Seeds. Courtesy of Sundance Institute
The last time I made my way out to Sundance Film Festival, I was in a place of deep reflection as I thought and wrote of love while wandering the snowy confines of Park City. This year, I decided to take in the festival from Los Angeles—taking full advantage of the generous virtual option to watch the films I was most excited about with a dear friend, while we commiserated and recovered from the psycho/emotional/interpersonal fallout of the calamitous fires in LA. I also appreciate this option to be able to watch the films virtually because my Sundance experience last year left a very bad taste in my mouth, even before being able to attend so many other festivals, conferences, and convenings that showed much more mindful care for its attendees. Being at IDA’s Getting Real conference, BlackStar’s Greaves Filmmakers Seminar and flagship BlackStar Film Festival, the Global Audiovisual Archiving Conference put on by Archive/CounterArchive, the Eye Filmmuseum, TIFF, and LA’s own AFI Fest all proved to be more welcoming, engaging and inspiring experiences.
But Sundance is a unique crossroads of industry and independence, where you are able to be surprised by films that you didn’t see coming—films that often end up disrupting the film industry’s ideas of marketability, contending for awards and being placed on all sorts of year-end lists, if they’re able to find the right support. As Sundance Film Festival looks to a future away from Park City, I look forward to its continued evolution and for it to claim greater responsibility in its capacity to shift the paradigm of attention in the industry and for film festivals as a whole. While Sundance itself looks into questions of location, land, capital, culture and evolution, I also find myself attracted to the films in the 2025 lineup that seek context and answers to these same questions.
The purest shot of joy for me at this year’s festival was Elegance Bratton’s Move Ya Body: The Birth of House. The thumping sounds of the film’s namesake song, “Move Your Body” by Marshall Jefferson, steadily build as the audience is invited into a cinematic reclamation of House music’s rightful place in history. Framed within the infectious, joyous refuge found dancing at the club, Elegance Bratton’s film takes us through the ecstatic bloom of House music and into the pitfalls that come with outward expressions of queer jubilance.
Chicago is a battlefield in the time of House music’s birth, and the film brings us into this fraught and fertile terrain through the stories of Vince Lawrence, legendary innovator of the House music scene and one of the founders of the first House music record label, Trax Records. Archival television footage of Chicago in the late ’70s, cinematically gathered touchstones of Black life, and family photos of Vince’s life help build a picture of why and how House music came to be. In this perspective of a young Black nerd growing up in an intensely segregated Chicago, the magic of Disco comes alive on the screen. The mother to House music, Disco was “Black and Brown and queer,” the musical form starting out as an act of resistance creating another world of possibility for the expression of exuberant Black life.
To be Black in ways that catch the world’s attention and imagination, as Disco did, is typically met with anti-Black oppression and violence. Move Ya Body foregrounds the constant reminders that “Black bodies in motion aren’t met without consequence,” as DJ and House scholar Duane Powell says in the film. To do so, the film takes us through the dark days of anti-Disco sentiment stoked by the conscious and subconscious actions of local radio shock jock Steve Zahl and the impact that had on the vibrant Disco scene in Chicago. But as often as radical Black cultural expression is met with suppression, people find a way to go underground—and thus House music was borne out of Chicago’s Warehouse nightclub. Elegance’s loving portrait of the early House music scene gives life to this exultant, celebratory music, emphasizing that the history of House music is the history of Black music.
“The music industry is a technology to strip capital from Black cultural production.”
—Madison Moore, Cultural critic and professor at Brown University, in Move Ya Body: The Birth of House
Faced with the seeming perpetuity of efforts across history to extract capital from Black cultural production, Kahlil Joseph designed a cinematic vessel from within for BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions. The film is committed to the portrayal of Black brilliance in all its chaotic, symphonic permutations, giving verisimilitudinous vividness to what co-screenwriter Saidiya Hartman describes in the film as “the everyday anarchy of Black lives.” I see in her words and in this film, our persistent spiritual, ancestral evasion amidst cultural strip-mining—the living otherwise that “is happening now and it’s how we’ve survived,” as Saidiya says. Kahlil Joseph’s film moves in hyperrhythms of evasion, beyond the fiber optic speeds made capable by the telecommunication cables laid across ocean floors along routes that echo the transatlantic slave trade, moving viewers into instantaneous quantum recognitions of the infinite radiance of Blackness.
“I know what you’re thinking, but this is not a documentary,” read Kahlil Joseph’s captions, set after a sequence of clips from his family’s home movies and photos. Blink between frames and you’ll miss the film warping ahead, techno thumping as the audience is sped through moving image representations of the pages of Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African-American Experience, as notable Black figures, movements, countries, activities, animals of the continent flash across the screen. The visuals seamlessly switch between moving and still images, black and white and color, quiet and loud, past, present, and future. The text of Encyclopedia Africana, replete with on-screen paginal citations, plus the rapid-fire imagery together depict a glimpse of the infinity of Blackness across worlds. Sorrow and sadness by way of ecstasy, curiosity, joy, create a symphony in motion on screen.
Amid these fantastic spirals, in his captions, Joseph talks of missing his younger brother and father. But these personal moments are quickly over, as the film transmutes itself from a portrait to visual hypernews feed to speculative fiction. The film takes us back to its fictional future on a levitating transatlantic transport to Ghana aboard the Nautica, where bountiful amenities of a service rooted in the loving dissemination of Black cultural production allow for rest, refuge, reflection during the Transatlantic Biennale. “Fuck Your Facts (This message brought to you by BLKNWS)” flashes across the screen, one amongst many similar messages from the BLKNWS editorial team, and reminds me I don’t need to be telling you all this.
In the immensely rich, black-and-white brilliance of Brittany Shyne’s Seeds, we pay witness to Southern Black elders farming their land. The slow, observational pace of Brittany Shyne’s camera allows us to enter into a pace of life in these parts, where folks sit in their cars not to go anywhere, just to chat, and maybe listen to the radio for a spell. We see, among many elegantly meandering moments, a scene of farmers gathering their yearly pecan harvest. One elder takes a pecan, splitting it with her fingers and putting a piece in her mouth, silent, pensive, savoring the fruit of her labor in an intimate and shrouded seeming satisfaction. Casual histories are spoken while weighing pecan harvests, deep blacks with low contrast shades of grey silhouette generations of Black farmer families going to a funeral, returning their loved ones to the land. Everybody know each other, recognition moves slowly but it shows no bounds here.
This generous glimpse into Black farm life depicts the generations of farmers maintaining a slow and sacred way of life. Farmer Aaron talks of his family owning his land since 1883, elders who continue to hold on to the land while the young folks move up north. Sometimes they come back, “but they ain’t farming.” The casual reflections of their reality reflect a speed of life and capacity for attention that escape most city folk. Aaron reminds us, “What we see now in the present, don’t mean the future gonna be that way.”
Seeds (recipient of a 2021 IDA Enterprise Documentary Fund grant) lets us sit with the land and its Black stewards before we hear slivers of the struggle of Black farm life. Everybody got slightly broken down trucks, the banks won’t lend folks money, and the funds promised by Biden’s government don’t seem to be coming any time soon. A crew of farmers go to Atlanta and later to the White House to protest the continuing legacies of disenfranchisement—one stark fact mentioned in the film is that in 1910 there were 16 million acres of land owned by Black farmers, compared to now, when only 1.5 million acres are owned by Black farmers. Willie Jr. has loads of land but is forced to use his $900 social security check to farm with and at this rate, he’ll miss planting season waiting for their funds—deliberately so, he implies. There is deep perspective in this way of life. The passage of time slows and seeps when you respect the land, and those who listen find a richness in this life that’s not visible to those who ain’t seen it grow.
The battle for land sovereignty, justice, and dignity on Turtle Island continues in Jesse Short Bull and David France’s Free Leonard Peltier. Framed around the generational struggle in Indian country, the film delves into the 50 year long campaign to free American Indian Movement (AIM) organizer Leonard Peltier from prison. Using a filmed prison interview from 35 years ago as the central narrative backbone of the film, Free Leonard Pelter takes us from scenes of present-day organizers working to free Leonard Peltier to archival footage and new interviews with AIM organizers, Leonard’s lawyers, and government officials—all in the interest of telling Leonard’s fateful story and finding a path to justice for him in a country determined to see him imprisoned for life.
We hear of Leonard’s experiences at an Indian boarding school, of being arrested for attending an illegal Sundance ceremony in his community at the Turtle Mountain Chippewa Reservation, of him steadily understanding more of his positionality within the American occupation context, and what he could do to support the sovereignty of Native American peoples. The film propels us into the reason for Leonard Peltier’s imprisonment—the fateful Siege at Wounded Knee. Using archival footage, interviews, and even AI footage and sound to create a bracing documentation of the efforts to re-indigenize the Pine Ridge Lakota lands and defend against colonial extraction, the film goes deep into the specifics of the standoff, the fallout and the legal battles that follow.
Co-directors Jesse Short Bull and David France do an impressive job of making real and exciting the large-scale struggles against colonial powers on Indigenous land as well as the specific struggle of Leonard Peltier and what he represents. From Leonard’s time on the run after the shootout, to the myriad courtroom dramas that follow, we feel and see how much love and support Leonard gets worldwide. Organizers from the NDN Collective continue to campaign for Leonard’s freedom, and we’re treated to the latest update in 2025—Biden’s decision to finally commute Leonard’s sentence.
Amid the ecstatic 2023 revolution in Sudan after 30 years of dictatorship, filmmakers Anas Saeed, Rawia Alhag, Ibrahim Snoopy, and Timeea Ahmed along with British director Phil Cox documented the lives of five Sudanese people from different walks of life as the infinite energy of revolution gets redirected into a coup. The resulting film, Khartoum, is a spirited revelation and love letter to the people of Sudan and the city of Khartoum. During filming, the Sudanese military and the RSF break into a civil war that displaces over 10 million people, including the filmmakers and participants of the film. The beginning of the film sets up this context and subsequently the filmmakers’ solution to construct scenarios with the participants in exile. The filmmakers plant the participants in front of a green screen and prompt them to dream as the film constructs their dreamscapes around them through low-budget special effects—re-enacting their disbelief as Sudan descends deeper into war.
The five participants perform in each other’s scenes of what they went through as Khartoum fell into war. The stories are heavy with sadness and grief, but the filmmakers manage to create an environment and film that works to avoid re-traumatizing the participants and the audience. There is no attempt to hide the production seams, the necessary technical and emotional lengths the filmmakers need to go through to tell these stories are laid bare. We see the crew come on camera and hug the participants after particularly emotional bouts of storytelling and reenactment, a display of the care needed to tell stories that are still so fresh for all involved.
These reenactments are blended elegantly with filming done across Khartoum before the civil war. The camera floats into portraits of people around the city, full of light and hope from the revolution. There are scenes of music in Khartoum, men and women dancing joyously in modern and traditional styles, and joyous protests in the streets. This footage from before the war, like reveries of a Sudan on the brink of freedom, makes the illustrated stories of each participant having to flee the land that they love so much even more impactful.
Providing moments of grief, recognition, testimonies to lives and livelihoods lost, friends and family lost, Khartoum is a gift of remembrance to the people of Sudan for a dream achieved and not yet lost, for it lives within its people and underneath its soil, ready to sprout again when the time is right.
Matazi Weathers is a temporal and spatial film farmer, curator, educator, and filmmaker from Los Angeles, constellating image-making networks across the African diaspora as an experiential researcher and as Assistant Curator of Film at LACMA.