So, which movies should you pick for your Sundance 2024 watch at home? After years where shoving a bunch of people from all over the world into cramped Utah movie theaters simply hasn’t been possible due to the intensity of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Sundance Film Festival is slowly moving away from its hybrid online model and towards a full return to the in-person fest. That said, while the focus is now on the Park City event, some (but certainly not all) of the movies programmed at the fest will be available for viewing with the purchase of an online ticket. Digital ticketing has already been in progress, but the actual screenings begin January 25 and run through January 28. You can also snag the awards package to watch eight of the fest’s winners during the fest’s final 48 hours. But single-ticket purchases are probably still the way most people will be watching these movies early, even if the prices increased to $25 from $20 last year. It’s still not that far off from going down to the multiplex, or renting something on Premium On Demand, and there are plenty of movies worth watching at home.
The online platform has been nothing but a godsend to those unable or unwilling to travel to the festival, and it remains a safe and secure option to watch some of the movies that will go on to dominate the film conversation for the rest of the year. I’ve been a big fan of the virtual component of the fest and have been using it for all my Sundance viewing for the past three years.
Alas, some of the buzziest films at Sundance 2024 just aren’t going to screen from the comfort of your living room. But don’t worry, we’ve narrowed down our picks for what you should check out to those that will be available to the public online. Now that we at Paste have seen a slew of movies from the program—even more than we highlighted in our Most Anticipated list—we’ve got some suggestions on where you should spend your Sundance dollars.
Here are the 10 movies you should watch at home from Sundance 2024:
Agent of Happiness
Imagine if your government was, even superficially, concerned with your happiness. While so many countries use the boogeyman of The Economy to distract its people from the atrocities of the world (sometimes committed by those very countries), Bhutan, brilliantly, found a far buzzier acronym than Gross Domestic Product. It tracks Gross National Happiness. No more worrying about vague manipulable factors like inflation or the unemployment rate—just ask yourself, “Am I happy?” Ok, to be fair, Arun Bhattarai and Dorottya Zurbó’s documentary Agent of Happiness makes it clear that it’s a lot more complicated than that (and just as made up as stock prices). But even if the Bhutanese government doesn’t really care if its people are happy, posing this question to its populace is at least a diversion that encourages introspection. Those on the front lines, collecting this data for the government, are professionally confronted by life’s biggest question, interpreted by people from all walks of life. The quiet, intimate charms of Agent of Happiness pulse from this poignant collective consideration, filtered through the personal experience of a professional happiness inspector. Amber and his coworker drive around the mountainous countryside, looking for folks whose lives they can translate into numbers, recorded on forms and diluted down to a single digit through their job’s complex happiness formula. These census-takers strike a memorable image, in their plaid knee-length gho, white tego underneath with sleeves rolled back, black baseball caps and tall socks. Door-to-door style-wise, Mormons have nothing on Bhutanese government officials. As Amber plays air guitar in the passenger seat and chats about his lacking love life, Agent of Happiness immerses us in a doc that’s partially invested in the day-to-day of a unique profession, partially enraptured by the beauty of Bhutan’s bright colors and vast vistas, and partially surprised to have found itself on a buddy-comedy road trip. As we watch everyday people think deeply about this high-stakes satisfaction survey, the act of asking our friends and neighbors how they’re doing—how they’re really doing—develops an alluring grassroots appeal beyond the bragging rights of institutions. Agent of Happiness, with its personal point-of-view and delightfully candid discussions, motivates us to use our compassion for individuals to see past this façade.
And So It Begins
The 2022 presidential elections in the Philippines was a battle between the son of a right-wing dictator and a grassroots liberal, an explosion of misinformation, a blow to journalism, a heartbreaking account of history repeating itself and a colorful, musical spectacle. Plenty, that is to say, for American audiences to relate to as we head towards our own 2024 elections which will feature, in all likelihood, a frontrunner who will still be on trial for defrauding the U.S. government. And So It Begins, documentarian Ramona S. Diaz’s follow-up feature to A Thousand Cuts (her doc on journalist Maria Ressa and her publication Rappler’s conflicts with ex-president Rodrigo Duterte, which premiered at Sundance in 2020), is a familiar enough campaign narrative, but with enough sense of the scope and scale to hold our interest. Paired with its appreciation for the onslaught of Barbie pink, karaoke singing and choreographed dance routines that pepper Leni Robredo’s populist run, and the documentary gains an observational quality of a culture at a crossroads. There is the new wave of progression and the entrenched conservatism, beaten into a country by authoritarians, lingering colonial specters and misguided hopes for the future. And So It Begins‘ great strength is not in documenting the beats of this election, but in conveying how those participating in it are drawn down each path.
Black Box Diaries
All stories documenting the personal anecdotes making up the #MeToo movement are courageous. Speaking up about a painful truth, knowing that if society at large was going to listen with generosity or empathy, well, it wouldn’t need a movement to get these tales told. They are brave alliances between survivors and journalists, battling entrenched sexism with unrelenting professionalism and mutual trust. Black Box Diaries tracks a moving #MeToo story that brought the movement to Japan, from the crime itself, through the journey of going public and to the uneasy closure of its long war of attrition. Its devastation is familiar. But because filmmaker Shiori Itō is both survivor and journalist, and recorded her own investigation into her assault in real time, the documentary becomes a thrilling testament to her exceptional, tenacious agency in the face of a hostile world. A bit like how Navalny saw Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny pursue the men Vladimir Putin sent to assassinate him, there’s a macabre adrenaline running through the first-person perspective of Black Box Diaries. Nobody has the same incentive to bring about justice than the survivors themselves. There’s also the same interconnectedness of sinister power on the other side: Itō’s attacker is Noriyuki Yamaguchi, biographer of then-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, whose government maintained the same sexual assault laws for over a century. Yamaguchi’s political and police connections protect him from arrest at least once, and gets a helpful detective removed from Itō’s case. If all sexual assault cases are uphill battles, Itō’s is a Sisyphean conspiracy. And we get a front-row seat to the endless struggle. Not shying down from the crushing interconnectedness of powerful forces set against her, Itō’s journalistic rigor and personal vulnerability prevents a landmark moment in a movement from becoming a simple summary in a history book.
Brief History of a Family
The kind of psychological thriller crafted with such delightful tension that you can’t help but smile as you squirm, Brief History of a Family is an infectious good time about a Chinese family slowly succumbing to the (possibly) sinister affections of their son’s quiet classmate. Writer/director Jianjie Lin’s feature debut pulls from plenty of genre influences (its class dynamic and affluent apartment setting will be familiar to Parasite fans) to construct a tight dramatic metaphor encompassing Chinese parenting values and the end of the country’s one-child policy. With eerie framings and excellently tense performances from Feng Zu and Keyu Guo as parents with plenty of secrets, Brief History of a Family will keep you guessing throughout its crisp 99-minute runtime.
Eternal You
It stands to reason that if there’s money to be made in biotech, there’s an equal amount to be made in necrotech. Eternal You explores the sectors of the artificial intelligence business that’s wasted no time adopting the psychological tricks of the spiritual trade and applying them to chatbots and CG models. Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck’s Eternal You observes the burgeoning industry around techno-spiritualism with wry skepticism. While AI in general is currently being sold as a miracle do-it-all to the most credulous among us, this specific use of AI is targeted towards an even more vulnerable demographic: The credulous and grieving. And those working behind the scenes are used to grifting. As Eternal You listens to those in charge of these startups, like Project December founder Jason Rohrer, we hear self-assured PR exaggerations. It’s showmanship. It’s the crystal ball, the velvet curtains, the copious candles. It’s the stuff that gets you funded by the rich and attracts comfort-seekers to your website. The filmmakers then immediately rebut with people like Carl Öhman, who are willing to cut through the bullshit about this segment of the AI gold rush pursued by “the most skillful in turning the dead into a business.” Their straight talk is an oasis, especially when the topic involves one people are inclined to be too hurt to be anything but trusting around: Death. It’s all existentially depressing, housed in a bleak aesthetic. A glitchy score from Gregor Keienburg and Raffael Seyfried harmonizes reversed and edited vocalizations in an aural replica of Eternal You’s central concept, its soothing inhumanity haunting cold drone shots. Block and Riesewieck aren’t afraid to show off a little style, which goes a long way when covering subject matter that inherently entails a lot of sitting at the keyboard, staring at a screen. Wide shots, giving a broader montaged context to human experience, go a long way to underscore the impossible concept of replicating consciousness. Balancing this is an icy off-handedness. Even cathartic, emotional moments are filtered through imperfect technological lenses: Reality TV, computer monitors, iPhone speakers, text on a screen. Eternal You is a necessary warning klaxon for our culture’s increasing inability to accept death, just as it finds a techno-economic structure happy to oblige it.
Girls Will Be Girls
A tangible takedown of patriarchal hypocrisy, and how these larger social forces impact women in specific ways, Girls Will Be Girls is a bold and thoughtfully shot debut from writer/director Shuchi Talati. Complicating the story of Mira (Preeti Panigrahi) and Sri’s (Kesav Binoy Kiron) boarding-school romance with erotic thriller psychology and cultural observation, Girls Will Be Girls documents coming-of-age moments with refreshing spirit and explicitness. Adding in the complex role of Mira’s wannabe cool-mom Anila (Kani Kusruti) can make the movie seem like it’s juggling quite a bit, but within Talati’s confident, cramped, physically intimate frames, the latent energy is enough to carry us forward through the movie’s sometimes-warring interests. With beautiful colors, lived-in performances and a searing perspective on Indian society, Girls Will Be Girls is a heightened, beautiful, painful return to high school—with enough uncomfortable twists to make you squirm in your seat.
In the Land of Brothers
An expansive, three-act observation of Afghan refugees struggling to make their lives under the oppressive discrimination in Iran, In the Land of Brothers is an assured dramatic debut from filmmakers Raha Amirfazli and Alireza Ghasemi. Bolstered by an impressive cast playing across time-jumps, In the Land of Brothers’ entrancing script and evocative settings sweep you up in the tragic yet steely vignettes. As the stories connect across themes and families, building to a cathartic climax, the resoundingly tragic and consuming humanism is woven with enough subtlety to avoid melodrama. A brutal, beautiful depiction of life under discrimination, filmed with a painterly eye and a compassionate heart.
Porcelain War
Slava Leontyev and his wife Anya Stasenko are porcelain artists in Ukraine. Slava makes the objects, Anya paints them with intricate figures navigating miniature worlds. Slava is also an ex-Special Forces soldier who trains civilians to take up arms to defend their homes against Russian invaders. This dissonance adds a poignant and inescapable friction to Leontyev and Brendan Bellomo’s war documentary Porcelain War. Anya and Slava tour their local forest, picking mushrooms from around the landmines and helping clear the wilderness of unexploded missiles from Putin’s forces. The rubble of their cities, shattered across the streets, is echoed in their delicate artwork. Getting to know the fighters in Slava’s unit (a milk farmer, furniture sales manager, home contractor, graphic designer, weapon designer and IT worker fill out the force) on top of the warm, indomitable couple at the doc’s heart, makes the reportage’s more intense moments — including a bodycam segment that’s one of the most heart-pounding moments of the war I’ve seen caught on tape — all the more affecting. Porcelain War‘s questions around how we cope, and what’s worth fighting for, are as vital as ever with the world still full of ignored pandemics, government-sponsored genocide and ongoing invasions. Its answers, quiet and bittersweet, hit like a drone strike.
Sugarcane
The last few years have seen both fiction and nonfiction reckonings—ranging from the poetic reeducation of Lakota Nation vs. United States to the genre work of the late filmmaker Jeff Barnaby—with the brutal, federally-mandated violence of residential schools. Few cinematic takes have been as beautiful and compassionate as Sugarcane. From subject/director Julian Brave NoiseCat and director/journalist Emily Kassie, the documentary gives faces, names and histories to those affected by the residential schools—and looks, bracingly, towards a future where healing is possible. The impact of these schools is so pervasive and lasting, that even this couched optimism can feel impossible. This is especially true when zeroing in on the members of the Williams Lake First Nation. You’d be hard-pressed to find someone in the WLFN, whose main reserve is British Columbia’s Sugarcane, who wasn’t affected by the violence and sexual assault at the notorious St. Joseph’s Mission residential school. This school in particular featured such rampant, prolific abuse that an anecdote of its evils led to the Canadian holiday National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. Sugarcane allows the full extent of this tragedy to play out in details, like Chief Willie Sellars buying an awareness-raising box of orange donuts, and in asides, like Prime Minister Justin Trudeau facing criticism after he speaks at a local event. NoiseCat and his father Ed are our two closest subjects during Sugarcane. Their confrontational yet loving trip through the latter’s past embraces the double-edged joy and pain of intimacy. The other two men we spend the most time with are Chief Sellars and former Chief Rick Gilbert, who act as perfect symbols of their eras as well as endearing individuals. Alongside these men, others share their pasts, the trauma weaving a nearly visible web between the community members. NoiseCat and Kassie bring us close enough to touch it through the images they shoot. So many documentaries dealing with crimes like these can be cold, clinical reporting assuming a tactful distance from the whole affair. Sugarcane, warm and sad, knows it all hits harder if we’re living there. Inside the dilapidated shell of the schoolhouse are carved messages in the wooden walls; upstairs, sunlight filters through an asteroid belt of dust motes. The remnants of the past are still physical, and still present.
Thelma
Every good action hero knows you’ve got to stick to your guns. Ethan Hunt is a marathon-running master of disguise. John Wick has never lost count of his remaining bullets. Jackie Chan’s various inspectors and agents view the world as their personal set of monkey bars. When writer/director Josh Margolin’s debut Thelma keeps its sights trained on its rogue granny on a mission (June Squibb), its hilarious geriatric reframe of action-movie tropes has a game champion. Like its absentminded hero, the film can sometimes get sidetracked right when things are getting good, wandering down schmaltzy or twee narrative paths. But when it lets Thelma (and Squibb) do her thing, the comedy is perfectly cute and a stellar showcase for what an actor’s late career can offer. There’s novelty in the comedic turns from the 94-year-old Squibb and her 81-year-old co-star, Richard Roundtree (in his final film role). These actors get to tap a well that’s unique to their age and the genre without sticking them into the boxes that generally contain old performers. They’re not utterly dignified, wisdom-dispensing elders. They’re not tragic victims of time. And they’re certainly, blessedly not the dreaded “rapping grannies” who are more punchline than performer. As the pair abscond on their quest to retrieve Thelma’s stolen savings, solicited from her cookie jar and mattress by phone scammers, they’re clearly complex, pulling off warm humor, endless charm and impressive stunts. A 94-year-old doesn’t have to ride a motorcycle off a cliff to make you gasp. Thelma’s emphasis on the unique pleasures found at different stages of life works because we can see the trust it places in Squibb as its front-and-center star.
Jacob Oller is Movies Editor at Paste Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter at @jacoboller.
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