Sundance 2013: Hope and Change Redux

The 2013 Sundance Film Festival straddled the second Inauguration of President Obama in the calendar, and the programming mix reflected the predominant social issues of the day. Among the more visible figures spotted roaming around Park City: Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, the driving force of Jacob Kornbluth's Inequality for All, who presided over Q&As and panels like the impassioned Berkeley professor he is; and Anita Hill, the iconic figure of the Clarence Thomas hearings from two decades ago, who was on hand to support Freida Lee Mock's Anita. Among the lesser known figures, for obvious reasons, included a trio of current and former CIA agents, all of whom provide riveting accounts of their decades-long hunt for Osama bin Laden in Greg Barker's Manhunt; and four intrepid late-term abortion providers—the only four remaining in America—who appeared at high-security screenings of Martha Shane and Lana Wilson's After Tiller. And most of these filmmakers, and a host of others in the documentary lineup, converged on the two parties that IDA hosted on successive nights—the first, with RoCo Films, and the second, with T3 Media.

All told, as America emerged from a profligate and divisive election year and, with a faint glimmer of hope, faced a new presidential term, the stories that have both driven and split this country in recent years unspooled in mostly riveting cinema all over Park City.

Immigration reform is one of the hot-button agenda items as Obama begins his second term, and Who Is Dayani Cristal? takes a wrenching, ground-level view of the experience of one ill-fated immigrant who was found in the Arizona desert, with the name Dayani Cristal tattooed on his chest-his sole means of identification. The film, by Marc Silver and Gael Garcia Bernal, deftly weaves three narrative threads. One unfolds north of the border, where forensics experts, border patrol officers, journalists and diplomats from the Mexican and Honduran Consulates all offer sobering testimonials about their process in identifying this one of the many thousands of migrants who have perished in the desert. Another story, set in Honduras, introduces us to the family and friends of the man they identify as Yohan; they give us a human perspective on his motives and motivations for seeking a way out of a dire situation. The third story is a dramatization of sorts, in which Bernal himself assumes the role of Yohan, retracing his journey from Honduras to Arizona, during which he meets fellow travelers, hops the train (presumably the same train that transported young Guatemalan migrants in Rebecca Cammisa's Which Way Home), stays at way stations, and crosses the Arizona border. While it's not clear whether the migrants recognized Bernal and agreed to play along, or bonded with a comrade willing to risk everything for a better life for his family, this narrative thread catalyzes the film and makes the story of the migrant all the more poignant. "I tried to not fall into the division between documentary and fiction," said Bernal after the screening, on his decision to portray Yohan within a documentary context. "The reality of migration is common for everyone. We're all from migrant families. Why is it normal to call migrants ‘illegal aliens,' and not ‘undocumented migrants'?"

Bernal later participated in a panel, "Turning the Tide," which also included Pablo Larrain, director of the feature No, which stars Bernal; Jehane Noujaim, director of The Square; and the aforementioned Robert Reich. Orlando Bagwell, director of the Ford Foundation's JustFilms initiative, moderated; he started out by discussing the power of films like those represented on the panel to foster change, as well as the challenges in shaping that change.

Reich turned to documentary because he had been writing and speaking about the widening inequality of classes in America for years—"and it has had no effect," he admitted. "People learn through narrative. When I teach, I tell stories, and my students understand the issues better through narrative. But, if the dominant narrative is one of cynicism and anger, that narrative won't generate social change. Inequality for All is not didactic or proselytizing; it attempts to connect the dots so people have more power."

Noujaim contended, "I made a film to challenge the single narrative"—that is, what the media was reporting about the revolution in Egypt. Her film The Square follows four characters over two years as they participate in demonstrations on Tahir Square. She maintained, "The revolution was about getting rid of power bases, but then the vote came down between the establishment and the Muslim Brotherhood. It will be at least ten years before we understand what the last two years was about." Asked what she hoped people would walk away from the film, she responded, "I hope people see the complexity and why the fight continues."

The Square, which earned the Audience Award in the World Cinema Documentary strand, is a bold and riveting film that places you at Ground Zero of the revolution and keeps you there, following, as mentioned above, four activists as they brave the power shifts, violent confrontations, and their own challenges of maintaining the revolutionary esprit de corps. Noujaim found her characters within the first 18 days of the uprising in Tahir Square and managed to follow their stories despite herself having been arrested. Because the revolution is a work in progress, she finished filming just two weeks before premiering at Sundance, and delivered the film the day before the first screening.

The Middle East formed the backdrop for Greg Barker's Manhunt: The Search for Osama bin Laden, based on Peter Bergen's book of roughly the same title. With access to current and former CIA and FBI agents, Barker, along with editor Joe Bini and the graphics company The Mill, tells an engrossing history, from the first Persian Gulf War in the early 1990s, of how Osama bin Laden rose to power and how US intelligence personnel painstakingly and meticulously tracked him down to the endgame in Abbottabad. Along the way, we get a sense of the moral blind spots that inevitably inform the mission, particularly in addressing the effectiveness of torture (The FBI parted ways with the CIA over the question of "enhanced interrogation techniques."); the struggles with successive presidential administrations; and the various tragic setbacks along the way.

Of course, no one embraced enhanced interrogation techniques with more fervor than Dick Cheney, the subject of R.J. Cutler and Greg Finton's The World According to Dick Cheney, which will premiere in March on Showtime to kickoff a series of docs on controversial figures. Also on tap for this particular strand: Suge Knight and Muammar Qadaffi. Many in the audience for the Sundance premiere were disappointed, but audiences should not have expected a cinematic trial, evoking a tearful mea culpa, or any moment of regret from a figure so unwaveringly resolute and hidebound in his convictions, despite their tragic consequences.  Audience members took Cutler to task for not asking, say, about Cheney's Halliburton affiliation and how his former company profited from the Iraq War, and I, for one, would have liked to see Cutler grill him about his five deferments from military service as an ironic pretext to his eventual emergence as one of the most bellicose government leaders of the past 50 years. Perhaps it was too soon to address the subject of Cheney and his place in American history, and perhaps, despite Cheney's ongoing health issues (he underwent a heart transplant in the months prior to sitting down for four days of interviews with Cutler and Finton), the filmmakers should have let history do its work and allow the Cheney era some perspective and hindsight.

Cheney was obviously not going to give the audience what he probably knew it wanted, but nonetheless when he says in the movie, "If you want to be loved, go be a movie star," it makes you dig a little deeper into a public figure who so callously dismisses the notion of human decency. There's also this withering quote: "You don't want to be known as a mean and nasty fellow? You don't want your honor to be questioned? Why would those things matter when compared to protecting America?" And the contradictions are there: He cites honesty, integrity and loyalty as the qualities he values most, yet in order to secure Representative Dick Armey's vote for the Iraq War, Cheney lied to him about Saddam's capabilities. As a young chief of staff in the Ford Administration, he purged the Nixon loyalists, including Henry Kissinger, even though it was Nixon, through Donald Rumsfeld, who gave him his first job in public office. Cheney served several terms in the House of Representatives, yet he adamantly advocated for the imperialist presidency that Nixon embraced. He grew up in Wyoming, far from the East Coast establishment, having flunked out of Yale twice, yet he transformed the George W. Bush White House into one of the most insular and opaque Executive Branches in American history. This is the world according to Dick Cheney, after all—a world that by the second term of the Bush Administration he had checkmated himself out of.

So while Cutler and Finton's film may not have delivered the schadenfreude that most Sundancers had hoped for (Cheney seemed to relish the dashed expectations, as evidenced by the dastardly twinkle in his eye in the last frame), the world that he fashioned, that he articulates in the film, is not one that most Americans would care to inhabit.

Thomas White is editor of Documentary.