If the nine films I saw this year during my Sundance experience signal anything, it’s that we, currently, are culturally and artistically invested in transience.
To note this throughline and not address the presence of many films created by, and/or centering upon transgender, gender non-conforming, non-binary, and intersex people feels like a glaring oversight. During this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Utah’s H.B. 257 bill—a piece of legislation banning transgender people from accessing bathrooms and locker rooms that do not coincide with the sex on their birth certificate—was passed.
Despite being a Utah-based festival that is frequently buoyed by transgender and queer voices, Sundance has offered only vague affirmation of support for the transgender community, failing to condemn, or even mention outright, Utah’s transphobic bill.
Though only able to choose from a limited selection due to my virtual press pass, I was fortunate enough to view some of the queer and transgender films included in this festival. Jules Rosskam’s Desire Lines—part-documentary, part-archival reflection, and part-fictional trans fantasy—explores the historical, cultural, social, and (often charming, sexy, and vulnerable) personal experiences of gay trans men. Esteban Arango’s Ponyboi, written by and starring River Gallo, centers on Ponyboi (Gallo), whose intersex identity leaves him untidily identified—and often simultaneously demeaned and desired—through lenses of gender, sexuality, and attraction.
The notion of gender and sexuality and their respective capacity for fluidity and liberation is perhaps the most pertinent aspect of the festival this year, especially due to external political circumstances. That said, a larger, more existential theme of transience, of changing seasons and tide shifts, took on many forms and interpretations.
Many of the films I watched were centered upon the unavoidable transition of aging. Sean Wang’s Didi, a charming time capsule of 2008 boyhood, is a middle-school-centric gut punch, and a representation of the age where you are seemingly spiritually obligated to do and say everything wrong. In Good One, India Donaldson’s subtle and thoughtful feature debut, seventeen-year-old Sam (Lily Collias) goes on a backpacking trip with her father and his best friend, all the while existing in a state of teen girl limbo. Sam is both not-quite-woman-enough to warrant her own motel room, tent, or solidified spot in the adult conversation, but not-quite-child-enough to leave the vacation unscathed by some sly sexualization and an ongoing presumption of domestic labor. And in Jesse Eisenberg’s second feature, A Real Pain (which leaned on the side of repetitive and the slightest bit trite), we see a brotherly tale of arrested development, where the death of a grandparent leaves cousins Benji (Kieran Culkin) and David (Jesse Eisenberg) spinning out like tops in the midst of reopened inner child wounds.
In a salient (though at moments uneven and unsteady) reflection on queerness and sex, Mikko Mäkeläs Sebastian follows Max (Ruaridh Mollica), a young queer man who transitions between two forms of selfhood—that of Max the writer, an upstanding, thoughtful, academic-type with friends, family, tidy aspirations, and a “normal” job, and that of his sex worker persona, Sebastian, who acts as a dissociated avatar of sorts for Max to utilize as a protagonist for his current novel.
But what made these stories of transience, slippery experiences, and transitional periods all the more striking was their being in such closely watched proximity to fellow festival picks that emphasized the inherent failing and oppression of our current rigid systemic structures.
This abusive rigidity is epitomized in Natalie Rae and Angela Patton’s devastating Daughters, a documentary that centers around Patton’s program, “Date With Dad Weekend”, which organizes dances and dates for incarcerated fathers and their daughters. But the film is ultimately a meditation on the brutality of America’s prison-industrial complex, in which grief and crumbling familial foundations (despite ferocious effort on the parts of parents and children) reign supreme.
Similarly, in the particularly difficult and laudable Black Box Diaries, Shiori Itō—who is equal parts intelligent, self-aware, courageous, and charming—documents her attempts to prosecute her rapist, a powerful journalist in Japan with connections to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and the police. All of the channels in which justice should presumably be served are tainted and blocked by the social status, financial stability, and political pull of her perpetrator, leaving Itō to take matters into her own hands—and reinterpret totally what it means to find peace and justice outside of Japan’s flawed, outdated legal system.
In many senses, Stephen Maing and Brett Story’s Union was a melding of this dichotomy between rigid brutality and liberating transience into one film. Documenting the first successful unionization of an Amazon warehouse, Union doesn’t tell a story of tidy solidarity, but one of individual differences, collective messiness, and changing goals and ideals. Most importantly, though, Union shows that all differences can be moved through in search of a larger purpose. The embracing of the possibility of continual change opens up many pathways that the currently oppressive powers that be insist do not exist.
To sit comfortably—or, at the least, honestly and totally—in the truth of everlasting transience is where liberation is found. To embrace rigidity—especially in the form of punitive structure and a demand that things must remain as they are lest we accidentally let in chaos—is to risk losing those who are making our most honest art, our most honest political change, and experiencing our most honest and radical growth. The films at Sundance stirred these thoughts and aspirations within me this year. The structure these films exist in—Sundance itself—would do well by listening to the messages being collectively shared within it.
