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.
15 Standouts From the 2021 (Virtual) Sundance Film Festival From Tweet
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The Sundance Film Festival is typically the industry s annual coronation of indie sensations and once and future awards darlings. Intrepid filmgoers make the pilgrimage to snowy Park City, Utah, where they wait in long lines to catch a movie that could either be the next big thing or a Redbox exclusive in seven months.
Sundance carried on in 2021 despite the pandemic thanks to a makeshift virtual cinema, which allowed folks to take in the festival’s best from their couch. (And in some cases as with Nashville s own Belcourt via drive-in screenings.) Let’s parse what really made this edition of the festival such a virtual victory.
The 15 Best Films We Saw at Sundance
Eliott Grover, provided by
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The 2020 Sundance Film Festival was one of the last major events of its kind –– or any kind –– to take place before the world changed forever. With little time to prepare a viable pivot, other festivals like SXSW and Cannes were forced to cancel. As the pandemic raged through the summer and into the fall, Sundance organizers understood that they would have to radically reimagine their event in order to save it.
The 2021 festival, which concluded yesterday, was entirely virtual. Some other festivals, fearful that sponsors and distributors could shy away from truncated or remote programs, are reluctant to abandon in-person expositions. Sundance, however, leaned in. Under the leadership of first-year director Tabitha Jackson, the programming team spent months designing a proprietary streaming platform and building a digital world to preserve the energy of a festival environment.
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