2024 Sundance Film Festival - Day 7 Capsules | Buzz Blog
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2024 Sundance Film Festival - Day 7 Capsules

The Greatest Night in Pop, Union, Girls Will Be Girls, Nocturnes

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The Greatest Night in Pop *** [Special Screenings]
If you were there at the time—and perhaps a hipper-than-thou teenager—the 1985 all-star famine-relief hit “We Are the World” was an earnestly anthemic, well-intentioned piece of kitsch, which might make the prospect of a feature-length documentary about its creation a less-then-appealing prospect. But Bao Nguyen’s film isn’t so much celebration of the song as it is a fascinating home-movie about herding some of the most famous cats on the planet at the time. Nguyen gets contemporary interviews with many of the participants—most notably the song’s co-writer Lionel Richie, in addition to Cyndi Lauper, Huey Lewis, Bruce Springsteen and more—but leans into the footage taken at the actual January 1985 Los Angeles recording session that extended into the wee hours of the morning after that year’s American Music Awards ceremony. And some of the anecdotes are just too enjoyably juicy to resist: Al Jarreau drunkenly delaying the proceedings; Lewis getting his impromptu shot at a solo vocal when Prince decides not to show up; Bob Dylan needing a little help from Stevie Wonder to figure out his part. There are moments when all the mutual back-slapping and hero-worship gets a bit much, but as chronicles of a pop-culture touchstone go, this one turns out to be considerably more satisfying than the creation that inspired it.

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Union ***1/2 [U.S. Documentary]
I suspect that directors Brett Story and Steven Maing would argue that there’s ultimately something inspiring about their chronicle of workers at a Staten Island Amazon fulfillment center attempting to organize, but it’s perhaps more compelling as a portrait of why challenges to corporate power in America feel so doomed. For a year from spring 2021 to spring 2022, the filmmakers follow leaders for the would-be Amazon Labor Union—notably Chris Smalls, a former Amazon worker fired largely for protesting the company’s unsafe pandemic-era working conditions—as they face the stacked deck of trying to get a required percentage of employee signatures from a place with a 150% annual turnover rate, and then convince the employees to actually vote for the grass-roots, unaffiliated union. Hidden-camera moments capture the “captive audience” meetings in which Amazon uses anti-union scare tactics, and the many obstacles from arrests to gale-force winds that stand in the organizers’ way. But perhaps most compelling is what we see about the internal fighting over tactics, and the weariness that sets in for some of the regulars as the efforts drag on (and the film’s postscript makes it clear they're still dragging on). Union is all about the fact that workers and labor organizers are only human, naturally facing the conflicts that emerge between humans under stress, while their opponent—the corporation—has the advantage of no confusion over its single goal of maximizing profit.

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Girls Will Be Girls ***1/2 [World Dramatic]
As much as writer/director Suchi Talati explores a female coming-of-age narrative with some cultural specificity, she also finds something more universal in the way tensions between adolescent girls and their mothers is tangled up in matters of female desirability. At the outset, that’s not the primary thing on the mind of Mira Kashore (Preeti Panigrahi), a high-achieving year-12 student at an Indian boarding school—of which her mother, Anila (Kani Kusruti), is also an alum—who has just become the school’s first-ever female Head Prefect. But academics start to seem a little less important when transfer student Sri (Kesav Binoy Kiron) catches her eye. Talati grounds the tale in the cultural expectations of this particular place, including gendered assumptions about appropriate behavior. But the real complexity involves the relationship between Mira and Anila, and the mother’s almost flirtatious behavior towards the boy she insists Mira should not have as her own boyfriend. Talati deftly handles the material that addresses Mira’s growing sexual curiosity—it’s a perfect touch that this studious girl would want to do online research regarding how to have sex so she would do it “right”—and Panigrahi’s performance hits every note of desire, jealousy and uncertainty with a perfect pitch. Ultimately, though, it’s a lovely exploration of how complicated it can be for teenage girls and their mothers to reach the point where they can simply be mother and daughter, and not somehow competitors.

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Nocturnes *** [World Documentary]
Nature documentaries can have their own unique rhythms, and directors Anirban Dutta and Anupama Srinivasan attempt to combine that with the unique rhythms of being a field researcher. They explore the work of researchers in the forests of the eastern Himalayas, led by doctoral candidate Mansi Mungee, as they study the moth populations of that region and how they might be affected by climate change. The filmmakers are willing to linger on the images and sounds in this habitat, and at times they might linger a bit too long on too many shots of mist-shrouded hillsides. It’s undeniably fascinating, though, when the camera lingers on the “moth screen” that Mungee employs to attract her research subjects, and the thousands of different creatures of every size, shape and color. And there’s also interesting material simply in realizing how arduous this kind of research is in a remote locale, depending on perfect conditions, being away from family and generally spending months on a not-particularly-comfortable life in order to snap hundreds of pictures of insects. The questions that the film asks about how these ecosystems might be changed forever by the comfort level of one particular moth are provocative, but perhaps not as interesting as realizing what goes into having even a chance of answering those questions.