Brighter Days

UNDANCE 2020 BROUGHT JOHN COOPER’S 11-YEAR run as festival director to a close. I didn’t always agree with Cooper’s selections, and occasionally I was appalled by his rejections. (He admitted that he didn’t get when he first saw it, and was only saved from embarrassment by his colleagues’ support of the now-celebrated doc.) But Cooper always managed to place the festival at the center of important conversations around independent film, so much so that Sundance sometimes seemed more than a refuge or a market, but a platform that could have an effect, however small, on a world now hurtling toward totalitarian capitalism and the sixth mass extinction. This year, 50 percent of the films were directed or co-directed