Good morning 🐣

There were a couple factors at the beginning of this year that made me want to start writing this newsletter. One of them was the Sundance Film Festival. It’s been held virtually for the last two years in a row due to COVID, which means I’ve actually been able to attend. Something once prohibitively expensive became democratized overnight.

Here are my thoughts on some of the films I watched during January’s event, as well as when you might be able to see them:

In this Finnish film, the cracks in a seemingly idyllic family begin to show after the mother cruelly kills a bird that’s ruined her latest social media video. Her tween daughter, burdened with heavy expectations in her gymnastics competitions, brings home and nurtures the dead bird’s egg, which quickly balloons to an obscene size. What both literally and metaphorically hatches is tragic and horrifying. (Watch the trailer on YouTube)

Two Black women at a historic New England university — one a first-year student and the other a newly appointed dean of students — each navigate heightened expectations while haunted by history and the racism and oppression baked into the system. The film subverts horror traditions multiple times, leaving the viewer feeling unsteady, and I had to pause it for a second to process the simple image of a ghostly hand reaching out from under the bed. Its bold use of color, especially red, contrasts with the ghoulish white college founders’ portraits, which play a role in a finale that immediately brings “The Shining” to mind. (Watch the trailer on YouTube)

In 1860, five decades after the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves was signed into law, two men from Mobile, Alabama, successfully smuggled enslaved people from Africa to the U.S. onboard the Clotilda without getting caught. They burned and sank the ship afterwards. The Civil War broke out a year later and the survivors of the last known U.S. transatlantic slave trade went on to found a community nearby named Africatown, which exists to this day, populated by some of their very descendants.

Winner of Sundance’s U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Creative Vision, “Descendant” recounts this story and its generational aftermath, including footage filmed by Zora Neale Hurston of one of the survivors, Cudjo Lewis, who lived until 1935. (Hurston went on to tell Mr. Lewis’s story in the book “Barracoon,” which was finally published posthumously in 2018, about 90 years after initially being written.)

The rest of this powerful documentary follows Africatown’s community members as they attempt to find the Clotilda. Spoiler: it’s eventually discovered and you get the sense that some people knew it was there all along. In fact, the descendants of the human traffickers are still major landowners to this day, their family name forever etched into old survey markers dotting the land surrounding Africatown, land which is now occupied by toxic industrial plants, poisoning its citizens. It seems there are always echoes through history.

Where do I even begin with this one? Set in Chile and waving the magical realist flag, “The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future” deals with pollution, ghosts, depression, motorcycles, and yes, singing cows. Rather than collapse under all that weight, it becomes a gorgeous, deliberately paced, and mournful examination of motherhood, deep family wounds, and, most importantly, hope. I really hope it gets released some day.

As you can probably tell by now, I deliberately sought out Sundance films this year that sounded weird and different. If I recall correctly, there is hardly any dialogue in this dreamlike film that is perhaps even more surreal than “The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future.” Set in and around 19th-century Macedonian villages, a young feral woman is raised by a shape-shifting witch and then rejected when she acts too much like your standard teen. Now all alone, she must learn the ways of men by taking on the forms of men, women, children, and animals… but in order to do so, she has to physically consume her victims through a hole in her chest. Imagine Terrence Malick meets “The Thing.” It’s beautiful and haunting. (Watch the trailer on YouTube)

These films are all worth checking out when you get a chance. Of course I’d love any feedback or movie recommendations you might have. You can reach me at e38b868f8f8ca3808a8d869080829386cd808c8e.

And please feel free to forward this to anyone you think might be interested.

Until next time! 👋

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