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When director Will Allen’s name was omitted from the Sundance Film Festival Competition announcement last November, plenty of conjecture surrounded his film Holy Hell and its sensitive subject matter. The riveting documentary sheds light on the inner workings of a mysterious spiritual community called Buddhafield, in which more than 100 young people lived a utopian existence under the grip of an enigmatic leader.
The non-fiction film is the first feature from director Will Allen, and while numerous other documentaries and narrative films have explored similar subject matter, Holy Hell offers a unique perspective.

People, places, and stories aren’t always what you expect them to be in Pervert Park, a moving and bravely humane documentary about a self-contained community of sex offenders in St. Petersburg, Florida. As Swedish director Frida Barkfors and her Danish husband Lasse Barkfors said at the film’s premiere at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, they were also surprised by what they found in the park.

Whit Stillman’s elegant, witty Love & Friendship, based on Lady Susan, an unpublished novella by Jane Austen, opens this Friday after premiering in the Premieres section of the 2016 Sundance Film Festival. Unsurprisingly, the pairing of Stillman, known for his sophisticated comedies of social mores, and Austen, beloved for her 19th-century romantic fiction, proved to be as well-made a match as any that might appear in the works of the English author. Before the film’s premiere, Stillman, who made his Sundance debut in 1990 with Metropolitan, even joked to the audience that his films “have often been accused of being set in Georgian times.

At this year’s Sundance
Film Festival, Belgian director Felix van Groeningen revealed the personal
connection behind the brotherly descent into sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll that
is Belgica. “It’s inspired
by a real bar, which my father started in 1989 and was sold to two brothers in
2000,” he said during the post-screening Q&A. Yet it’s the story of these
brothers, rather than of Van Groeningen’s father, that motivates the film.

Rania Attieh and Daniel Garcia’s H. marks one of the most enigmatic Sundance selections in recent years and is set to make its theatrical release in April. Detailing a series of inexplicable events following a meteor strike in upstate New York, H.

With Take Me to the River, director Matt Sobel delivers not only an atypical take on the coming-of-age story, but one of the most original movies to have premiered at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival. Sobel’s button-pushing mindfuck about adolescent sexuality and family secrets is a tenacious and taut drama that veers between comedy, drama, and thriller – sometimes within the same scene. It’s not an easily accessible film, but as described by programmer David Courier at the 2015 Sundance premiere, it’s the kind that defines what the NEXT section of the Festival is about.

Yorgos Lanthimos’ relentless trademark absurdism is at its best and most pointed in The Lobster, the Colin Farrell-led drama that sees its protagonist defect from a matchmaking hotel where he has 45 days to find a partner or be transformed into an animal of his choice. The Lobster operates on any number of frequencies, from its acute sense of pacing to its dreary, nearly monochromatic visual aesthetic, Lanthimos’ writing and direction pull the viewer in varying directions while chopping at the cultural underpinnings of modern love – or worse, what it could become. The film finally makes its commercial theatrical run next Friday after premiering at last year’s Cannes Film Festival.

Nestled among awards season bedlam is our own little Festival set for later this month. But before we introduce audiences to a fresh roster of filmmakers and films, make the rounds on these Sundance indies coming to Netflix, DVD, and other digital platforms this January, as well as a slate of Sundance Institute Theatre Program productions coming to the stage.

Coming to NetflixFriday, January 1
How to Change the World

Friday, January 15
The Overnight

Monday, January 25
Turbo Kid

iTunes via #ArtistServicesTuesday, January 12Blind Bob and the Trees Chisholm ’72Good Morning Karachi Stray DogIvy DVD, Blu-Ray, and DigitalTuesday, January 5
Infinitely Polar Bear
Experimenter
Sleeping With Other People

Tuesday, January 12
The Stanford Prison Experiment
The Look of Silence
Tuesday, January 19
The Diary of a Teenage GirlOn the StageGrey Gardens, Southwark Playhouse, Jan.

For all the autobiographical narratives, in-depth profiles, and passion projects at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, James White may have been the most intimate film at Park City. From first scene to last, wherever James White (Christopher Abbott) goes, the camera follows, and closely. Whether he’s wandering through a crowded New York club, getting into a bar fight, bombing at a job interview, navigating his deceased father’s Shiva, or tending to his ailing mother (Cynthia Nixon), we’re right there to read his face, register his desperation or confusion, and ride his emotional rollercoaster.

If fear is in fact the most powerful motivator, then (T)Error may have us all hand-wringing and galvanized come the credits. In their feature debut, co-directors Lyric R. Cabral and David Felix Sutcliffe cleverly infiltrate a real life counterterrorism sting carried out by a veteran FBI informant known as Saeed Torres, or “Shariff.

It’s all but impossible to describe all that happens in The Forbidden Room, since it’s all but impossible to track all that’s happening in the moment.
So let’s just say it has something to do with a doomed submarine, a woodsman determined to save his beloved from humanoid wolves, a manacled gardener, a soused parachutist attorney, a poisonous skeleton unitard, posthumous drinking buddies, an inner child murderer, and baths, for starters. It’s a film in which digressions aren’t really digressions, but rather thresholds to new flights of fancy, to more and more fervent valentines to lost and imagined cinematic worlds, to beautiful imagery and bawdy jokes.

A pair of Sundance breakout films coming to theaters in October examine the disparate but mesmerizing charades carried out by their subjects. In the documentary (T)ERROR, cameras infiltrate a real life counterterrorism sting carried out by a veteran FBI informant, and in I Smile Back, Sarah Silverman secretly inhabits a world of compulsion and duplicity that belies her idyllic family life. Check out all that October has to offer below.