Sundance from home: A virtual wrap on 2021’s unprecedented all-digital festival [Los Angeles Times]
This year’s Sundance Film Festival, its first virtual incarnation, ran Jan. 28 to Feb. 3 and Times film staffers were collectively glued to our TVs, laptops, smartphones and other devices to join in the annual celebration of independent cinema. Critic Justin Chang and reporters Mark Olsen and Jen Yamato discuss a most unusual festival experience and nod to some standout films and a few rather puzzling decisions by the festival’s awards juries.
JUSTIN CHANG: At a normal Sundance Film Festival, Jen and Mark, we wouldn’t be writing to each other. We’d be sitting around that big kitchen in the L.A. Times condo, snacking on pizza and gummy bears, exchanging quick notes on the movies we’ve seen and strategizing about what to see and write about next. Then some of us would don our beanies and parkas and head out into the snow while doing the kinds of quick travel-time calcula
AJ TaylorFebruary 2, 2021Last Updated: February 2, 2021
Country Thunder is a go for June 11th through the 13th at the Heritage Park in Forest City. Country Thunder Music Festivals Director of Marketing and Public Relations Jerry Krochak says even though the festival was postponed twice in 2020, they were able to maintain the headlining acts of Lynyrd Skynyrd, Old Dominion, and Kane Brown.
Steve Iwamoto and Constance Wu in I Was a Simple Man A lot of times the island is used as a pretty backdrop and the locals are at the margin, explains the filmmaker behind the Sundance dramatic competition title.
Christopher Yogi hopes to introduce audiences to a different Hawaii than the one they have grown accustomed to seeing onscreen. A lot of movies that take place here take place in hotels and at popular tourist spots, explains the filmmaker. A lot of times the island is used as a pretty backdrop and the locals are at the margin.
I Was A Simple Man follows a family as their eldest, Masao (Steve Iwamoto), nears death. The cast includes Constance Wu, who first workshopped the project with Yogi years ago at the Sundance Labs and plays Masao s late wife, Grace, as she returns to her husband while he begins his transition.
By Jana Monji, AsAmNews Arts & Culture Writer
Those looking for a glimpse of the Asian and Asian American films at Sundance got a good taste during a conversation with Asian filmmakers and actors hosted by the Asian Society of Northern California.
Janet Yang, Academy Governor-at-Large and executive producer of
The Joy Luck Club film, spoke with writer Amy Tan, actress Miya Cech, director Sushmit Ghosh, director Debbie Lum, actor Leonardo Nam, director Baz Poonpiriya, director Rintu Thomas and director Christopher Yogi.
Debbie Lum, director of
Try Harder! noted that her documentary on the agony and angst of college admissions, looked at this topic through the lens of parents. That was easy to do now that she’s the mother of three kids. In the background, during the filming the lawsuit against Harvard University was being fought in the courts, giving the general feeling that declaring one was Asian American on one’s college application was a detriment.
Director: Christopher Makoto Yogi
Premiere: Jan. 29th 1:00 p.m.
Life, no matter how solitary the path we choose, is inevitably a grand catastrophe of collaboration. I Was a Simple Man follows Masao (
Steve Iwamoto and, in his younger years,
Tim Chiou) as he nears death in his lifelong home of Hawai‘i. As he hurdles toward his inevitable close, Masao’s life of exile (both self- and community-imposed) opens up into a florid portrait of his complicated personhood. Everything he could’ve known has changed beyond recognition, and the proceeding film balls up nearly a century’s worth of gratitude, regret, resentment and wonder into a visual poem that makes one man’s death the nexus for an exploration about what it means to be a father, a husband and a man in a land whose definition slips through your fingers day by day.