PARK CITY, UTAH — Robert Redford didn’t mince words in his opening remarks at Sundance this year: “Harvey Weinstein was a moment in time, and we’re going to move past that,” said the star-studded event’s 81-year-old founder, kicking off a film festival that was less about showy titles selling for record profits and more about carefully carving a path onward and upward from the fallout of 2017’s #MeToo reckoning.
The festival made its intentions loud and clear with placards displaying a new code of conduct — “Sundance Institute is committed to allowing attendees to experience the festival free of harassment, discrimination, sexism, and threatening or disrespectful behavior” — and a hotline for anyone who experienced or witnessed it. Late-night parties with free-flowing alcohol were still on offer, although the hotter tickets seemed to be brunches and daytime panels where creative types could bond and discuss the future of film and entertainment. One of the fest’s most popular talks featured 84-year-old Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, subject of the documentary “RBG,” in conversation with NPR’s Nina Totenberg. On Saturday, Park City hosted a Respect Rally alongside marches in large cities all over the country to commemorate the anniversary of the 2017 Women’s March.
On its film roster, Sundance 2018 served up a wide and diverse array of films with women behind the camera and in front of it, from director Jennifer Fox’s sexual-abuse memoir “The Tale” to the Chloë Sevigny-starring “Lizzie,” about Lizzie Borden, to the proudly goofy female skateboarders of Crystal Moselle’s “Skate Kitchen,” to Toni Collette’s shrieking, goose-bump-inducing performance in the occult horror flick “Hereditary.” Ginsburg, Joan Jett, Jane Fonda and lawyer Gloria Allred were all featured in documentaries, while the doc “Half the Picture” took on the whole subject of female directors, and the lack thereof, in Hollywood. A couple of actresses seemed to be in just about every film you saw: Ann Dowd (”The Handmaid’s Tale”) may have set a record with five films in competition, while Andrea Riseborough, one of the industry’s most talented chameleons, played four roles, all of which she said had been hard to come by: “I’ve always found that the parts out there are either chaste Mother Teresa figures or highly sexualized and demonized figures,” she said at a Sundance panel — while noting that things are looking up, given the statistic of nearly 40 percent of this year’s in-competition directors being female.
The fest also picked up where one of its hits last year, the Oscar nominee “Get Out,” left off in its exploration and satire of race relations. “Tyrel” takes a more muted approach to the experience of being the only black man in a group of friends, with Jason Mitchell’s Tyler stuck away for the weekend with a cabin full of fratty white guys. “Blindspotting,” co-written by and starring “Hamilton” alum Daveed Diggs, is a drama set in a hyper-real, gentrifying Oakland, Calif. And “Sorry to Bother You,” one of the festival’s wildest entries, revolves around a black telemarketer (Lakeith Stanfield) who’s sucked into a deeply sketchy world when he starts using his “white voice” on his customers.
In its farthest look forward, the festival expanded its virtual-reality offerings, rolling out one deep-space-set short, “Spheres: Songs of Spacetime,” which visibly shook up Redford when he watched it (unsurprisingly, perhaps, “Mother!” director Darren Aronofsky was a collaborator on it). VR attendees could also follow NASA astronauts on their extreme training regimens, become intergalactic cartoon female warriors, trip on Amazonian hallucinogens and feel ice-cold snowballs and creeping spiders in the palms of their virtual hands, if they dared.
This less bombastic but, in many ways, more daring Sundance is a throwback to its earliest days in the 1980s, when Redford began to change the film landscape with his scrappy indie festival. This year, it seems to be on the verge of another major seismic shift.