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.

Courtesy of Cinetic Media and Fusion Entertainment

My first trip to Sundance itself, after two successive failed attempts, was marked by even more improvisation and recalibration of expectations than I had anticipated. Through a combination of competing obligations and severely limited time in Park City itself, I only saw three films at the festival, but the surrounding experience was enough to get a lay of the land. There are many things that, even if one actively reads Sundance dispatches every year, might not be immediately apparent: the shuttles necessary to navigate the hilly, slushy streets are really just city buses, sometimes packed with skiers jostling for position; the press and industry screenings during the festival all take place north of/down the hill from the far more picturesque and bustling Main Street in a requisitioned multiplex; and the shifting tides, both in terms of “internal”—the occasion of new festival director Eugene Hernandez’s first slate—and external politics—the continued partnership with a pro-Israeli organization during the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the passage during the festival of statewide anti-trans bathroom bills—can go largely unnoticed. This last point is by no means exclusive to Sundance, especially in these times of struggle and compromise (which I freely acknowledge I contribute to in my own minuscule way), but the specific concatenation of dire issues made for an especially strange experience amid the beautiful surroundings.

Such a conflicted perspective was on display in the first film I watched: Sujo, the third film from the Mexican directorial team of Astrid Rondero and Fernanda Valadez. I didn’t see their previous, well-received effort—2020’s Identifying Features, credited to Valadez alone—but this film seems to represent a simultaneous contraction and expansion of scope from its predecessor’s twinned tales of disappearances along the Mexico-U.S. border. Running half an hour longer at 125 minutes, Sujo nevertheless confines its focus to its eponymous subject, following him from childhood to young adulthood over the course of four parts. After the death of his father, a cartel gunman with the nom de guerre “El Ocho,” Sujo—whose unusual name is frequently remarked upon—goes to live with his aunt. For his safety, he is forced to stay at her home in the remote countryside outside the city, with only visits from a family friend and her two young sons for company. As the film unfolds, he joins the cartel himself and is eventually exiled to Mexico City, where he acts upon a long dormant interest in education.

Sujo often threatens to become a rote depiction of cyclical masculine structures—unfortunately underscored by an abrupt shift in attitude and behavior between the two actors playing Sujo as a boy in the former two parts and a teenager in the latter, offering little character-based justification for his sudden desire to join the cartel—ameliorated in part by some reasonably impressive dream sequences, which heighten the mildly ethereal tone already established in the quasi-rural setting. Given this, it might be somewhat odd to single out the last part, which takes place entirely in Mexico City, and yet it is where the interest in its character’s experience becomes most prominent, almost acting as its own, more successful film in miniature; seeing him on his own, as opposed to constantly in the company of his family or friends, goes some length in concentrating what can sometimes feel like a loose, surface examination of what it means to grow up in isolation.

A much more successful example of finding new material within familiar forms could be seen in Nathan Silver’s Between the Temples, by far the best world premiere I saw at Sundance. I’ve seen two of the prolific New York filmmaker’s works before—Thirst Street and The Great Pretender, both of which I enjoyed—but was still taken aback by the tone this immediately establishes, launching immediately into an initially contextless discussion between Ben (Jason Schwartzman in one of his best performances), a Jewish cantor still recovering from the death of his novelist wife, and his two mothers (Caroline Aaron and Dolly de Leon). This is only the first of many destabilizing encounters, which grow in hilarity and unpredictability, a tendency which helps greatly to color in the (relatively) standard central premise: over the course of the film, Ben literally finds his voice again with the companionship of Carla (Carol Kane), his childhood music teacher who, after reconnecting with him by chance, impulsively decides she wants to get a bat mitzvah.

Silver’s collaborators, once more, involve multiple luminaries of the New York independent film scene: he co-wrote with C. Mason Wells, while Sean Price Williams shot the film as usual on 16mm and John Magary edited with welcome freneticism. But there’s a strange alchemy at play in Between the Temples, which balances its pleasantly jaundiced take on the people in Ben’s life—especially those involved in his synagogue, including Rabbi Bruce (Robert Smigel)—with genuine, tentative chemistry between Schwartzman and Kane. This is above all a warm film, given jagged edges by the gambits that Silver orchestrates according to the demands of a particular scene: a recurring sound gag caused by Ben’s bedroom door, a cemetery tryst with Rabbi Bruce’s daughter Gabby (Madeline Weinstein) that improbably evokes both Drive My Car and Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, an actually well-done hallucination sequence with shades of the more fanciful parts of La chimera. This all culminates in an exquisitely chaotic dinner party sequence where everything is laid bare, and the tenderness of what follows does not resolve things so much as find a place of great rapprochement.

But the best film I saw in Sundance’s selection was the last film I saw in person: Richard Linklater’s Hit Man, which premiered at Venice last year but hadn’t yet shown on the West Coast. I’ve admittedly been lax on staying current with Linklater despite my general appreciation for him, but the combination of exceptionally warm reception and widespread bemoaning of a likely cursory theatrical run courtesy of Netflix pushed me to prioritize this. Of course, Linklater himself has had a long history with Sundance stretching all the way back to Slacker—he also had an episode of the documentary miniseries God Save Texas at this year’s festival—that only sweetened the urge to see it with an audience. Co-written by and starring Glen Powell, the film follows the moderately fictionalized story of Gary Johnson, a New Orleans philosophy professor who takes up side work with the police department, eventually finding his role as an undercover cop posing as a hitman to entrap would-be clients. Eventually, he becomes entangled with Maddy (Adria Arjona), a woman seeking to kill her abusive husband, and the fallout that ensues takes all manner of truly delightful twists and turns.

Hit Man is definitely a very slick and crowd-pleasing affair, but in its own way it almost reads like Linklater’s idiosyncratic, breezy take on Vertigo wherein Scottie and Madeleine are embodied within the same person, a conscious molding of one’s persona to fit the situation. Each of Gary’s disguises are specifically tailored to what he thinks his target desires (deploying an array of ridiculous disguises and accents reminiscent of “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar”), and thus each transaction is premised on some manner of seduction. That impulse, of course, is taken to its absolute limit when Maddy enters the picture, and the inherent joy involved in watching Powell and Arjona eventually playacting their roles of cool professional and defiant possible criminal is inextricable from their red-hot magnetism. The final note, both perverse and good-natured, typifies the brilliant high-wire act that this film walks, and provided a great conclusion to this phase of my Sundance 2023 experience.

Going on about the dispiriting nature of my predicament during this most recent Sundance — technically being able to attend due to my press pass and a robust online platform but losing out on the in-person experience (through both the Press Inclusion Initiative and a visit as part of the USC Gould Entertainment Law Society) that I had planned until literally the day I was supposed to leave — almost would seem to defeat the point of a festival dispatch, but I think some context is in order. In some ways, Sundance was ideal for the at-home viewer who had just suffered a shock at the start of the festival: all the films, and correspondingly most of the buzz, had premiered by the time I was more than half a week into my quarantine, and the presence of almost every film online (save for the notable exception of e.g. Past Lives, the narrative film I was most looking forward to catching up with) could have enabled an even broader viewing schedule than last year, where I was successful in watching all of the films from the NEXT section. But, whether it be the COVID brain fog or an ever-greater disconnect from the festival atmosphere because of the knowledge of all that I was missing, I only caught up with a handful of films in the final weekend of the festival, partly racing, partly strolling against the clock, all from an even more tightly curated selection than before. (I am also obviously writing this long after the end of the festival, so these reviews will unfortunately be much sparser than I had planned.)

The bulk of this viewing came from the resurrected New Frontier section, and I began with Gush, the feature debut of Fox Maxy, whose shorts have rapidly gained recognition over the past few years (which I have not had the pleasure of seeing). Running a slim 71-minute film, it incorporates enough footage to fill several much longer films, drawn from Maxy’s personal archive of a decade of constantly shooting many of her day-to-day interactions. The footage comes fast, often not providing enough to create a context, though several scenes to recur, including a car-bound conversation with two of Maxy’s nieces about a somewhat predatory older man which was apparently filmed two weeks(!) before the festival began.

Coupled with the fast blur of footage is the use of deliberately intrusive animations, especially skeletons shadowboxing, an experimental theater performance that contextualizes some of the more outré images, and specific meta-film devices, including a nifty use of anonymous stock footage with Maxy’s videos playing on the monitor. Though this is the official world premiere of Gush, it has apparently shown before, including at a public work-in-progress screening at the Museum of Modern Art last Halloween, and will continue to be revised in each of its future showings. In this present incarnation and likely all others, there’s a certain shapelessness that the pell-mell, go-for-broke chaos of the haphazard images and editing encourages. This is of course built into the film and remains compelling on a moment-to-moment basis, but the overall experience grows monotonous, and the deliberate placement of the final scene, in which an emcee at a party thanks Maxy for the use of her footage playing on monitors, feels a tad self-satisfied for something ostensibly so communal.

Another selection from New Frontier, Last Things by the section’s most tenured member Deborah Stratman, is the director’s first feature since her landmark The Illinois Parables, and falls into the mid-length category at just 50 minutes. Unlike that film, which from my memory deals with fairly specific instances of folklore, this largely follows intersecting strands centered around the literal evolution of rocks, featuring a heavy use of voiceover by the French filmmaker Valérie Massadian; comparisons have been made with “La jetée” but the science fiction/nature dichotomy made me think much more of the work of Ben Rivers, which has always toed a border between hypnotic and didactic. While the scientific aspect here is more foregrounded, with footage of laboratories, the play between the question of whether the narrated events are the beginning of this world or the next characterizes the pleasingly diffuse nature of the film.

Probably the film’s greatest asset is Stratman’s photography; for whatever reason her 16mm images, which form one of the crucial components of Thom Andersen’s masterpiece Los Angeles Plays Itself, have always held a certain grain density for me that automatically enliven whatever they capture. It’s especially interesting to see the way she films Petra (footage not shot for the project, it should be noted), revivifying the old stomping grounds of Henry Jones, Senior and Junior. I can’t say much else really stuck with me, but I look forward to revisiting this sometime down the line.

Stratman’s film also played with the Filipino short film “It’s Raining Frogs Outside” by Maria Estela Paiso that premiered in Berlin all the way back in 2021; its title provides the literal backdrop. It begins in enormously promising territory, using stop-motion and voiceover to sketch out its main character’s backstory, but then becomes an interesting yet viscerally unappealing (thanks to some icky CGI) story about evolution in a semi-apocalyptic milieu. One animated moment, which features a very upsetting encounter with a cockroach, came up in my memory when I watched the following film that night and made me think that that feature and this short had been paired, a quirk of film festival viewing happenstance.

That film (whose cockroach scene is thankfully much less graphic) was the first I caught up with in my much-less comprehensive survey of the NEXT section: Fremont, the fourth feature by Babak Jalali. I haven’t seen any of his past work, but it sounds like something of a departure, both in its subject matter — a portrait of an Afghan translator who has moved to the Bay Area city — and its aesthetic, which features a frankly gorgeous deployment of Academy digital black-and-white. Donya (Anaita Wali Zada) lives in a housing complex populated by other immigrants from her native country, many of whom regard her suspicion due to her past work with the government. She instead finds some measure of solace in various denizens of the area, including her coworkers at a fortune cookie factory in Chinatown and a psychiatrist, played in a wonderful supporting turn by Gregg Turkington.

In general, there’s a generosity to Jalali’s approach to his characters, almost always keeping things lightly humorous and leaving him free to pursue tangents powered by the more bit characters. Some of these, especially centering around the affable factory owner, are much more effective than others, including a montage of people receiving Donya’s fortune cookie messages that inexplicably includes Boots Riley in a cameo. But this coasts along well, and if the final passage — following Donya as she drives long-distance for a possible date, encountering a mechanic played by Jeremy Allen White along the way — succumbs to some of Jalali’s weaker/laxer narrative and conversational tendencies, the final punchline is appropriately bittersweet.

The best film I saw at Sundance, Passages directed by Ira Sachs, has its own narrative issues, but largely overcomes them thanks to the powerhouse presence of Franz Rogowski, further cementing his place as one of the best actors around. As Tomas, a film director who — despite being married to Martin (Ben Whishaw) — begins having an affair with Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos), he largely defines the roiling rhythms of a fundamentally classical story, that of a man whose capricious and wandering eye destroys his relationships. At only 91 minutes, its fundamental issue is its length, moving possibly too swiftly between partners even as Rogowski does his best to sell his seesawing, self-involved ardor for one or the other.

Despite his long career, I haven’t seen any of Sachs’s films before, which only makes me more inclined to see this as a banner entry in the Saïd Ben Saïd catalogue, whose résumé as producer (Verhoeven, Lapid, Garrel, Mendonça Filho etc.) forms one of the most essential auteurist studies of the past decade. Aside from the forthrightly Parisian setting, which makes the presence of both the German Rogowski and the English Whishaw amusingly incongruous, Passages fits in well with the peculiar recurrence of quietly domineering protagonists, people whose force of personality comes out more in pointed barbs than in raised voices. The sensuality and heartbreak emitted helps carry this through the awkward narrative structure, as do a number of quite erotic sex scenes (though Sachs’s disinterest in Exarchopoulos could scarcely be more palpable).

The third and last film in New Frontier was A Common Sequence, co-directed by Mary Helena Clark and Mike Gibisser in their feature debuts; I had seen the former’s short “Figure Minus Fact” but otherwise wasn’t familiar with either’s work. This takes something of a loose triptych structure, all examining the intersection of nature, work, and science: the regenerative potential of the achoque salamander in Pátzcuaro, Mexico; the use of mechanized apple pickers in the Yakima Valley in Washington, the study of DNA in South Dakota. In large part, this adopts a fairly traditional verite documentary form for better or worse, plenty of handheld observation with some interviews laid in via voiceover, but the transitions between parts can be fascinating: in particular, a Mexican worker’s mention of his friend trying to find work in America, specifically Washington, triggers the leap to the apple orchards a few scenes later.

But every so often, A Common Sequence will throw in a wildly abstract image, especially of machines and interfaces, that considerably enlivens the circumstances. The first and last significant shots arguably make the film an overall success all by themselves: they both capture a group of Mexican fisherman in distinct ways. In the first, they are coming back to a lake’s shores in darkness, illuminating the frame with only their headlamps, as snatches of conversations and dogs barking are heard. The latter features the opposite motion, and as the shot stretches out, the slow fade to night and the emergence is stars is so odd on camera that I genuinely thought the background might be computer generated or even some kind of faux-matte painting; I can’t tell if it was just my state of mind at that particular moment, but it was perhaps the single most compelling thing I saw “at” Sundance.

My final film at the festival was in the NEXT section, and a film I prioritized specifically because of positive notices: The Tuba Thieves, the debut feature by Deaf filmmaker Alison O’Daniel. It is difficult to describe the film, other than to point out its structure of stories loosely related by the preeminence of sound: a group of people affected by the theft of tubas from Los Angeles high schools from 2011-13, people living in neighborhood under the roar of jumbo jets flying in and out of LAX, the first performance of “4’33”,” the last performance at the Deaf Club in San Francisco presided over by Bruce Baillie, and so on and so forth.

The highlight is, by design, the open captions, which are exceedingly delightful in their wit: providing humorous descriptions of even the most routine sounds, giving actual decibel measurements, stretching out words as they get longer and longer, and so on and so forth. Indeed, I feel a bit churlish for liking this less than I wish I did; O’Daniel provides a great deal of invention from scene to scene, and I’m not usually one to fault a film for its narrative incoherency. But there’s too much packed into here, and the ending in particular feels like an especially arbitrary note, a return to an already extraneous storyline that sheds little further light. That summed up my abbreviated Sundance in a nutshell: all the films I saw were good and interesting, but none felt free from compromise.