Sundance 2024

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.

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.

A compulsively absorbing and gripping documentary that plays out like a tense political thriller, War Game puts a bipartisan group of US defence, intelligence, and elected policymakers spanning five presidential administrations into a room and gives them just six hours to save American democracy.

An insightful, generous and supportive reframing of transmasculine sexuality, Jules Rosskam’s Sundance documentary Desire Lines astutely blends first-person interviews (with transmen who are attracted to men) alongside a fictional storyline that poses nuanced questions and helps to deliver a compassionate examination both of the history of transsexuality and private desires.

Norway came up trumps at Sundance 2024 where A New Kind of Wilderness won the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize: Documentary, while Ibelin received The Directing Award and The Audience Award in the same section. The U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Doc went to Porcelain War, while Daughters won the Festival Favourite Award and US Doc Audience Award. The Belgian doc Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat won the World Cinema Doc Special Jury Award for Cinematic Innovation.

The party atmosphere and spirited pageantry of the 2022 campaign for the Filipino presidency play in stark counterpoint to the vitriol, bitterness and oppression displayed by departing President Rodrigo Duterte as he bluntly and offensively dismisses the chances of his former Vice President Leni Robredo as she bids for the post.

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.