Sundance 2025 highlights

Looking ahead to the festival... as it looks towards its own future

by Amber Wilkinson

Dolores Oliviero as Natalia in The Virgin Of The Quarry Lake
Dolores Oliviero as Natalia in The Virgin Of The Quarry Lake Photo: Courtesy of Sundance Institute

In addition to the usual anticipation about this year’s edition of Sundance Film Festival, which runs from tomorrow until February 2, there’s also a sense of uncertainty. This could be the penultimate year with Park City, high in a mountain above Salt Lake City, as the event ponders a move either downtown or even out of Utah completely. The state is still in the running to host the festival after next year’s edition but Cincinnati, Ohio, and Boulder, Colorado, are also in contention with the decision “to be announced sometime after” the current festival has concluded.

It’s true that in recent years things have got a lot more challenging in Park City. Richer people, with skiing rather than cinema on their minds have moved in, the festival’s success has seen accommodation prices pushed through the roof which, along with Covid and the screening of certain films online, have seen fewer people, including journalists, make the pilgrimage. There’s also limited room to expand in that environment, which may make the prospect of a larger spot a tantalising one. Whatever happens, it’s certainly got most people I speak to in a nostalgic mood and determined to enjoy the unique cultural cauldron to the hilt while they can. At a press meet and greet, the festival director Eugene Hernandez remained, as the cliche goes, tight-lipped as to where the 2028 edition will be held.

Speaking about the devastating fires that have hit Los Angeles recently, he said: This has been a hard couple of weeks for many of us. As a resident of Santa Monica and a native of California, I want you to know how personal these fires are. We have filmmakers in our festival, alumni members of the industry community and our Sundance staff who have lost homes or were displaced in the past weeks of this. This tragedy continues right now and we stand with all our friends and colleagues in this tragic moment. And, at the same time we come together tonight and in these coming days to continue looking ahead.”

With looking ahead in mind, as ever, the programme is packed with titles from at home and abroad that are well worth looking out for. Here, we stay away from the big names to consider some of the less ‘starry’ but no less interesting entries in this year’s festival.

Among the foreign language titles to watch out for is The Virgin Of The Quarry Lake. This Argentina-set drama, adapted by Rojo filmmaker Benjamín Naishtat from the books by Maria Enriquez and directed by Laura Casabe. Set in 2001, when Argentina was undergoing an economic crisis, the action centres on teenager Natalia (Dolores Oliviero) and her pals, whose infatuation with the slightly older Diego (Agustín Sosa) takes on a darker tenor with the arrival of the much older and, apparently, more worldly wise Siliva (Fernanda Echevarría), who begins to command his attention. Casabe told us she loves to mix genre and noted, “The supernatural leaks through the cracks of reality”. We’ll be bringing you the full interview later in the festival.

Khartoum
Khartoum Photo: Courtesy of Sundance Institute

An altogether different sort of coming of age tale unfolds in DJ Ahmet, which also screens in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition. It sees a pair of teenagers bond over music and a shared sense of rebellion against the adults in the North Macedonian village where they live. Having just recently been in Tromsø, I’m also very keen to catch Folktales, which is screening in the Premieres section of the festival. Directed by experienced documentarians, and Sundance alumni, Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing (The Boys Of Baraka), it follows teenagers at an unconventional school in Arctic Norway.

Another documentary to get on your radar is Khartoum. This immersive hybrid was shot by a collective of Sudanese documentarians - Anas Saeed, Rawia Alhag, Ibrahim Snoopy Ahmad, Timeea Mohamed Ahmed - along with British filmmaker Phil Cox, who found themselves forced to flee the country’s conflict part way through making their film. Their subjects, two young boys, a tea vendor, a civil servant and an activist, also left the country but this film brings them together as they articulate their memories and dreams for the future with the help of green screen.

Cox told us: “Making the film was a positive act was an act of kind of resistance. It was a statement. And that came from the filmmakers.” - we’ll be bringing our full interview with all the directors later in the festival.

As always at Sundance, acts of resistance are high on the agenda and you can see two very different examples in films from opposing sides in the Ukraine and Russia conflict. From the Moscow side comes Mr Nobody Against Putin, which sees a schoolteacher tasked with recording enforced acts of patriotism in the classroom turn whistleblower. Meanwhile, in Ukraine, 2000 Meters To Andriivka sees Mstyslav Chernov turn the same sort of laser reportage view on frontline troops trying to retake ground as he used to observe ordinary citizens at the start of the conflict in 20 Days In Mariupol.

Above all else, Sundance continues to be a festival of discovery, with about 42 per cent of films by first-time filmmakers. Join us in the coming days as we go on the lookout for future household names.

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