Early Sundance Feelers

Posted by Larry Gleeson

 

 

Kicking off the 2022 Sundance Film Festival at 4 pm on Thursday, January 20th, award-winning documentarian Sam Green returns to Sundance with a groundbreaking and immersive documentary, 32 SOUNDS, a film about the powerful effects of sound and how it affects our conscious and unconscious lives. 32 SOUNDS will feature original compositions of live music and narration by JD Samson that will be performed live.

32 SOUNDS is designed to be experienced with personal headphones for a truly unique binaural audio experience. A high-quality headset is strongly recommended for online audiences. Wireless headphones will be provided at performances held in the Egyptian Theatre.

32 SOUNDS will be a special hybrid digital/in-person presentation and will take place simultaneously at the Egyptian Theatre and in The Spaceship’s Cinema House.

Filmmaker Margaret Brown returns to Sundance with the World Premiere of her U.S. Documentary Competition film DESCENDANT, a deeply moving look at the descendants of the survivors of the Clotilda, the last ship carrying enslaved Africans to the United States 40 years after African slave trading became a capital offense.

Brown’s DESCENDANT explores and reveals the enduring power imbalance that persists between the descendants of Timothy Meaher, the man who chartered the illegal expedition, and the descendants of those who were enslaved aboard it. The Meaher family owns much of the heavily industrialized area that surrounds Africatown. Elevated cases of cancer and illness are prevalent there, but the Africatown community persists. Residents celebrate their heritage and take command of their legacy by bringing their history to the surface

In addition, Bianca Stinger’s cinematic meditation on memory and loss, THREE MINUTES – A LENGTHENING,  will screen at Sundance in the Spotlight section after debuting to critical acclaim at the 2021 Venice International Film Festival and Telluride Film Festival.

In 2009, Glenn Kurtz discovered a crumbling 16mm color home movie in his parents’ closet — amateur footage his grandfather David shot in 1938 on a vacation to Europe. In addition to familiar tourist attractions, the film included three minutes of what would turn out to be the only known footage of the predominantly Jewish town of Nasielsk, Poland — David Kurtz’s birthplace — one year before the Nazi occupation would destroy the community, leaving fewer than 100 survivors of the Holocaust.

Stigter traces the story of those three minutes and the discoveries they prompted, conducting a filmic excavation seeking to expand time, postponing the inevitable fate of the people caught on celluloid. Examining each frame for clues, playing and replaying the haunting footage, performing active discovery on every detail, THREE MINUTES – A LENGTHENING bears witness to history to demonstrate the power of cinema to reclaim the past for the present.

Stay tuned!

 

(Sourced from ACME Press News)

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