Sundance 2024

In this early highlight of 2024, Belgian archival maestro Grimonprez dissects the links between jazz and colonial politics during the Western sabotage of Congo’s newly won independence in 1960. With superb sound design, brilliant editing and hard-hitting political analysis (as well as great music), the film is as intellectually satisfying and physically irresistible as a great jazz performance.

Belgium-based Moldovan filmmaker Olga Lucovnicova, whose debut My Uncle Tudor won both the Golden Bear for Best Short Film at Berlinale 2021 and the European Film Award, world-premieres her latest short at Sundance. The new film tells the story of a strange non-human creature that was found in 1996 in a region of Russia shrouded in mystery, 1700km east of Moscow. Lucovnicova explains more to BDE.

A powerful, provocative and ultimately moving film from journalist-turned-filmmaker Shiori Ito, Black Box Diaries charts her brave and determined investigation into her own sexual assault as she attempts to prosecute her high-profile and very-well connected offender, despite a lack of formal interest from the police.

His parents used to regret how much time their terminally ill son Mats spent gaming. But after his death, they found that Mats, as ‘Private Detective Ibelin’, had been a much-loved member of a large and deeply loyal online community. Sure to be a crowd-pleaser, Ibelin is an accessible and moving account of the freedom, love and consolation that can be found in a digital world – especially for those of us in need of support in an offline world of sorrow and grief.

Do you remember when tech start-ups would find you a place to stay for the night, or locate a taxi just a minute away, or deliver you a burger? Just to make the business of living that little bit easier. Well, now start-ups are dealing in death, enabling grieving folk to communicate with AI-generated versions of their deceased loved ones, via web chat or VR. “[People] don't believe in God anymore…but at the same time, they can't deal with the fact that death is finite,” co-director Moritz Riesewieck tells BDE. “And these tech companies have a big chance to fill this gap.”

Silje Evensmo Jacobsen’s emotionally-charged documentary follows the family of Norwegian photographer Maria Gros Vatne as they deal with the bitter new reality of her untimely death from cancer. Her friend’s passing hit Jacobsen very hard as well, at which point the director decided she “had to make something from [Vatne’s] universe,” she tells Business Doc Europe.

Twenty docs are selected for Sundance’s World Cinema and US Documentary Competitions, while non-fiction features prominently in Next, Premieres and Episodic. “Curation is Sundance’s secret sauce and we’re energized by the range of films, stories and artists we’ve watched and selected from around the world,” comments Eugene Hernandez, Director, Sundance Film Festival and Public Programming.