PARK CITY, Utah — The 2023 Sundance Film Festival came to a close Sunday, capping the festival’s first in-person edition since the COVID-19 pandemic broke out in early 2020. Los Angeles Times film reporter Mark Olsen and film critic Justin Chang sat down to discuss what they saw and liked at the festival, and what it was like to be back on the ground in Park City for the first time in three years.
Justin Chang: As we pore over the Sundance awards, Mark, I’m struck by a familiar response, albeit one I haven’t experienced in three years: “Wow, that’s a lot of movies — only a few of which I’ve seen.” Sundance has four different competition sections — U.S. dramatic, U.S. documentary, world cinema dramatic, world cinema documentary — and few outside the festival’s programming team could possibly see everything. Still, I’m glad I managed to catch several of the highlights, including the grand jury prizewinner, “A Thousand and One,” A.V. Rockwell’s stirring, deceptively straightforward-looking drama about a mother (a terrific Teyana Taylor) and her young son trying to get by over several years in Harlem, starting in the mid-1990s.
Rockwell’s movie wasn’t the flashiest entry in the U.S. dramatic competition, but that’s partly what makes its victory so quietly satisfying. My personal jury of one might have differed from the actual jury in a few other respects: I’d have liked to see a prize go to Raven Jackson’s “All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt,” a rare example of a pure art film in this competition, and one of the few that — unlike some of the other honorees (and I’ll leave it at that) — chose to tell its story in a primarily cinematic language, using images, textures and associations rather than spoon-feeding us reams and reams of dialogue.
