Everyone, from academia to streaming services, divides cinema into two groups: movies (comedy, romance, horror, whatever) and documentaries, lumped together in one unholy heap. In addition to being obviously reductionist, the division is false: nonfiction films can be comedies, romances, horror, or any other genre, and they can also create unspeakable new genres. But American audiences still tend to receive documentaries of only a few types: true crime stories, cult exposés, hagiographies, and educational disquisitions filled with talking heads.
There's more to nonfiction than that. And while Sundance features plenty of light, star-driven biopics (celebrities on the carpet create much-needed social media attention), there are plenty of other nonfiction works on offer, some of which are coming to theaters now streaming services. over the next year or two. A couple of lucky films may even compete for the Oscar.
The documentaries at this year's Sundance, which concluded Sunday, spanned the genre map, often playfully mixing up conventions. But it was surprising how often one thread in particular kept coming up: the human longing to communicate with the dead and the lengths we will go to (technological and otherwise) to achieve it.
That was the theme of “Love Machina” and “Eternal You,” which were chosen by the programmers to complement each other. “Love Machina” (directed by Peter Sillen) is a romance that examines the efforts of married couple Martine and Bina Rothblatt to create a robotic replica of Bina, powered by artificial intelligence and an extensive database of her thoughts, words and emotions, which She can communicate with her descendants when she is gone. “Eternal You” (directed by Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck) takes a broader, more analytical look at the burgeoning market for “afterlife technology” designed to do what the Rothblatts hope to achieve: allow people to communicate with their loved ones. loved ones after death using artificial intelligence. If this sounds like an episode of “Black Mirror,” you're right, and some participants in “Eternal You” note the danger of upsetting humanity in this quest.
But as eminent sociologist Sherry Turkle points out on screen, what we see in these efforts is that AI offers what religion once did: a sense of afterlife, a search for meaning, the feeling of connecting with transcendence. . One of the best documentaries of the festival, the sociological portrait “Look Into My Eyes,” taps into this same longing from a more mystical direction. Directed by Lana Wilson, the film takes audiences into the lives of several New York City psychics. Clients expect to communicate with their dead loved ones through a literal rather than technological medium. (A participant helps people communicate with their pets, some of whom are still alive.) But the focus is on the psychics themselves, the reasons they come to their work, and what they believe they are really doing in their sessions. and the film is wonderfully nuanced and fascinating in its examination. Is this performance? It's real”? And if it brings peace to the living, does it matter?
Other documentaries focused on people trying to connect with each other across social barriers, like the much-loved “Will & Harper,” with Will Ferrell. There was the surprising, rebellious “Union,” directed by Brett Story and Stephen Maing, about the Amazon Labor Union’s organizing work at the JFK8 fulfillment center on Staten Island. It is a radically observational documentary, capturing years of effort amid the complex dynamics of solidarity, with working-class New Yorkers spending time alongside young organizers who take jobs downtown explicitly to lead the unionization drive. And it's brilliant.
“Sugarcane,” a sobering community portrait directed by Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie, traces the aftermath of the Roman Catholic Church boarding school for indigenous children in Canada by tracing generational trauma. Instead of preaching about the topic, the directors let their subjects slowly fill out the outlines while reminding us that these same stories have been replicated across North America and have only just begun to be researched. Elsewhere, Shiori Ito's memoir, “Black Box Diaries,” chronicles the director's daring and brutal investigation into her own sexual assault at the hands of a prominent Japanese journalist. The ways in which the powerful thwart the investigation are a damning statement about why and how these cases are so difficult to solve. (Ito won her case, but the problems are much bigger than those in Japan.)
And I can't help but think of the remarkable “Soundtrack of a Coup” (by Johan Grimonprez), a lengthy film that is a well-researched essay on the 1960s regime change in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the part that United States The States, particularly the CIA, played an important role, especially in taking advantage of the cultural prestige of jazz musicians, often without their knowledge, to promote the image of the United States abroad.
All of these movies are worth seeking out as soon as they become available. But I'll tell you the truth: the documentary that feels most destined to live in my memory is the first one I saw this year at Sundance, a project that defies genre by any definition. “Ibelin,” directed by Benjamin Ree, is about Mats Steen, a Norwegian who died in 2014, at age 25, from a rare degenerative genetic condition. He left a blog and a password, and when his parents logged in to post about his death, they discovered something surprising: he had a rich community and life in his World of Warcraft guild, where he played a character called Ibelin.
Ree employed animators to recreate scenes from Steen's life in World of Warcraft, drawing on a huge archive of transcripts detailing his conversations and activities. Ree also visits some of Steen's real-life friends, who are located across Europe and have immensely moving stories to tell. An excellent pairing with the 2022 Sundance premiere “We Met in Virtual Reality,” “Ibelin” is a poignant counterexample to the technodoomerism that often accompanies relationships formed in virtual spaces.
Some documentaries can be difficult to locate after their festival run, as they rarely get the money and marketing push that their fictional cousins do. Luckily, Netflix bought “Ibelin.” Which means you'll also be able to connect with Steen's story, through the ubiquitous technology of your own screen.
