Rolling Stone The Best Movies We Saw at Sundance 2021
From a postapocalyptic genre flick to a handful of brilliant, offbeat docs about our current moment these were the films at this year’s festival that moved and marked us
By The Sundance Institute, 3
It was a given that this year’s all-virtual, all-living-room-screenings-all-the-time Sundance was going to seem a little strange. Having experienced a few pandemic-corrective festivals already over the past 10 months, a lot of critics and journalists were already familiar with the drill: log on instead of line up, chat with your peers about recommendations via text and Twitter instead of live and in person, stroll to your bathroom between screenings instead of sprinting to catch shuttles. If you were on the east coast, the massive snow-dump helped create a weird Park City facsimile outside your door. There was still chatter about bidding wars, it just wasn’t happening in hotel-lobby bars this time. (Apple
Christopher Makoto Yogi’s
I Was a Simple Man will premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on January 29. The film is among 10 dramatic narrative feature films in the U.S. Dramatic Competition.
The film, set on Oʻahu’s North Shore, follows the life of Masao from pre-World War
II, to Hawaiʻi’s statehood, then the urbanization of Honolulu. When Masao gets older, he develops a terminal illness. As his condition deteriorates, he is visited by memories and ghosts of his past, including his wife (Grace) played by actress Constance Wu. The film illustrates the past and present of one family’s connection to their patriarch.