The Last Dance: A Sundance of Solidarity and Truth
Every Sundance leaves an impression on me — no, more than that. It feels like a permanent mark etched into my soul. Of course, there’s the snow, the crowded Main Street cafés, the films and conversations that linger long after you leave Park City. But there’s always something more — something that awakens me to […]
Sundance 2026: Holding the Line — Biljana Tutorov and Petar Glomazić on “To Hold a Mountain”
Gara, the guiding force at the center of “To Hold a Mountain,” is living proof that not all heroes wear capes. Her days begin before sunrise — herding sheep across vast alpine pastures, making cheese by hand, and protecting the land she calls home. Alongside this relentless labor, she is raising young Nada to be […]
Sundance 2026: “Take Me Home” — Liz Sargent on Caregiving, Disability, and Imagining a More Supportive World
When “Take Me Home” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, it arrived not only as an intimate debut feature but as the expansion of a story Liz Sargent has been living with — and refining — for years. Adapted from her acclaimed short film of the same name, which also screened at Sundance in 2023, […]
Sundance 2026: How Inuk filmmaker Lindsay Aksarniq McIntyre Made a Sundance Film From Caribou and Lichen
Lindsay Aksarniq McIntyre is an Indigenous experimental filmmaker based in Canada with a filmography spanning over 40 short films almost exclusively shot on 16mm film. Her work is deeply personal, giving her an artistic pathway to deal with struggles, learn new ways of being, and experiment with ways to connect to her land and ancestors. […]
Sundance 2026: Finding Barbara Hammer—A Late Awakening to Queer Experimentation
Barbara Hammer once said, “If we’re experimenting with our lives and the way we’re going to live, our film and our art should also be experimental. It breaks tradition, and makes you think in a broader way. It’s the way I experience the world.” I’ve been carrying that quote with me lately, especially as I […]
Sundancing on My Own: My Four Extraordinary Days in Park City
Sundance has always been a festival I had admired at a distance. How Robert Redford had gone about using his platform to launch the careers of countless filmmakers for over four decades had always left me in awe. So many of my favorite films had premiered at Redford’s festival nestled in the snow-capped mountains of […]
An Aliveness Behind the Eyes: Shuchi Talati and Preeti Panigrahi on “Girls Will Be Girls”
I have always had a fondness for coming of age films that vividly recall how intense our emotions are during pivotal moments of growth and transition. In many ways, we as humans are coming of age throughout our entire lives. It is an experience not merely confined to our adolescence, and that is a truth […]
Sundance 2025: “April,” “The Ugly Stepsister,” and “Are You Scared to Be Yourself Because You Think That You Might Fail?”
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 […]
Sundance 2025: Megan Griffiths and Mindie Lind on “View from the Floor”
Sometimes you just need a best friend to collaborate with to bring something beautiful and meaningful into the world. It’s tiring and painful for me to see women who feel they have to make it on their own to be considered valuable in the work they do. But there is magic in a community. One […]
Cinema Femme at Sundance Day 4: Happening, Alice, Hatching and Nanny
Happening The two best films I’ve seen thus far in 2022 won acclaim on the festival circuit last year prior their premieres at Sundance, and both happen to be astonishingly vivid portraits of female identity: Joaquim Trier’s “The Worst Person in the World” and Audrey Diwan’s “Happening,” the latter of which won the top prize […]
Cinema Femme at Sundance Day 2: Watcher, The Princess, Master, FRESH
Watcher During yesterday’s excellent female filmmaker panel moderated by The Atlantic’s Shirley Li, I noticed a foreign poster for Stanley Donen’s “Charade”—the greatest Hitchcock thriller that Hitch never made—hanging on the wall of filmmaker Chloe Okuno. Sure enough, Donen’s classic plays a significant role in Okuno’s excruciatingly tense feature debut about a New Yorker, Julia (Maika […]
Zeina Durra delves into her dreamy Sundance film ‘Luxor’
NOW STREAMING Sundance Interview from February 4, 2020. What I love the most about dreams is that they can take you into worlds that you’ve never visited, introduce you to people you’d normally never meet, and make you feel at home in an unfamiliar world. In a dream, there are pieces of a world that […]