PARK CITY, Utah — Colorado’s vast sky can offer a hushed and potent grandeur. That quality was on fine display at the Sundance Film Festival, thanks to Max Walker-Silverman’s touching drama “Rebuilding,” about a rancher who loses his modest spread to wildfire, and “Come See Me in the Good Light,” an incandescent documentary about poet and spoken word artist Andrea Gibson’s battle with ovarian cancer.
These two very different movies are among the best at the festival, which ends Feb. 2. The world premiere screenings of each earned ovations. Ryan White’s portrait of Gibson, who was named the state’s poet laureate in 2023 by Gov. Jared Polis, was competing in the U.S. Documentary category and “Rebuilding” in U.S. Dramatic. The festival’s awards were announced Friday — after the deadline for this wrap — but each should have given their respective juries much to consider.
This year’s 11-day festival was unusually subdued for a few reasons. On the West Coast, the fires that devoured communities in Los Angeles were just beginning to be contained at the festival’s start. From the East Coast, reports on presidential directives assailing the values of American possibility and inclusion that Sundance has been a steward of for more than four decades were coming in a flurry.
Even Colorado had something to do with the mood of uncertainty — but in a good way. There was a collective clarity about the fact the festival is pulling up stakes from the Wasatch ski town of Park City and perhaps leaving Utah entirely. Last summer, the Sundance Institute, of which the festival is its most well-known initiative, announced that Boulder, Cincinnati and Salt Lake City (with some role for Park City) were finalists for a 2027 move. The decision is expected to be announced in March or April.
Amid the palpable uncertainty, the nation’s premiere film gathering still offered what it has become known for since Robert Redford launched the festival in 1981: telling the stories that might have gone untold; platforming filmmakers who the Hollywood industry often overlooks until Sundance shines a light on them; allowing for performances that eschew the thrum of the multiplex.
Here are 10 movies to watch for in the coming year, either in the arthouse or on the festival circuit. A couple here come by way of Denver Film leaders, who were doing reconnaissance for next fall’s Denver Film Festival.
“Rebuilding”
Josh O’Connor’s Dusty is a divorced father who finds himself living in an outcrop of temporary FEMA trailers along with other victims of a wildfire. Like his new neighbors, he’s been upended and not sure where or how to begin again. He’s thinking of leaving for a cousin’s spread in Montana. This would mean moving away from his young daughter, Callie Rose (Lily LaTorre), who lives with her mother, Ruby (Meghann Fahy), and grandmother Bess (Amy Madigan) in town. Rumored to be in the running to play the next 007, O’Connor tugs at the emotional reins of his laconic cowboy gently. And LaTorre delivers a surprisingly nuanced performance as Lily, who can be understandably taciturn around her wounded dad.
“She soaked up what other actors were bringing,” filmmaker Walker-Silverman said in an email about his young star. “She learned the tone that people like Josh and Meghann and Kali Reis were working in, and sort of found a way to make it her own, which was perfect because her character is a kid trying to act like the adults around her as well.”
One doesn’t have to be a homer to recognize the uncredited costar of this quiet drama set and shot in Colorado’s San Luis Valley. Walker-Silverman, a native son of San Miguel County, knows Southern Colorado well and loves it plenty.
“On the surface, the corner of Colorado I grew up in and where we shot the film in the San Luis Valley share so much. They are only 70 miles apart as the crow flies, just on either side of the San Juans. But those 70 miles take 5 1/2 hours to drive. The rivers where I grew up flow to the Pacific, and where we filmed, they head to the Atlantic,” he said in one of the lovelier emails from a filmmaker.
“It’s a place that means a lot to me. Ultimately, it’s enough like home that I feel like I know it and care for it as though it’s mine, but it’s different enough that it still surprises and mystifies me. This is a very inspiring combination. This, along with how warm and proud the people are, is what made it a special place to make this film.”
“Come See Me in the Good Light”
Before the screening of his documentary about the poet Andrea Gibson, director Ryan White (“Good Night Oppy”) told the sold-out audience that on paper, his intimate film could sound “extremely heavy and heartbreaking.” After all, it follows Gibson, who is non-binary, and their wife, Megan Falley (also a poet), as they navigate Gibson’s ovarian cancer diagnosis. “But,” the filmmaker continued, “I learned something from Andrea: feel your feelings.”
And feelings abound — the couple’s, ours — as Gibson and Falley, who live in Longmont, grapple with the occasional promises and painful rebuffs of the cancer and its treatments. White weaves Gibson’s upbringing in Maine and their journey toward becoming a somewhat unlikely star of the spoken-word circuit. It was during that ascendency as a spoken-word artist that Gibson met comedian Tig Notaro, who, along with actor and producer Stef Willen, was a force in getting the documentary made.
Gibson, like Notaro, has a dry, observational wit. But their sense of language, of nature, of connections sings with grit and grace in the poems that the filmmaker and his subject weave throughout. And because Falley faces with fortitude and, yes, fears, her spouse’s pain and mortality, “Come See Me in the Good Light,” offers remarkable scenes from a marriage under duress but utterly devoted.
“Sorry, Baby”
Comedian Eva Victor can be ridiculously funny and wry. So it feels both remarkable and oddly natural that her directorial debut finesses its sorrowful and reckoning moods with expert timing. In addition to writing and directing the film, Victor gives a pitch-perfect performance as Agnes, a young woman living in the aftermath of a sexual assault. An ace ensemble — that includes John Carroll Lynch and Naomi Ackie, as her best friend — adds to this quietly triumphant film that resists trauma to tell a truer story about trauma.
“Brides”
Two high-schoolers devise a plan to leave their town in Britain for Syria. A siren of the internet has been calling them toward this destination so each can marry a Muslim man. Watchful Doe (Ebada Hassan) is rightly unhappy with the man her widowed mother is involved with. Spirited Muna (Saffiya Ingar) pushes against nearly everything in her life, including the wishes of her Persian parents. Their teenage discomfort is amplified by bouts of bullying and bigotry. Much of director Nadia Fall’s funny-sad directorial debut follows the duo once they arrive in Turkey. Unsurprisingly, but often touchingly, their trek toward their fates is a bit bumpy. No one will blame you if you hope the bumps slow them down enough to reconsider.
“BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions”
For his first feature, Khalil Jacobs has done something akin to documentary decoupage. Taking off from “Africana: The Encyclopedia of African and African American Experience,” edited by Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates Jr., he voyages into the past and toward the futures. “]Serious and playful, the work comes at a viewer as both a fever dream and an incisive critique of the Middle Passage, its points of departure and terminus. Part home movie, part cultural document, the film follows a fictional journalist to a spot in the Atlantic Ocean called the Resonance Field for the Transatlantic Biennial. On first viewing, it was consciousness-expanding and more than a little heart-rending. I look forward seeing what a second, even third, viewing will bring.
“The Librarians”
If you never loved a school or public librarian, you will now. They are the titular heroes in Kim A. Snyder’s chilling documentary about book banning. Most work in schools in Texas and Florida, states where coordinated efforts by legislators, school boards and well-funded conservative organizations have targeted books with LGBTQ+ themes as well as literature dealing with race and racism. But not all: Making a brief appearance are two librarians from Colorado. Snyder (whose documentary short “Death by Numbers” — co-directed with Janique Robillard — was recently nominated for an Oscar) elegantly intersperses clips from Francois Truffaut’s classic adaptation of Rad Bradbury’s dystopian novel “Fahrenheit 451” and “Storm Center.” (“I couldn’t remove a book because it has ideas we don’t like,” a prim Bette Davis pointedly says to her supervisor in the 1956 movie.)
“Sly Lives! (aka the Burden of Black Genuis)”
For a moment in the late 1960s and early ’70s, Sly Stone (née Sylvester Stewart) and the Family Stone were a comet ablaze. Here, he’s the subject of Questlove’s follow-up to his Oscar-winning “Summer of Soul.” This documentary, too, has thrilling archival footage and savvy interviewees — Living Color guitar maestro Vernon Reid and R&B star D’Angelo — dropping wisdom. With his gender-diverse, mixed-race band, Sly is an obvious precursor to Prince. In “Stand!” “Family Affair,” “I Want to Take You Higher,” we hear funk-infused anthems of inclusion and the not-so-simple song about a wild innovator derailed by drugs.
“If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You”
The sick child in this dark comedy-drama has a bleating voice only a mother could love. Even then, Linda is driven to her limits. Rose Byrne gives a performance for the ages as an exhausted mom and cratering therapist who cannot heal herself. Her husband, away on business, is just a voice on the phone coaching, cajoling and criticizing her handling of just about everything. Conan O’Brien portrays Linda’s shrink. Theirs is a relationship of prickly transference and countertransference.
“Train Dreams”
Clint Bentley is one half of the writing-directing duo that made “Sing Sing” and “Jockey.” In other words, he has a good grasp of very human characters. In this how-the-West-was-forged drama (based on a book by Denis Johnson and set in the wilderness of the Pacific Northwest), Joel Edgerton deftly portrays a day laborer putting down railroad tracks and roots at the dawn of the 20th century.
“Lurker”
Sometimes during a festival you need a movie that goes easy on you, even when its milieu is that of unease. Alex Russell’s funny-dark creeper is set in a Los Angeles where the famous occasionally walk into the orbit of the not-famous. When musician Oliver (Archie Madekwe) visits a hipster clothing store, clerk Matthew (Théodore Pellerin) pretends not to know who he is — a fact that surprises and rather delights Oliver. Quickly, Matthew finds a way into Oliver’s good if mercurial graces. As their friendship evolves and then devolves, “Lurker” becomes one of those slow-motion wrecks you see coming but can’t turn away from.
Lisa Kennedy is a Denver-based freelancer specializing in film and theater.