Sundance 2015: Indiewire's Eric Kohn Shares Notable Films and Filmmakers from this Year's Festival

(Photo courtesy of: Michael Krause) 

     The 2015 Sundance Film Festival has reached its end, awards have been given, and distribution deals are being made. But, with so many new and noteworthy films and filmmakers, the sheer quantity of the cinema showcased at the festival can seem overwhelming to those trying to keep up with the film world. Not to mention newer mediums showcased, such as virtual reality. 

    Eric Kohn, Indiewire's chief film critic and senior editor, as well as Criticwire's manager talked with me about what we should take note of from Sundance 2015. 

    What were a few of the most notable features in films at this year's festival? 

    "It was a pretty diverse year, there wasn't one movie that stood out above everything else.... The biggest movie that everyone's talking about, per usual, is the one that won the Grand Jury Prize and that is Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, which will go to Fox Searchlight. It's about a guy who sort of befriends this young woman when they're in high school and she's dying of cancer and he's a film geek... It's charming in certain ways, I felt like it was a little more formulaic than a lot of people are willing to talk about, so not maybe the most exciting discovery of the festival, but it was accomplished for what it did. 

    

    "That was one movie in the competition that stood out, another is The Diary of a Teenage Girl... It's the first feature by Marielle Heller-- very accomplished movie... It has a terrific lead performance in it by this young woman named Bel Powley... she is playing this young woman in early '70's San Fransisco who has this relationship with the boyfriend of her mother. It's a really well-done period piece, but, also, it feels very authentic in this sense that you never feel like the relationship couldn't be happening, she doesn't treat it as something that is subversive, or twisted, or right or wrong. It's a straight-forward coming-of-age story that is very accomplished at the same time, and that's a very tricky balance...  

The Diary of a Teenage Girl  

(www.imdb.com) 

   "In terms of others that I thought were quite strong... James White, which won the Audience Award in the sidebar Next at the festival. That's a movie directed by first-time feature Josh Mond... This one is another cancer drama, but very unconventional in terms of how it plays out. It's about this young man played by Christopher Abbott dealing with his mother's impending death... Christopher Abbott in particular really comes into his own here. People see him most widely, I think, on Girls, where he is this very kind of genial, likeable kind of guy, and here he is rougher around the edges in terms of physical performance, and I think that when this movie get out that he's going to get a lot of attention for it. 

    "The other movie I would single out as one of the more memorable Sundance movies is Entertainment, which is a film directed by a guy named Rick Alverson... It's not for everybody... but it's a very interesting way of looking at how the performance process can be very isolating to people. 

    "I'll point out one more, which is the midnight documentary, The Nightmare... this is the second feature from Rodney Ascher, who did Room 237 a couple of years ago, a documentary about these conspiracy theories surrounding The Shining.  The Nightmare is a movie about sleep paralysis. It looks at eight different people who have suffered from sleep paralysis and, also, it has these recreations-- very vivid, and very scary recreations-- of the kinds of visions that people have experienced under sleep paralysis. It was a very interesting way to kind of liven up the non-fiction formula by making it legitimately scary and also about a topic that has a certain kind of universal appeal." 

    Are there any filmmakers that we can hope to hear a lot more about in the future because of Sundance?  

    "The director of Diary of a Teenage Girl, Marielle Heller-- this is an incredibly strong debut feature, and the fact that Sony Pictures Classics picked it up immediately means that it's quite likely that she will get a sort of prestige. 

    "The director of Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, is another first time filmmaker that I think is definitely the kind of person you could see continuing on the path of making very light, charming, American movies, you know, possibly working for a studio at some point... He is certainly somebody who is going to be around. 

    "James White showcases Josh Mond's ability behind the camera... it definitely shows that he can match the kind of sensibilities and technical finesse that we've seen from the other filmmakers in that collective in the past, so it bodes well for his future. 

    "The most interesting discovery, I would say, is not a filmmaker who is necessarily new if you've been watching movies on film festival circuits in the past, though this was his first time at Sundance, and one of the most interesting films there was Tangerine. Tangerine is directed by Sean Baker. Sean Baker is an interesting guy... he tends to spend a lot of research figuring out how to tell stories about marginalized characters in genres you wouldn't necessarily see them receiving treatment for. With Tangerine, he's again in LA, but shooting a movie for the first time on an iPhone 5. It's following a pair of transgender prostitutes on Christmas Eve over the course of several hours. They go on this kind of loopy series of misadventures. What's interesting about it, is that it's a very charming movie and it doesn't turn these characters into caricatures, or condescend in any particular way to who they are and how they behave... My hope is that a film like Tangerine will be an opportunity for a filmmaker like Sean Baker, who has been doing really interesting work for a number of years, to get discovered by a much bigger audience."  

Tangerine 

(www.imdb.com) 

    A lot of people are talking about the use of virtual reality at this year's festival. Can we expect to see virtual reality noticeably change filmmaking and film-watching anytime soon for mass consumers? 

     "I think we're still a few years off from VR experiences in a sort of mass, mainstream consumer-oriented or consumer-facing form of entertainment... 

    "I don't think that we're heading in any particular immediate direction towards virtual reality... But I do think that what we're seeing is that the technology is there and, so, people are going to keep toying around with it; it's not going to go away." 

    Sundance showed a lot of innovative, and sometimes controversial films, are there any films that you think have exceptional potential for social impact? 

    "Absolutely. Usually, that sort of category falls to the documentary, and there were a bunch like that. The first one would be the one that won the Grand Jury Prize, The Wolfpack, which is a documentary from a first-time filmmaker named Crystal Moselle. It's about a very bizarre story about a man in the Lower East Side who raises six children and never lets them leave the house, namely because he think that society is somehow going to corrupt them, and they wind up learning everything they know about the world through the movies... There are, I think, a lot of philosophical starting points here for ways of looking at, you know, what family values are today and what parenting should or shouldn't be... I think that it's going to generate some very interesting conversations about what it means to be a parent in the modern world.... 

    "In a more traditional framework, a documentary that I would hope gets out there in a bigger way is Welcome to Leith, which is a documentary about a white supremacist who takes over a small town in North Dakota in 2013... And what's interesting about it is that filmmakers, in order to get the full story of what's going on, gain access to this frankly evil person in the center of the story to get his side of things. So, you get this really chilling, balanced perspective on what went down in this small town and... and allows for a more balanced understanding of how evil operates in the real world." 

    Eric then mentioned a new documentary from Kirby Dick, The Hunting Ground: 

    

    "His new movie is about sexual abuse on college campuses and I think it's very effective in getting the point across that the problem with sexual assault on campus is not so much that colleges don't realize that it's happening, it's that they are actively trying to suppress stories about it because they're businesses... It's really a flag-waving kind of experience, I wouldn't say for great filmmaking necessarily, but it certainly does a good job of valiantly raising awareness of sexual abuse and why it's continued to be a problem... I think it's definitely gonna be part of a national conversation very soon." 

    To learn more events from Sundance 2015, visit: www.sundance.org and www.indiewire.com