Discover the Top Art Films at Sundance This Year

Across nearly five decades, the Sundance Film Festival has evolved from a small showcase for independent film into one of the premier festivals in the United States and a linchpin of the business. In the process, it has departed from its indie roots, much as independent filmmaking in the US has been absorbed into the mainstream. Art-related films in particular reflect the festival’s changes, running the gamut from niche subjects to crowd pleasers. Case in point, one of the buzziest entries in this year’s program is The Moment, an autofictional mockumentary starring pop star Charli xcx. Musician Courtney Love gets a more traditional biographical treatment in Antiheroine, which follows her through the recording of her latest album and looks back on her career, most pointedly her relationship with Kurt Cobain. Broken English employs a more oblique approach in its portrait of the recently deceased actress and singer Marianne Faithfull. Interviews with Faithfull and archival materials are framed by segments in which actors Tilda Swinton and George MacKay play researchers for the “Ministry of Not Forgetting” who are investigating her life. On the other end of the spectrum are documentaries about less prominent (though no less important) artists. Barbara Forever draws on the astonishingly rich personal archive and many experimental films of the pioneering queer director Barbara Hammer to assemble a deeply personal and affecting biography. The highest compliment I can pay is that it feels of a piece with Hammer’s films. Some of the artist’s contemporaries either worked on or appeared in programming for Manhattan Cable Television, a taboo-busting public access channel that broadcast from 1976 to 1990. Public Access looks back at this anarchic venture into experimental television, which included The Emerald City, one of the earliest series by and for the queer community. An even greater feat of archival resurrection comes in the form of Once Upon a Time in Harlem, which captures a party staged in 1972 by filmmaker William Greaves for surviving artists of the Harlem Renaissance. The footage lay fallow for decades before the film was recently completed by Greaves’s son, David. We are now as far removed from this event as it was from the Harlem Renaissance itself. The result is a poignant, multilayered reckoning with history. The broader art world and its institutions are the subjects of the fiction feature The Gallerist. The film stars Natalie Portman as a gallery owner so desperate for exposure and success that she tries to sell a corpse as a piece at Art Basel Miami, satirizing the culture and commerce of art fairs. The documentary short The Oligarch and the Art Dealer chronicles the Bouvier affair, in which the relationship between art dealer Yves Bouvier and Russian magnate Dmitry Rybolovlev soured as the former faced various accusations of fraud, forgery, and money laundering. Finally, the callous treatment of Indigenous artifacts and remains by museums is scrutinized in Aanikoobijigan [ancestor/great-grandparent/great-grandchild], the latest film from Adam and Zack Khalil. They follow the Michigan Anishinaabek Cultural Preservation and Repatriation Alliance by imagining its work as a vector through which ancestors’ spirits free their bodies and belongings from institutions holding them captive. Whatever form the festival takes as it shifts cities next year and continues to change, I hope the experimental ethos of films like this one persists.