For the first time since its inception, this year’s Sundance Film Festival iteration has not been held in picturesque Park City, Utah. Due to the ongoing pandemic, the window was transformed into a virtual event. Promising directors were still available to showcase their work, but viewers were able to watch them from the comfort of their living rooms. It wasn’t just the way the films were presented that changed. The pandemic has also affected the amount of films made and what they are about.
The change is most obvious in films that are explicitly about the pandemic, of which there are several. For example, Nowadays is a short film starring Marianne Rendón and William Jackson Harper as two young men in their 20s in New York fighting during the early quarantine stages. Harper’s character is a cultural journalist who tells stories about Zoom orgies, while Rendón is an aspiring dancer who feels like she is falling behind since she can no longer dance. At one point, her best friend complains that she misses the first few days of toilet paper accumulation and Tiger King marathon series. It looks like a time capsule from the beginning of 2020: much of the film takes place on Zoom calls, and director Adam Brooks says that each actor received a package of equipment so they could shoot from their apartments.
At the other end of the spectrum is In the same breath, a documentary by director Nanfu Wang (perhaps best known for 2019 Nation of a child), which presents an agonizing account of the early stages of the pandemic in Wuhan, China, the city where things started. Wang managed to obtain cameras inside several hospitals in the city to obtain first-hand reports of patients and their families. He paints a worrying picture of hospitals that were overworked and unprepared for the scale of infections and a government that does not want to admit guilt. Wang, who was born in China but lives in America, turns his attention to the United States, where a similar pattern emerges. Even as someone who has been following the pandemic news closely since the beginning, I still discovered In the same breath a revealing experience.
(One of Sundance’s most impressive films, The pink cloud, is about living a confined life, but, surprisingly, it was written in 2017 and filmed in 2019, long before COVID dominated our lives. It’s scarily prescient.)
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In other films, the impact is more subtle. The disorienting horror movie In the land it is set in a world devastated by a deadly virus, but it serves mainly as a backdrop for a much stranger story about a fight against nature itself. Early on, you see people wearing masks and hand washing. But eventually, it all goes away as the story moves in a very different direction, centered on mythological creatures. Still, even these brief inclusions – things so common in everyday life now – serve to support a film that would otherwise be manic. The same goes for Seekers, a documentary on online dating, where there are many images of masked people roaming the streets of New York. It doesn’t really influence the stories people tell about their romantic lives. It is scenery more than anything.
The dramatic comedy How it ends it is not about the pandemic at all, but it is clear that directors Daryl Wein and Zoe Lister-Jones had to find creative ways to get around the distance restrictions. The story is playfully somber. With an asteroid programmed to destroy Earth, Liza (played by Lister-Jones) embarks on a little adventure to solve some loose ends in her life: revealing to her parents how the absence made her feel, reconnecting with a lost friend, scolding an ex who cheated and ending with a hopefully hedonistic party.
It is not a Purgestyle situation, however. This pre-apocalyptic film is surprisingly quiet, while Liza wanders the almost empty streets of Los Angeles and stands almost two meters from almost everyone. Strangely, it works. You notice the distance and the emptiness, but you also put a greater focus on the characters and their performances, which are almost uniformly excellent. The limitations do not end up disturbing the overall experience.
Of course, it’s no surprise that the biggest story of 2020 has impacted the world of cinema. The pandemic has changed the way we all live and has changed our relationship with entertainment. But what has been fascinating at Sundance is seeing the many ways creators have dealt with it – whether it’s the stories they tell or the logistical challenges of actually making a film. And with things not changing anytime soon, it’s likely that this year’s Sundance was just a preview of the next few years of film.