Despite the infamously collegial atmosphere of Park City, where cast and crew apparently pack the world premieres and perhaps contribute at least a little to the notoriously hyperbolic hype, I wasn’t able to attend any public screenings at Sundance this year, sticking to press screenings out of relative convenience and scheduling complications. So it was somewhat amusing for my sole public screening to take place instead at Slamdance, the festival initially established in 1995 as a response to the growing mainstream nature of its much larger counterpart. Unlike Critics’ Week or Directors’ Fortnight with respect to Cannes, to my knowledge Slamdance has seldom been perceived as an inherent part of the Sundance festival experience, instead mostly existing as its own entity, lasting a week with no press screenings and full online accessibility for a nominal (by film festival standards) fee.

I obviously can’t speak about the degree to which Slamdance has preserved its imprimatur of independence, but it was interesting to hear that this was the first time in many years that it was held at the Yarrow, a DoubleTree hotel located in the same plaza as the multiplex where Sundance’s press screenings are held; apparently the Yarrow used to be a longtime Sundance locale, either for screenings or logistics, and the new repurposing may herald some kind of new move towards integration. More immediately apparent were the screening conditions; I only went inside one of the two theaters, but it felt surprisingly (not unpleasantly) ad hoc, a long hall full of individually placed dining room chairs.

In that setting, I saw a paired short and feature from the Unstoppable section, dedicated to films by filmmakers with disabilities. Radha Mehta’s “Dosh” was first, a 16-minute portrait of an Indian-American hard-of-hearing housewife attending her family member’s pre-wedding ceremony while struggling with her husband’s refusal to seek treatment for his worsening bipolar condition. The short never gets better than its opening shot, a nice wide shot of her house as she does laundry in the garage, the yellow light leading into an impromptu dance number. From there, the film falls into fairly surface-level depictions of the fraught relationship between generations in Asian society, culminating in a few absurd plot turns that the intimate final scenes can’t wash away.

The accompanying narrative feature was Good Bad Things by Shane D. Stanger, starring his childhood friend Danny Kurtzman, who has muscular dystrophy. In the film, Danny is a graphic designer living in Los Angeles with his friend, caretaker, and business partner Jason (Brett Dier), and is vying for a contract with a online dating company looking to refresh its brand image. Partly for research purposes, he begins using the app and meets Madi (Jessica Parker Kennedy), a free-spirited photographer who he quickly falls for, in the process coming to terms with his relationship with his body and state of existence.

For better or worse, Good Bad Things follows the arc of quality implied by its title. It initially begins with a welcome sense of humor about itself, recognizing the limitations of Danny’s movement and interactions while also taking the time to observe him speeding in his wheelchair along beautiful beachside streets, or stoically parked in a corner of a house party for hours on end. Jason aids immensely with this lightness of tone, an endearing goofball totally dedicated to his friend’s happiness, making it known through good-natured ribbing and impressive physical pratfalls.

The film runs into greater trouble the more it falls into sincere yet formulaic drama. The tentative beginnings of Danny and Madi’s courtship are cute, with an on-point emulation of Tinder’s user interface; however, it’s notable that this is literally the only match that Danny gets, and his initial decision to crop his wheelchair out of his profile photo gets no pushback whatsoever, two streamlining choices that avoid nastiness but make the film nevertheless feel strangely under-conceived and tentative. That feeling only deepens after a series of seesaw swings between acceptance and discomfort, predicated on rote storytelling beats; Good Bad Things‘s shift into bathos coincides very neatly with a stark tamping down on any comedic elements, especially in a shift away from Jason’s presence. This isn’t to say that the film leans more towards the latter half of its title; by the end, the two impulses reach a conventional but still satisfying ending. However, my feeling of untapped potential outweighed the highly positive crowd around me.

I didn’t have time to watch any of the most admired films at Slamdance in person or online, but I did watch all of the films that played in the Experimental Shorts program, both out of curiosity and to fill the void created by the substantial curtailing of Sundance’s New Frontier program. Last year, the three films selected there were all works by significant artists—Fox Maxy, Mary Helena Clark & Gibisser, Deborah Stratman—and formed the bulk of my most fascinating viewing experiences; this year, there were only two, with the more notable being a partly-AI generated Brian Eno documentary that wasn’t available online.

For convenience’s sake, I’ll be writing about them in alphabetical order, which both mirrored my own viewing order and offered some interesting, if not always flattering points of comparison. The first was “Entrance Wounds” by Calum Walter, one of the most ambitious works in the program by virtue of its multi-pronged examination of American gun culture, finding its grounding primarily in a few pointed images: the director holding a Guns & Ammo magazine in a supermarket like an actual pistol, a shattered car window, and rapidly accumulating snow in a backyard. The connections between each nodal point could sometimes be tenuous, but it arrives at an appropriately disquieting place.

Two excavations of the past followed, the former being the much more straightforward “Goddess of Speed,” directed by Frédéric Moffet. An attempt to “reimagine” a lost 1963 film listed in Andy Warhol’s filmography as either “Dance Movie” or “Rollerskate,” it is mostly composed of newly shot 16mm footage of a rollerskating performer acting as the original dancer Fred Herko, who died the following year; these split-screen black-and-white sequences are intercut with exterior building views in color. The result could occasionally feel a bit confused, neither acting as a full-on recreation of Warhol’s work or evoking what may have been Herko’s inner life, and the short eight-minute duration offers little chance for this to entirely develop.

More successful was “Light of Light” by Neritan Zinxhiria, easily my favorite of the slate. In many ways, its avowed simplicity is its greatest virtue, centered as it is upon the thousands of photographic plates made by a monk who lived in the monastic state of Mount Athos, which has laid mostly undisturbed since Byzantine times, ninety years ago. Interweaved with Super 8 footage shot by Zinxhiria, the effect is ghostly and out-of-time above all else, in many ways resembling the modus operandi of Mark Jenkin’s work. The scenes of monks going about their work, as captured in grainy black-and-white, feels as if it could have come from the silent era if it weren’t for extensive sound mixing. More concerned with mood than anything else, the unity of its conception and subject matter nevertheless made it my personal highlight.

This fully conceived work was followed by two interesting if somewhat disconnected efforts. “Lotus-Eyed Girl,” directed by Rajee Samarasinghe, runs a compact 6 minutes, yet faces the highly unusual problem where its central motif—a young woman’s mouth slowly opening and releasing pomegranate seeds—is its least appealing. Even given its ambit as a free collage, predominately of archival images captured in black-and-white, it still contains the capacity to surprise, especially in a series of dazzling, prismatic floral patterns in color that intersect with these scenes from the past.

Avowedly less sensual was Teresita Carson’s “Monolith”, a video essay featuring a multitude of elements and voiceover relating to archeology and colonialism, which frequently spirals out into Google Earth footage and even the kind of Internet kitsch 3D images featured in Fox Maxy’s Gush from last year. Its avowed anti-museum stance was surprisingly frank, though the trail of ideas that led there from the extensive hike that opens the film was less concentrated.

The last three films, unfortunately, all dealt in one way or another with the digital world and were uniformly the weakest. The first, Joseph Wilcox’s “Nobody Wants to Fix Things Anymore,” ran just four minutes, utilizing AI images and speech in conjunction with original video to tell the vaguely inane story of a self-styled fixer of broken things. The droning nature of the voiceover and images, especially with the knowledge of its generation, is counterproductive at best, encapsulated by a shrug of an ending.

Slightly better was “Nowhere Stream” by Luis Grane, an animated short (with some nice live-action shots of the LA River) about a largely featureless man beset by a series of disturbing occurrences on the Internet and/or at his computer, including morphing keyboards, videos of many copies of his head floating down a river, and the like. The deliberately bland nature of many of these unpleasant images sometimes pays dividends, mostly when juxtaposed with natural beauty encroached upon by urban development, but that only goes so far given the weak stabs at topicality.

Last, and regrettably least, was “Welcome to the Enclave,” directed by Sarah Lasley, seemingly filmed inside a Second Life-esque online game populated by live-action actresses. Designed as a crowdfunding video for two sisters who have created an online utopia for women on a virtual street known as The Enclave, it quickly goes haywire as anonymous trolls donate so that they can plaster memes and pornography on the walls of the houses. What goes crucially unaddressed, however, is the nature of these near-parodic, garishly White middle-class aspirations, conveyed through insipid marketing speak and appropriations of Eastern spirituality writ large. The result is a world where no one looks good, which wouldn’t be a problem if not for the seemingly sincere depiction of these women and their dreams throughout, which leads to a serious clash in intentions that does not appear to have been intended. Only the concluding long tracking shot through the houses as they clip in and out of a mountain offers something that genuinely engages with the chosen medium.