Sundance 2025 Report I
Arab teenage rebels, Sly Stone, Pee-wee Herman and more from the first three days of the Sundance Film Festival.

It’s a restrained Sundance this year. The big-ticket evening screenings at the Eccles Theater are packed as usual but the daytime screenings are looking a bit sparse, and the A-list names seem to have stayed home. There’s glitz – there’s always glitz – but it’s low-key. Has Sundance still not recovered from the pandemic? Has the decision to put many of the offerings online from January 29 through February 2 put a dent in in-person attendance? Are West Coast movie people staying home to keep an eye on the fires or to deal with the damage done? Or, more existentially, has the news that Sundance will depart Park City after next year for a city yet to be named – the finalists are Salt Lake City, Boulder and … Cincinnati – sparked an awareness that what began nearly 50 years ago could be coming to a close?
Probably E) All of the above, and yet the films and filmmakers still come, hoping to springboard from this festival into an industry that continues to mutate by the day, if not hour. The era of streamers like Netflix, Amazon and Hulu throwing stupid money after Sundance buzz movies seems to be over (although “Hit Man” and “Thelma” got gobbled up by Netflix last year), and while specialty film platform MUBI is in town as both distributor and sponsor, it’s not a populist powerhouse like those bigger streamers. Where does a Sundance hit go after everyone leaves Park City? It’s no longer certain.

As a longtime attendee (this is my 25th Sundance, or maybe my 26th – I’ve lost count) who favors screenings over parties, it’s all the same in the end for me. Perhaps because I’m feeling residual guilt over all the movies from other countries I didn’t see in 2024, I’ve been erring on the side of the World Drama and Documentary categories, and if that sounds like sawdust, you are free to stop reading now. But the returns have been pretty high, to tell you the truth, and je ne regrette rien.
So the first two days of my Sundance 2025 turned out, somewhat randomly, to be a mini festival of Angry Young Arab Teen dramas, the best of which – and a real audience pleaser, if any American audiences ever get to see it – is “DJ Ahmet” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 1/2, seeking distribution, online availability), from Macedonian writer-director Georgi M. Unkovski. In a rural Yuruk village in the north of the country, a teenage boy (a long-suffering, Brillo-headed Arif Jakup) spends his days herding sheep in the hills and his evenings secretly blissing out to electronic dance music pulled in from the Internet. He meets his opposite number and true love in Aya (Dora Akan Zlatanova), who has returned from studies in Germany to unwillingly enter into an arranged marriage, and together they plot to set her free.

Delightful and beguilingly sharp, “DJ Ahmet” is a reminder that if there are no new stories, there are new ways of telling them. Sundance is teeming with coming-of-age dramas, but you’ve probably never seen one where an army of sheep invade a midnight forest rave, or where a tractor is turned into a mobile EDM sound system, or where the local minaret broadcasts the Windows start-up sound to the surrounding countryside. Along with the movie just below, it’s a sign of a coming wave of Arab-language films where the parents are still living in the 19th century while the kids are charging headlong into the 21st.

Almost as strong is Tunisia’s “Where the Wind Comes From” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐, seeking US distribution, online availability), which benefits by a phosphorescent lead performance from Eya Bellagha as Alyssa, a 19-year-old rebel without a fuse – a teenage girl so fed up with her culture’s restrictions and proscriptions that she’s primed to explode. With her older but shyer best friend Mehdi (Slim Baccar), a talented artist who can’t find a job in Tunis’ prostrate economy, Alyssa steals a local crime kingpin’s car and drives off to an art contest in the south of the country, with an internship in Germany as the prize.
It's a standard road film in structure, but writer-director Amel Guellaty keeps the energy fizzing throughout, and Bellagha is a whirlwind in the lead – hilarious, heartsore, always making the wrong decision for the right reasons. I really do hope “Where the Wind Comes From” gets seen as widely as possible – a brand new star is a terrible thing to waste.
There’s an angry Arab rebel teen in “All That’s Left of You” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐, seeking distribution) – a Palestinian youth taking part in the First Intifada of 1988 – but he’s only a small part of Cherien Dabis’s epic mosaic of one family’s travails from the Nakba to the modern day. Dabis is a Palestinian-American actress and filmmaker who was born in Omaha and understands as well as anyone what it means to be dispossessed – visiting the territories at age 8, she and her sisters were strip-searched by Israeli soldiers – and her earlier “Amreeka” is a poignant drama of assimilation and struggle in Illinois. (Dabis has also directed six episodes of “Only Murders in the Building” – it’s a big old funky world.)

“All That’s Left of You” – the title wearily refers to Palestine itself – is notable for starring acting-directing icon Mohammad Bakri and his two actor sons, Saleh and Adam, as family members of different generations, and the film itself is a powerful if dramatically diffuse and occasionally heavy-handed history lesson as filtered through the prism of one clan, charting their descent from proud Jaffa landowners to strangers in their own land.
A few short takes:

“Sly Lives! (AKA The Burden of Black Genius)” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 1/2) will be streaming on Hulu in late February, but how could I resist the long-awaited Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s follow-up to “Summer of Soul” and a long-overdue paean to one of the protean musical talents of the 20th century? Without Sly Stone, no hip-hop (well, different hip-hop) and definitely no Parliament-Funkadelic or Prince, among others; what he brokered in the 1960s before flaming out in the ‘70s was a multi-culti revolution in sound and vision. Thompson gets everybody on the record here except Stone himself – Sly may live, but he’s not present in this movie. The price of fame and way too many drugs? I wish the film addressed the issue beyond Stone’s son saying, “He’s basically an old Black man now.” But “Sly Lives!” does dive into the thorny issues of the movie’s subtitle, addressing the pressures exerted on a Black genius – which Stone most certainly was – by an America primed to make his internal operating system crash from all the conflicting instructions.

“Pee-wee as Himself” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 1/2) is a three-and-a-half hour, two-part documentary by Matt Wolf scheduled to appear on HBO sometime this spring, and, yes, I took in the whole megillah in one festival screening, and the time flew by. (But I’m the guy who made sure my girlfriend liked “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” before going ahead with the wedding plans.) As opposed to the Sly Stone doc, Paul Reubens is front and center here, interviewed extensively a year before his 2023 death from the cancer he kept secret from the filmmakers and almost everyone else. The movie’s anything but a hagiography: while it addresses all the stops on a very long and multi-chaptered story, both the director and Reubens himself are open about his ambition and need for control over his public persona, his sexuality, and every facet of his career, and the need extends to the interview sessions themselves, which are often hysterically funny but also telling in the way Reubens confesses and withholds, often in the same breath. Was Pee-wee Herman Paul Reubens' armor, his closet, his rival? All of that and more. The segments on his early, pre-Pee-wee work are revelatory; those on the late-life scandals are frank; and there are a surprising number of bridges burnt in the middle. The doc’s not-so-big reveal? Not that Reubens was gay (come on), but that he was, in his own words, a “massive weedhead.”

“If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐) was getting thumbnailed on the shuttle buses as “'Uncut Gems’ meets ‘Nightbitch’,” and, honestly, that’s what’s good and bad about it. Like the Safdie brothers’ drama, this pitch-black comedy drama in which a heroic Rose Byrne stars as a working mother having the worst month ever starts with the intensity cranked to 11 and stays there for the entire running time. The non-modulation is the point, but you may need a defibrillator by hour two. Her airline pilot husband is away; a busted pipe has collapsed the living room ceiling; she and her young daughter have moved to a motel; the daughter (who’s interestingly and conveniently just offscreen almost the entire movie) has some kind of mystery ailment that involves a feeding tube and machines that emit shrieks on the regular; one of the mother’s therapy patients has gone AWOL; and her own therapist, played by a driest of dry Conan O’Brien, is kind of a dick. It’s the second feature from actress-writer-director Mary Bronstein (who plays an officious hospital caregiver and who has worked with the Safdies in the past), and some here are calling it brilliant while others are calling it punishment. I lean slightly toward the former, mostly on the strength of Byrne’s truly impressive triathlon of a performance. An A24 movie, obviously, with a release planned for later this year.
Here are some scenes from the post-screening Q&A. with Bronstein talking about the film's themes and goals, Byrne and Bronstein discussing their working relationship, and Conan admitting that he felt like a total fraud on the set.
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