Shortly after Donald J. Trump’s inauguration in January 2017, Tabitha Jackson, then director of the Sundance Institute Documentary Program, hosted the annual opening reception for documentary filmmakers at the festival in Park City, Utah. British Ms. Jackson, who is mixed race and gay, took the stage, knowing that many in the audience were uneasy about what had happened and what was to come.
She struggled to find words to convey what people were feeling. Instead, in a Samson reverse moment, she asked filmmaker Sandi Dubowski (“Shaking before Gd”) to start cutting her dreads, which she had been cultivating for 20 years. The crowd went crazy.
“It was a release of energy,” she said in a recent interview. “A non-verbal expression of something that needs to change around me as the leader of this program and around us as a community. A little warrior spirit and also a slight howl, because we didn’t know what was coming. “
Mrs. Jackson, 50, now finds herself as a leader in another time of greater uncertainty. She took over the direction of the Sundance Film Festival in February, just before the pandemic really set in the United States, and spent the past year spinning continuously to prepare for the 37th edition of the independent film showcase.
Scheduled to start on Thursday in an almost virtual environment (face-to-face exhibitions will take place in some art cinemas in 28 cities with fewer viruses, such as Atlanta, Houston and Memphis), Sundance 2021 is a grand experiment. This will allow those who have never been able to share the extravagance of the snow-ski town – because of the cost or remote location – to experience it for the first time. With set screening times for each film and live question and answer sessions to follow, Jackson and his team are trying to recreate the unique energy of Sundance, which has been the premier destination for American independent cinema for nearly four decades.
“It was initially depressing when we realized that we couldn’t run the festival the way we did before,” said Jackson. “But when we started planning, it became liberating when we thought, ‘Well, what can we do this year that we couldn’t do before?’”
The decision not to host the festival in Utah was made in June. But the organization had to change direction once again in December, when the growing number of coronaviruses in California led to the cancellation of a large number of drive-in tests that had been scheduled for the Rose Bowl.
“It’s been a roller coaster ride, but the tracks that keep us stable and safe are our purpose in producing independent films,” said Jackson. “We know why we are doing this.”
Mrs. Jackson joined Sundance in 2013, after spending more than 20 years in London working for the BBC and Channel 4 and producing works like Nick Cave’s “20,000 Days on Earth”, an almost documentary that intended to show a singular day in the independent cinema the life of the musician, full of invented events, filmed in fictional locations.
Those who know her often describe Mrs. Jackson as curious, open, and quick-witted. She is also committed to helping filmmakers.
“She could really host one of the main talk shows at dawn, she is so funny and witty,” said Diane Weyermann, director of content for Participant and former director of the Sundance documentary program. This year, Participant will premiere two films at Sundance: the documentary “My Name Is Pauli Murray” about a lawyer, activist and non-binary black poet who influenced Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Thurgood Marshall, and “Judas and the Black Messiah”, Warner Bros. film that tells the story of Fred Hampton, the president of the Illinois Black Panther Party.
Documentary filmmaker Davis Guggenheim (“An Inconvenient Truth”) brings three films to the festival with his Studio Concordia. He said that Jackson was bringing a welcome change to an institution that had not evolved much over the decades.
“I like that it is no longer just a festival for the few – the few people who could go, the few people who could get tickets,” he said. “It is a brave new world, and she is being brave.”
When he took over the documentary program, Jackson acknowledged that he did not want the genre to become “the domain of the elite”, open only to those who could spend years raising money and making films.
In 2015, Ms. Jackson conducted a question and answer session with debuting filmmaker Nanfu Wang in front of a number of investors. Ms. Wang was looking for funds to complete her film “Hooligan Sparrow”, which follows activists protesting the case of six elementary school girls who were sexually abused by their principal in China. Ms. Wang was forced to shoot clandestinely and smuggle the footage out of the country to complete the film.
Typically, filmmakers have a producer available to meet their project’s financial needs, but since Ms. Wang did not have one, Ms. Jackson led Q. and A. in order to introduce her to the appropriate funders. The discussion led her to receive the funds she needed to finish the job. Ms. Wang will premiere her fourth feature-length documentary, “In the Same Breath”, which follows Covid-19’s broadcast from Wuhan, China, to the United States at this year’s festival.
“Tabitha speaks like a philosopher,” said Wang. “I felt like she saw me, not only because I was making a film about Chinese human rights activists, but she cared a lot about my education and how I became who I am today.”
This ethos of trying to give a voice to those not always allowed to participate is personal to Ms. Jackson. A half-breed girl adopted by white parents who later divorced, Mrs. Jackson was raised in a village in rural England and learned to move between groups.
“I started to enjoy inhabiting the limit of things, the intermediate space,” she said when receiving an industry award in 2018. “What started as a survival mechanism is now my most comfortable place”.
This year’s seven-day truncated festival schedule illustrates these intermediate places. With 72 resources, below the usual 120, Sundance will feature films from a diverse group of creators: 50 percent are filmmakers, 51 percent are black filmmakers, 15 percent are directors who identify themselves as LGBTQ and 4 percent are non-binary.
The opening night film is by Ahmir Thompson, the Roots drummer known as Questlove. Titled “Summer of Soul (… Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Television)”, it is a documentary that accompanies the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, an event held to celebrate African American music that took place the same summer as Woodstock.
“Twenty minutes after Tabitha saw the film, she said that not only do we want the film, but also for the opening night and for the United States competition,” said a producer, Jon Kamen. “Usually, you don’t know right away. Normally, everything is a little bland. “
Jackson said that she and her team, led by programming director Kim Yutani, had to relaunch the festival for many creators who were suspicious that the virtual environment would not be a great way to debut their work. One person they didn’t have to convince was producer Nina Yang Bongiovi, who with her partner Forest Whitaker has had films competing at Sundance in five of the past seven years.
They will be there this year with “Passing” by the actress who became debut director Rebecca Hall. The film, set in 1920 and starring Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga, follows the story of two African American women who can “pretend” to be white.
“When I looked at the screen and saw Tabitha and Kim – two inclusive and diverse women – telling me and my team that our film is loved and embraced and, please come and be part of it, it meant a lot,” Ms. Yang Bongiovi talked about Zoom’s connection when the film was accepted.
Despite last year’s challenges, there were some benefits. Jackson managed to be quarantined most of the time in Connecticut with documentary filmmaker Kirsten Johnson (“Dick Johnson Is Dead”), whom she married last year at Sundance, on the first day of the festival. They recently bought a house with filmmaker Ira Sachs and artist Boris Torres, who are the parents of Johnson’s 9-year-old twins.
This gave Mrs. Johnson a front row seat for Jackson’s lawsuit.
“What’s interesting about Tabitha is that she has a lot of perspectives, considering where she comes from and what her life is like,” said Johnson. “She has an infinite curiosity about the permutations of racism around the world and the ways in which we fight against identity. I think there is a real sense of how to keep fighting for this new scenario and not be blinded by simple solutions. “