Wilkerson's intense, mesmerizing project probably doesn't yet technically even count as a film:
He narrates live and cues the images and audio as he proceeds, though one can easily imagine the
result becoming a single-channel movie at some point in the future. Through home movies,
documentary footage, photographs, interviews, narration, and text, the filmmaker tells us about his
great-grandfather's 1946 murder of a black man, a crime for which he got off scot-free. Wilkerson
found precious few facts in his attempts to learn more about the murder, but he kicks up lots of
ghosts, both historical and familial. It's hard to experience this without getting shivers up your spine —
from fear, from anger, from the beauty of the filmmaking.
Mudbound
Based on Hillary Jordan's 2008 novel, Dee Rees's historical drama follows the intersecting lives of
two families — one white, one black — working the same land in 1940s Mississippi, during and after
WWII. It unfolds via multiple perspectives and voiceovers, as the characters' ruminative, poetic
narration stands in sharp contrast to the elemental forces onscreen: Visually, Rees foregrounds the
physical cruelty of farm life, of disease and brutal weather, of dirt and grime that won't wash off. The
film's vision of a world where class, cowardice, and extremism circumscribe our common humanity is
devastating.
Where Is Kyra?
Michelle Pfeiffer is often the sole figure onscreen in Andrew Dosunmu's bleak, beautiful tale of an
impoverished woman falling into increasingly dire circumstances. The director is fond of static, off-
balance compositions with very shallow focus, but he also likes to point his camera directly into his
actress's face, one of the great visages of modern cinema. Close-ups often show her half-concealed
in the gloom, emerging from pitch-black corners of the screen. Rarely on film has the sheer
debilitating exhaustion of poverty been so clearly conveyed.
City of Ghosts
The citizen journalists of Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Slowly, an organization that exposes the horror
being perpetrated by ISIS in its Syrian stronghold, risk their lives every day — not just in Syria, but in
Germany, Turkey, and other countries, where some members hide out as they try to keep RIBSS's
online efforts going. Matthew Heineman's film embeds with some of the group's key members over an
extended period. We don't just see their efforts as journalists and activists, we also see them as
people — their reactions to the deaths of comrades and family members, and to the disintegration of
the city they once called home. This is a deeply unsettling, gripping, and vital documentary.
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