Sundance 2024

An insightful, generous and supportive reframing of transmasculine sexuality, Jules Rosskam’s Sundance documentary Desire Lines astutely blends first-person interviews (with transmen who are attracted to men) alongside a fictional storyline that poses nuanced questions and helps to deliver a compassionate examination both of the history of transsexuality and private desires.

Norway came up trumps at Sundance 2024 where A New Kind of Wilderness won the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize: Documentary, while Ibelin received The Directing Award and The Audience Award in the same section. The U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Doc went to Porcelain War, while Daughters won the Festival Favourite Award and US Doc Audience Award. The Belgian doc Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat won the World Cinema Doc Special Jury Award for Cinematic Innovation.

Belgium-based Moldovan filmmaker Olga Lucovnicova, whose debut My Uncle Tudor won both the Golden Bear for Best Short Film at Berlinale 2021 and the European Film Award, world-premieres her latest short at Sundance. The new film tells the story of a strange non-human creature that was found in 1996 in a region of Russia shrouded in mystery, 1700km east of Moscow. Lucovnicova explains more to BDE.

A compulsively absorbing and gripping documentary that plays out like a tense political thriller, War Game puts a bipartisan group of US defence, intelligence, and elected policymakers spanning five presidential administrations into a room and gives them just six hours to save American democracy.

In this early highlight of 2024, Belgian archival maestro Grimonprez dissects the links between jazz and colonial politics during the Western sabotage of Congo’s newly won independence in 1960. With superb sound design, brilliant editing and hard-hitting political analysis (as well as great music), the film is as intellectually satisfying and physically irresistible as a great jazz performance.

A powerful, provocative and ultimately moving film from journalist-turned-filmmaker Shiori Ito, Black Box Diaries charts her brave and determined investigation into her own sexual assault as she attempts to prosecute her high-profile and very-well connected offender, despite a lack of formal interest from the police.

Do you remember when tech start-ups would find you a place to stay for the night, or locate a taxi just a minute away, or deliver you a burger? Just to make the business of living that little bit easier. Well, now start-ups are dealing in death, enabling grieving folk to communicate with AI-generated versions of their deceased loved ones, via web chat or VR. “[People] don't believe in God anymore…but at the same time, they can't deal with the fact that death is finite,” co-director Moritz Riesewieck tells BDE. “And these tech companies have a big chance to fill this gap.”