1 Oscar dreams
Even before the announcement of the Academy awards nominations this week, Utah — home of the Sundance film festival — was full of buzz about next year’s frontrunners. While no single picture has been talked about like Get Out or Call Me By Your Name were last year — both of those made the Oscar list, along with their fellow Sundance alumni Mudbound and The Big Sick — there have been plenty of stars garnering critical heat. These include Keira Knightley, Rupert Everett and Laura Dern, who plays the adult version of the director Jennifer Fox in her sexual abuse memoir The Tale, which received a standing ovation at the premiere.
2 Keira loves Colette
Speaking after the world premiere screening of Colette, Wash Westmoreland’s film about the French writer, Keira Knightley said she prepared for the role by reading most of Colette’s novels, including the Claudine books and The Vagabond, along with Judith Thurman’s biography Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette. Knightley shines in the role, which puts the writer’s sparky creativity and complex relationship with her husband, Willy (Dominic West), to the fore. She said: “She made sense to me very quickly, as soon as I got the script. Their relationship was so clear, it was just a joy.”
3 The Happy Prince is here . . . finally
The Sundance festival director John Cooper revealed that The Happy Prince, Rupert Everett’s film about the final years of Oscar Wilde, was the first they accepted to Sundance last summer. A six-month wait must have been a drop in the ocean for Everett’s passion project, which he began writing almost a decade ago. The end result — which he also stars in and directs — is ambitious, but flawed, although there’s no faulting his moving performance. Speaking at the Sundance Cinema Café, he said: “I realised quite early on I had a capacity to play Wilde quite well, because the structure of the sentences and the phrasing is quite long and they tend to be grandiose. If you don’t know how to glance off the dialogue and make it natural it becomes quite cumbersome and I always, for some reason, had that knack.”
4 The stream becomes a river
Once upon a time, you had to wait months to see a Sundance title if you weren’t at the festival. Now, thanks to streaming services, you can often see them at home — last year I Don’t Feel at Home in this World Anymore, the winner of the US fiction grand jury prize, arrived almost immediately. This year look out for, on Netflix, Josh Marston’s Come Sunday, the true story of a Pentecostal bishop facing a doctrinal crisis, featuring a compelling performance from Chiwetel Ejiofor, and, from Amazon, Gus Van Sant’s funny if fragmented Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot, starring Joaquin Phoenix as the recovering alcoholic cartoonist John Callahan, with Jonah Hill on award-worthy form as his sponsor.
5 Women are on the march
In the wake of the scandal surrounding Harvey Weinstein, once a fixture at the festival where he first showed Reservoir Dogs and Sex, Lies and Videotape, it’s good to see the programmers championing female voices. This year, 37 per cent of the films screening are directed by women, considerably more than the industry average, with only eight out of the top-grossing 100 films of 2017 helmed by female directors. Women also made their presence felt outside the cinema, with hundreds — including Jane Fonda and Tessa Thompson, the star of Thor: Ragnarok — ignoring a foot of newly fallen snow and sub-zero temperatures to join a Respect Rally in Park City, Utah, where the festival is held.
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6 Diversity is paramount
If #MeToo is high on the agenda here, so is the issue of race, and the festival has featured a number of black and Asian directors, including Idris Elba (making his feature debut with the British crime flick Yardie) and the Zambian-born Welsh director Rungano Nyoni (I Am Not a Witch). My highlight was Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You, a blistering satire starring Lakeith Stanfield as an African-American call-centre worker who discovers he can sell a lot more by “speaking white” (in one of many pointed jokes he is told this should not be “Will Smith white”). Riley goes all in, also tackling slave labour and dumbed-down culture, while adding Armie Hammer as a drug-fuelled, corporate-slave boss and even a fantasy element for good measure. Definitely worth the bother.
7 A US accent is something to chew on
The rising Irish star Barry Keoghan (Dunkirk, The Killing of a Sacred Deer) revealed his unusual technique for perfecting an American twang in Bart Layton’s American Animals, which deconstructs a real-life heist. Keoghan said: “It wasn’t easy, believe me. Bart said, ‘It’s all right’, but I’d say, ‘No, no’, and I’d stick a cork back in my mouth and practise. I had this weird method of getting my accent by chewing on stuff.” He spoke in the accent continuously, on and off-set, during the eight-week shoot and his hard work pays off — American Animals is an intriguing hybrid, part gripping thriller, part sharp portrait of toxic masculinity.
8 Fact is stranger than fiction
Sundance always features a strong documentary line-up — three-fifths of the new Oscar nominees, Strong Island, Last Men in Aleppo and Icarus, had their world premieres here last January. The crop at this year’s festival includes stories that are so incredible they sound made up. Take Tim Wardle’s Three Identical Strangers, about identical triplets who were separated at birth, only to stumble across one another at 19. That would be enough for most documentaries, but it’s just the tip of a sinister iceberg that becomes increasingly chilling as their adoptions are revealed to be far from the simple stories they first appeared.
9 Kelly Macdonald is puzzling
In Marc Turtletaub’s Puzzle, Kelly Macdonald puts in a strong performance as a housewife who begins to find independence after discovering . . . a love of jigsaws. Like many of the female-led films this year, the role is refreshingly cliché-free, showing the strength of Macdonald’s character despite outward appearances of fragility. When asked at the premiere if she was a natural at puzzles, the Scottish star said: “I’m really embarrassed to admit it didn’t even occur to me to do one before I started filming.” By the end of the shoot she was hooked, becoming “puzzle pen-pals” with a crew member. “We send each other pictures of the puzzles that we’ve done,” she said, quickly adding: “I don’t glue them together or anything . . . I’m not mad.”
10 Directing is dangerous
“Those people who are filmed, they are ready to get killed for religion. Me? I am ready to get killed for cinema — it’s my religion,” Talal Derki said of risking his life for his latest documentary, Of Fathers and Sons. The Syrian director gave up the safety of his home and family in Berlin to embed himself with a family of Islamist extremists in Syria for the film. He focuses on the family’s two sons, aged 13 and 12, painting a heartbreaking picture of radicalisation that begins almost at the cradle and is likely to end all too soon with a grave.