Courtesy of Cinetic Media

Context is everything when it comes to choosing what to watch at a festival with as many sections and films as Sundance but no single “main” slate. A particularly enticing logline, a positive comment from a trusted fellow critic, or an established filmmaker making their next project: all these factors have outsized effects on viewing under time pressure. Admittedly, the online stage of this year’s Sundance offered some helpful constraints, aside from the standard practice of the biggest distributors (A24, NEON, etc.) to not make their most prominent films like I Saw the TV Glow, Presence, and A Different Man available even for critics: due to poor planning, I had only reserved a virtual seat for the first film in this festival dispatch, and as such the belated additional openings for the myriad award winners—numerous as the available titles were—gave me a second chance.

No such intervention was needed, however, for one of my most anticipated films. During my stint on the shorts jury at last year’s AFI Fest, Sean Wang’s “Nǎi Ni & Wài Pó” was one of the clear highlights, a warm documentary that, a few silly interludes aside, assembled a calm and lovely portrait of his grandmothers and their concerns with a great degree of care, captured at least partly on 16mm. It was our runaway favorite for the best of the documentary shorts on its way to a deserved Oscar nomination—which Wang improbably learned about during his time in Sundance—and he made a very affable impression when we met him to present the awards. When I saw that he had a film in this year’s lineup, it had me very curious to see how he would apply his sensibility to his first feature-length narrative feature.

Unfortunately, the answer was “not well.” Dìdi—admirably, the title has usually been rendered with the accompanying Chinese characters (弟弟), the term for “younger brother” that I’ve heard literally millions of times throughout my life—acts as another personal depiction of Asian American life in the San Francisco Bay Area, this time of the quasi-autobiographical figure of Chris Wang (played by Izaac Wang) in the summer of 2008 just before he began high school. Over the span of a few months, Chris handles a multitude of relationships old and new: with his sister, who’s about to leave for college and can’t tolerate his brattiness; with his mother (Joan Chen), often disappointed by her son’s antics, and grandmother; with a potential new girlfriend; and with various long-time and would-be friends, who he connects with through memes, MySpace, AIM, and skateboarding videography.

None of this is necessarily ruinous, and I should note here that, being only a few years younger than Wang, much of Dìdi bore a genuine fidelity to the things I observed growing up as a Taiwanese boy in the late 2000s, particularly the look of early YouTube and Facebook; even more inexplicably, Chris and his sister look uncannily like the children of my mother’s cousin, who I saw grow up, with the daughter starting college at the beginning of this current school year. But the film has almost nothing of the surprise and emotional insight that “Nǎi Nai & Wái Pò” did, instead functioning like a very typical Sundance coming-of-age story and relying heavily on upbeat montages, mortifying scenes of embarrassment, and the seemingly de rigeur drug trip scene. Characters are introduced then abandoned as soon as they have served their narrative purpose: Chris and his sister are openly cruel to each other until a single remark completely turns their relationship around; the older skaters that Chris attempts to ingratiate himself with disappear right after his videos are deemed to be inadequate; and a late-breaking act of violence mainly serves as a breaking point between Chris and his mother before things are patched up a few scenes later. Most surprising is the hostile treatment of Chris’s grandmother (his father is working in Taiwan offscreen during the entire film), the sole familial figure who does not get some measure of redemption, in a far cry from the short. Dìdi has its moments, including in the bursts of DV that break up the otherwise staid aesthetic and Joan Chen’s typically solid performance, but its adherence to narrative formula and easily defined emotions rings disappointingly false.

Another film based on real people was Kneecap, directed by Rich Peppiatt in his feature directorial debut, though I had no clue that this was the case until the end credits rolled. The NEXT section film is about the real-life Gaelic rap trio based in Northern Ireland, comprised of two delinquents and a teacher seeking a means of bringing prominence and expression to their language. The three members (Liam Óg Ó Hannaidh, Naoise Ó Cairelláin, and JJ Ó Dochartaigh) play themselves, along with a bevy of Irish actors headed by Michael Fassbender as Ó Cairelláin’s father, an IRA member in hiding from the law. As the trio come together and deal with police attention, drug dealing, and a rapidly growing fanbase finding resonance with the defiantly Irish republican politics, Peppiatt adopts a punk-ish aesthetic, with plenty of neon, voiceover, and lyrics splashed across the screen.

Kneecap is definitely fun, and for a total outsider to Ireland and the group the film makes no particular overtures towards differentiating fact from fiction, especially given the increasing attention it pays to police investigations and an anti-drug modern IRA cell seeking to bust the group, with a political referendum for the Irish language to be recognized as an official language of Northern Ireland in the background to boot. The film can be quite messy, having to juggle three separate main characters in this mélange of storylines, and characters like Ó Cairelláin’s depressed, voluntarily housebound mother often take away from the momentum. But the film has its heart in the right place, something made resoundingly clear when Kneecap participated in the pro-Palestine vigil on Main Street during the fourth day of the festival.

Turning to an actual documentary, one of the more talked-about films at the festival was Benjamin Ree’s Ibelin, a Norwegian documentary about Mats Steen, who died of muscular dystrophy at the age of 25. After his death, at the long tail end of an increasingly isolated existence where he withdrew into video games—frequently playing them at almost every waking hour in his final few years—his family posted the news of his passing to his blog, whereupon they received numerous messages of condolences from strangers. They realized that he had established a significant presence in World of Warcraft as his digital avatar Ibelin, a strapping detective that often served as a beloved source of guidance for his clan—from whom he concealed his condition until close to the end of his life—establishing numerous flirtations, feuds, and reconciliations along the way. To convey this progression, Ree first tells Steen’s real-life story from birth to death, including some talking head interviews with his family, before shifting to his virtual life and the memories of his in-game compatriots through both animated recreations of his exploits and live-action interviews.

Despite having played many video games over the course of my life (principally first-person shooters, only sometimes online), I never got into MMORPGs like World of Warcraft, and can only speak as someone who, like Steen, grew up fascinated by the ludic, transporting nature of video games. But Ibelin strikes me as the work of filmmakers with no concept of what it actually feels like to play video games; given the centrality of this experience to Steen’s existence, this seems like a colossal misunderstanding of the subject of the documentary. The biggest problem comes in a central component: to represent Steen’s WoW interactions, Ree enlisted animators to replicate interactions working with close-ups, much higher graphics, and posable expressions and gestures, all of which probably wouldn’t have been possible in the game; he also added professional voice acting that worked off of the players’ text-based chat logs. The result is something totally uncanny, a great deal of effort marshaled towards a false simulacra of what it would have been like to play the game in the late-2000s and early-2010s. Rather than working within the limits that both Steen and gamers at large face in their in-game interactions, or at the very least embracing the possibilities and charming idiosyncrasies that can come with machinima, the filmmaking opted for something more fanciful and less faithful to lived experience; even if one takes it as an illustration of how absorbed someone can be in a video game, the imposition of a more conventional aesthetic weighs heavily on the film. There are other significant issues that can be raised of course, most notably the garish decision to film the opening family segment in 1.33:1 before expanding to 1.77:1 to symbolize the shift from his physical confinement to his “liberation” in the video game realm. But the flattening effect of this crucial aesthetic choice smothers all.

The only (presumably) fully fictional film I ended up seeing online during this Sundance ended up being Shuchi Talati’s Girls Will Be Girls, another coming-of-age story, this time set in an elite co-ed boarding school in northern India. Mira (Preeti Panigrahi) begins the film at the top: in the opening scene, she is chosen to be the first female prefect in the history of the school. Immediately, she begins messing up when she meets a handsome transfer student (Kesav Binoy Kiron) and begins to discover her sexuality for the first time. This storyline runs concurrently with the growing disrespect that various other male students display and the ambiguous interest of her coddling mother (Kani Kusruti), who also went to the same boarding school, in the transfer student, as Mira’s well-earned position follows a downward spiral.

Such a character arc often poses a crucial issue: what was this character like before she began to unravel? Though Panigrahi makes for a restful and observant screen presence, there’s little sense of Mira as someone inclined even only in the past towards academic and social success, instead largely defining her through external forces that continuously undermine her position. Said position is largely theoretical, mostly signposted by greater interactions with teachers, light dress code citations, and the reporting of a few boys for upskirt photography, though the film culminates in a harrowing day where, per tradition, the prefect acts as the principal for the day, leading to a total loss of authority. Shot in (according to the film’s website) a 1.5:1 aspect ratio and running just shy of two hours, Girls Will Be Girls finds its footing in its most intimate moments, especially in the rush of pleasure, shy flirtations, and strange perversity of her mother’s actions, but the determinative arc feels lacking in some key context.

Thankfully, the best film I saw online at Sundance was also the last: Union, directed by Brett Story and Stephen Maing. I sadly haven’t seen work from either before, despite generally high regard for Story’s The Prison in Twelve Landscapes and The Hottest August, but like Dìdi the film was on my list based on directorial reputation, though I had also heard Story discussing the film on a Film Comment Labor Day panel. It observes the years-long effort to form the very first union at an Amazon factory—the Amazon Labor Union, serving the workers at a warehouse in Staten Island—largely through the eyes of its wily, charismatic president Chris Smalls, a former Amazon worker who was fired when he began unionizing efforts. This subject matter distinguishes itself not only via the extensive, almost entirely successful union-busting that Amazon has accomplished in the past, but also the ALU’s independent existence outside of traditional national labor unions, and the filmmakers feel fully embedded with the workers. Over the course of numerous Zoom calls and nights spent in the cold—a key part of the ALU’s canvassing was handing out free hot meals to the workers coming and going by bus across the street from the warehouse—many members of the union come into focus, each with unique backgrounds and levels of experience with both Amazon and organizing, all aimed towards securing enough votes to be officially recognized by the National Labor Relations Board. The film ends shortly after that successful, widely reported effort in April 2022 with a few scenes of discord and a failed second attempt to unionize at another NYC warehouse, and the result is something appropriately bittersweet, something borne out by the continual difficulties—including a tense confrontation with police seeking to force union organizers off the Amazon property—and clashes in personality that Story and Maing do not shy away from depicting.

Two moments, both involving the same camera movement, especially stuck out. The first comes after the initial successful effort to establish the union: the organizers get into a huddle, and a camera pointed upwards from within the circle spins around, capturing the elation and solidarity of each face with evident joy and good will. The second happens at a fairly routine meeting with miscommunicated start times: as interpersonal strife and frustrations at the lack of progress boil over, a camera located towards the back of the room spins around as the cameraperson moves to find a better position to capture all the rancorous participants. Those two clear breaks from standard observational camerawork, borne out of necessity, felt as resonant to me as anything I watched at the festival: the same formal choice conveying totally different emotional truths, and a perfect encapsulation of the highs and lows involved in this shared endeavor.