It’s Saturday, January 25th and today is my last day at my first in-person Sundance Film Festival. Writing from a sardined high top table at Atticus, where yesterday I met Conan O’Brien, the window’s view shows an endless barrage of snow accumulating outside. Skiers and film fans are trying not to slip. My salted maple latte feels fitting for this milieu, and I’m seated across from a young woman, a shorts filmmaker from Los Angeles. This scene of caffeinated ambition and impassioned impromptu conversations is the essence of this publication and this festival, as are the films that compose this dispatch: worldly stories that testify to the borderless beauty, power, horror, and humor found in the malleability and governance of the human body.
I started the festival off with a glowing success: Georgian writer-director Dea Kulumbegashvili’s affecting film, “April.” Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili) is a premiere OB/GYN who performs undocumented, unofficial abortions in the villages. When an investigation is opened into her practices after a stillbirth at the hospital, the stakes of her secretive trade become even more precarious.
Nina is a stoic woman, passionate in behavior and yet quiet in disposition. April’s script is sparse, allowing the direction to take center stage. Kulumbegashvili’s extremely long takes compel us into a state of true observation — of forced presence — that makes us witness her world in real time. It parallels the way we get transfixed in moments of fear, awe, or, even, inescapability, as many of these shots are viscerally disconcerting but of utmost importance to the film’s ethos.
Nina’s relationships with the men in the film — fellow doctors, fathers, and transients — blur the lines of submission and defense. At times, both seem to occur simultaneously, and it’s these scenes that are the most troublesome as Kulumbegashvili questions what autonomy really looks like. What’s the difference between true autonomy and simple pushback against submission? These things are not quite the same, and “April” utilizes Nina as its mournfully stolid, complex figure to beg the question.
Magical realism collides with sometimes unbearable reality in the film. An elusive hag wanders about cut-in vignettes, long shots of flora, fauna, mud, and rain color the community of the Georgian landscape and the psychic battle of the film, and stray cattle dogs holler and howl in the background much of the run time, making a score of their own. “April” investigates healthcare, autonomy, and femininity — the intersections of birth, death, and caregiving — with punchy groundedness. It’s a tale that defines unflinching filmmaking.
The female form is once again a warzone, though in much different fashion, in “The Ugly Stepsister,” a subverted Cinderella story by Norwegian filmmaker Emilie Kristine Blichfeldt. The film is a gross out foray into the nagging, gnashing teeth of insecurity. Elvira (Lea Mathilde Skar-Myren) daydreams of Prince Julian. She reads from his book of poems, yearning endlessly, and mourns that she doesn’t possess the beauty of her sister, or new stepsister, Agnes (read: Cinderella). When Elvira’s cruel, hard-edged mother marries Cinderella’s father, one day he drops dead, leaving the family penniless. The home then is transformed into a battleground for dominance of which only the most beautiful can come out on top.
As Elvira and her mother plot for the heart of the prince in preparation for the ball, the abuse of Cinderella ensues as they look to enshrine the beautiful, charismatic orphan within the walls of their castle. Meanwhile, Elvira’s desperate attempts to mollify her physical qualms range from painful and masochistic to outright grotesque. Skar-Myren, with affecting eyes built for this genre, portrays the hopeful, tragic Elvira with cannonball impact. Moving and monstrous, she showcases unbelievable dedication to her physical performance. With dogged determination, she dedicates herself to her ruthless dance instructor, primitive plastic surgery procedures, and parasitic solutions to naturally unattainable standards.
Blichfeldt’s fairy tale is animal: bloody, lusty, and disgustingly organic. She utilizes stunning tableaus of fanciful feasts, ballet numbers, and more to remind you that “The Ugly Stepsister” is the offspring of something graceful. However, this doesn’t make the film antithetical to its source material. Many set pieces in the film are gorgeous and romantic, but it’s the sudden, pulpy subversion via guts and bodily fluids that make the film stick. Using “The Ugly Stepsister” to pick apart desire and desirability and the lengths we’ll go to for class mobility, Blichfeldt scrutinizes the film’s central question: What really makes a fairy tale?
Bec Pecaut’s stunning short film “Are You Scared to Be Yourself Because You Think You Might Fail?” is not about the realization of fairy tales but the acceptance of longed for realities. Mad (Lio Mehiel) just got top surgery and their partner Kat (Sadie Scott) and mother Nora (Phyllis Ellis) are there to help them recover from the operation. But in this gender affirming journey, psychic and physical wounds present themselves.
While the film utilizes top surgery recovery as its central story, the true narrative is that of the relationships that compose the film. Mad is thrust into a period of heightened vulnerability. Seeking means of validation and care as well as assistance with typically everyday tasks (going to the bathroom, showering, taking things off high shelves, etc.), these physical and emotional needs are amplified, putting their relationship with their partner under new tension as the balance between needing and being needed slides the spectrum.
As these cracks seem to widen though, Pecaut’s film maintains thoughtful empathy for both positions. Fallibility with good intention, love shown through imperfect efforts — these are the columns that support Pecaut’s thesis. Though Mad and Kat’s relationship is one that, even in its stressors, is clearly affectionate and loving, it’s Mad and their mother, Nora, that provide the core of the film’s humor and heart.
The idea of complex parental relationships that can still be sources to fall back on is one that is tenderly examined in the short. This isn’t a redemption for the film’s romantic relationships, rather it’s a complement: a display of the peaks and valleys of both, and the acknowledgment that showing up looks different, but no variance of doing so can be ranked or scored objectively. Mad has an incredible support system, and Pecaut’s direction is warm and intimate. From close ups of details of the cozy family home to hand holding and gorgeous portraiture, “Are You Scared of Being Yourself Because You Think That You Might Fail?” is a 17-minute embrace of the errable, impassioned relationships that make us.
