The weather at Sundance this year was great—mostly sunny, a steady 74 degrees Fahrenheit, based on my indoor AC monitor—although the wind in my Southern California desert backyard did kick up from time to time. But at the actual Sundance, not the virtual one attendees were experiencing through their computer monitors, serious questions were in the air.
Now that the cinema world was a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, what movies would be done and available? Would anything premiering be worth a damn after sitting on the shelf for nearly 12 months? Were the good movies being held back in the hope that actual festivals would kick back into gear by, oh, late spring? (Hope springs eternal.) That last question was the one that really mattered, one that pestered the fall festivals of 2020 to a degree but which has now come down hard on festivals in early 2021, as the feeling (is it just a feeling?) grows that the pandemic is coming to the beginning of the end.
For a festival so reliably terrible when it comes to programming world cinema, that question was fundamental. As I’ve noted in these pages before, Sundance has always been the kind of US festival (because it is the most powerful US festival) that feels as if it can skate by with a mediocre global selection so long as its domestic lineup packed houses, generated sufficient buzz, and sold to, aptly invoking Harun Farocki and expanding the conversation; it’s hard to imagine Cooper being able to manage the same.
