How this year’s Sundance films tackled American politics

Two years ago, the 2017 Sundance Film Festival kicked off in a world that had tilted on its axis. At this year’s event, that world was still spinning — and a few of the movies that played suggested it might keep doing so in the future.

Sundance takes place in conservative Utah, but the festival is hosted by Park City, about 40 minutes’ drive from Salt Lake City, where only 14 percent of residents voted for Donald Trump in 2016. And the community around Sundance and its programs is, on the whole, staunchly liberal — no huge shock, given the organization’s founder, Robert Redford, who has been an activist almost as long as he’s been an actor.

The festival has made a concerted effort to boost voices that are underrepresented in risk-averse Hollywood, particularly in the past few years. You’ll sometimes find some films in the lineup that challenge accepted liberal notions (Get Out premiered there in 2017, as a secret screening), and the festival has worked hard to confront its reputation as a boys’ club. But you typically won’t find many — or possibly any — films playing at the festival that would pass muster at a screening in the current White House.

Which is why the feeling at Sundance two years ago was somewhere between shock and a desperate rally. (“The mood is weird,” I wrote on opening night.) In 2017, Donald Trump was inaugurated as president on the first full day of the festival and one of its busiest; the following morning, about 8,000 people, including some celebrities in town for the festival (though not Redford or any official Sundance representatives) converged on a very snowy Park City to hold a satellite version of the first Women’s March.

That year, very few Sundance films were about the election of Trump, with the exception of the baffling, neutered Trumped, from the producers of the Showtime series The Circus. It takes a lot of time to make a good movie, and the two-month period between Trump’s election in November and the festival in January was hardly adequate for post-production.

Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, his follow-up to the 2006 Sundance premiere An Inconvenient Truth, did open the 2017 Sundance Film Festival. Even then, it played like a strange elegy for a world that was already gone — and that had probably been gone a lot longer than some people realized — in which politicians earnestly believed that whole groups of people could be won over by citing facts. Now the nature of “facts” was in dispute, and would continue to be in the days ahead.

The time needed to make a good movie may account for why there weren’t many more films directly confronting the state of politics in America at Sundance in 2018, either. The most notable was RBG, a documentary celebrating Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, which would go on to earn a healthy $14 million at the box office and an Oscar nomination. Ginsburg herself showed up in Park City for the premiere — but the nature of the judiciary, which is supposed to remain neutral in political matters, meant that any pointed discussion was muted. A few other films, like Blindspotting, Bisbee ’17, and Sorry to Bother You leveled biting social critiques, but of the sort that would have been relevant no matter who had been elected in 2016.

As the festival convened this year, then, I found myself wondering whether the programming would have shifted, and what the mood would be. Two years is plenty of time for most filmmakers to conceive of, fund, shoot, and complete a film. The 2019 Sundance Film Festival was the first opportunity for many movies that were conceived during the Trump presidency to be programmed for the festival. Two years after the inauguration, it was time to take a pulse and see if things felt different.

And things did, indeed, feel different this year. Plenty of films weren’t specifically linked to the American political scene, of course, and some of them — like Native Son, Clemency, and American Factory — made their commentary on current political matters more oblique.

But among those films that specifically took on the Trump administration and its actions over its first two years, it was possible to detect two different tactics for critique.

The first was a direct confrontation that leaned on history to make a point about the present. Matt Tyrnauer’s documentary Where’s My Roy Cohn?, for instance, took its title directly from Trump’s mouth, and traced the biography of the notorious McCarthy aide, ball-busting attorney, and Trump mentor to strike an ominous tone. Similarly, Avi Belkin’s Mike Wallace Is Here was mostly a look at the legendary 60 Minutes journalist, but ended with a pointed critique of politicians who try to gut the free press.

Using history to comment on the present is something that film as a medium can do particularly well, especially since images and sounds bring stale stories to life and sear them into our minds. And that’s why the best example of this sort of film at Sundance in 2019 may have been Always in Season, Jacqueline Olive’s unforgettable documentary about lynching in America. The film unearths archival images of lynchings and pairs them with a contemporary story, about a 17-year-old black man named Lennon Lacy who was the victim of an apparent lynching in North Carolina in 2014. The attitudes are old, of course — 2014 predates Trump’s election by two years — but they’re still present today, and the film connects, with grace and fury, those historical attitudes to modern political rhetoric.

History foretells the present, and while we can’t look away from our past, films that remind us of its throughlines to today can leave us with a sense of despair. I was on the jury for this year’s US documentary competition at Sundance, in which all three of these films appeared alongside others, and I can attest to my rapidly darkening mood while watching them all.

So it’s good that there’s a complementary approach that can balance things out.

Those who don’t study or remember the past are doomed to repeat it — but even if we do study or remember the past, how do we avoid repeating it? Two particularly notable documentaries provided answers that pointed to the future.

I was surprised to find that one of them — Alison Klayman’s The Brink, an extraordinary documentary portrait of former Trump aide Steve Bannon — fit into this category at all. The film follows Bannon from his days in the White House after Trump’s inauguration in January 2017 to the midterm elections in November 2018. Bannon left the White House in August 2017, after the riots and protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, and criticism over his role in fostering nationalism in the White House. But it’s obvious in The Brink that Bannon clearly thinks the results of the congressional midterm elections were a setback for his populist, burn-it-all-down agenda.

The film contains plenty of material to scare the audience, too — a scene from June 2018 in which Bannon and the leaders of many of Europe’s most virulently right-wing, nationalist, anti-immigration political parties have dinner and discuss tactics is jaw-dropping, not least because Klayman’s cameras were even allowed in the room. But what’s notable in The Brink is how its arc traces the slow decline of Bannon, a man with an extraordinarily high view of himself.

You can’t make a movie about him without his delusions of grandeur becoming almost comically clear (something Errol Morris also did in his documentary American Dharma, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival last fall). But the benefit of The Brink is how clearly it shows that Bannon’s understanding of the world, while destructive and pompous, may be winning in some places but losing in others. His point of view is not inevitable. And it can be fought.

How? That’s what Rachel Lears’s Knock Down the House, which won the 2019 Audience Award at Sundance, showed. The film follows four progressive Democratic candidates, all women, who ran primary campaigns against establishment Democrats in the 2018 midterm elections: Amy Vilela in Nevada, Cori Bush in Missouri, Paula Jean Swearengin in West Virginia, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (a.k.a. AOC) in New York.

Only Ocasio-Cortez was ultimately successful in her bid, and Knock Down the House feels, in the end, as if it’s mostly her story. (The fact that she’s incredibly charismatic doesn’t hurt.)

But Lear smartly uses candidates from across the country, living in very different communities, to make a larger point: Whether or not you agree with a given individual’s politics at every point, there’s a hunger to upend America’s current ruling class. Two years ago, we were talking about that hunger insofar as it intersected with Donald Trump’s rhetoric; in 2019, the women Lear selected as subjects for her film, and others who were elected to Congress, represent a different path for politicians who advocate for ordinary people, and one with more authenticity, given they actually come from the same background as the constituents they’re bidding to serve.

The result, while clearly a liberal feel-good movie, sounds a broad note of hope: It’s not just blowhard billionaires with media expertise who have a chance to represent “real America.” Plain old shoe-leather canvassing and showing up in your community can make a real difference.

Since Sundance often functions as a herald of the year ahead in cinema, the 2019 festival’s two ways of looking at America midway through the Trump administration’s first term are two sides of the same coin, and they suggest what film can do best when it’s operating in a mode of dissent: critique, remind, reframe the future, and tell stories that challenge what audiences think they know.