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Currently Reading Cusp Review: In a Clear-Eyed Sundance Doc, Three Small-Town Texas Teenagers Act Out Their Alienation, Partying Against Purple Skies
Aaloni, Autumn, and Brittney mostly want to party, but live with a daunting awareness of sexual violence.
Owen Gleiberman, provided by
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With: Aaloni, Autumn, Brittney.
The youth party culture, as portrayed in the mass media, tends to be driven by a certain debauched and glamorous energy: the clubbing, the drugs, the “freedom,” the your-life’s-a-soap-opera excitement that turns the rituals of hooking up into a flame that lures everyone. But in “Cusp,” a documentary about three small-town Texas teenagers wiling away the summer, the party imperative may be just as compulsive, but it’s the scaled-down, middle-of-nowhere version, where a party is a bonfire and a bunch of dudes standing around with beer and blunts and a jug of moonshine and whatever girls they can get to show up.
Courtesy of Sundance Institute
The crop of documentaries that premiere at the Sundance Film Festival is always wide-ranging, both in style and in content. And this year’s selections were no exception, even if the 2021 festival was an unusual one, having largely migrated to digital platforms.
They ran the gamut from dramatic explorations of refugees’ experiences to funny and heartbreaking looks at American high schools to experimental films about technology’s effects on our lives. The world is a wide, wide place, and documentary filmmakers are committed to exploring it, celebrating it, and warning us not to take it for granted.
El Planeta, 2021(Film still)
Futuristic and reflective, AnOther’s picks of this year’s digital festival span Dior Saddle bag-toting grifters and hunted mythical creatures
February 08, 2021
A recent Instagram post from the documentary filmmaker Matt Wolf summed up the current state of attending prestige film festivals globally very well: “I’m alone in a virtual Chinese restaurant at a Dutch documentary film festival,” he wrote, captioning a screenshot of his avatar enjoying “dumplings” and “karaoke” at an empty table. Surreal attempts to replicate physical festival mingling aside, the transferral of festivals like Utah’s
Sundance to the digital space has ushered in a new democratisation of these events, allowing fans everywhere to spot the films most likely to have an impact on culture for themselves. This year, the best storytelling showcased a cinematic landscape both self-reflective and radically future-bound: revealing alternate viewpoints on the past, and
LINDA HOLMES, HOST: One of the most anticipated moments of any year in movies is the Sundance Film Festival. For decades, filmmakers including Quentin Tarantino, Jordan Peele and Steven Soderbergh have gotten big boosts from exposure there. But, of course, this is not a year for gathering and crowds, so the Sundance Film Festival in 2021 went virtual.
AISHA HARRIS, HOST: More than 70 feature films, including both narrative films and documentaries, are at Sundance this year.
HOLMES: And while we haven t seen all 70 of them, we ve seen quite a few.
HARRIS: And we can t wait to share some highlights. I m Aisha Harris.
A documentary about students at an El Paso High School who are interested in pursuing careers in law enforcement.
Director Maisie Crow says 900 schools in Texas have “some sort of criminal justice class or program.” As a Marfa resident herself, who covers the complexities of life along the U.S.-Mexico border through her work as editor-in-chief of the Big Bend Sentinel and Presidio Internacional newspapers, Crow told Texas Standard she was especially interested in exploring the role of law enforcement in Far West Texas.
“One of the things I love most about El Paso is its relationship to Juarez,” Crow said. “It really is one city divided by a border, and these kids really do live a cross-border life. I mean, they have community both in Juarez and in El Paso, and that was very important to me to make that clear in the film.”