Sundance 2k24

Four new films from Park City, Utah

Watching

Black Box Diaries (2024)

In 2015, Japanese journalist Shiori Ito went public with her story of surviving sexual violence from a more senior man in her industry. The case sent a ripple through Japan—the man was a good friend of then–prime minister Shinzo Abe—and a few years later Ito published a book-length account, Black Box, that situated her experience in the history of Japan’s antiquated rape laws (a quick insert shot of a notebook near the beginning of the film informs us that the laws have not been revised in 110 years). During this period, Ito filmed diaries of her journey through the justice system, partly on her phone and partly on her work camera with the help of friends.

Black Box Diaries, the film that results from her video journaling, is an at times moving if somewhat frustratingly inwardly-focused movie. In contrast to her book, which seems to have a lot to say about the systemic problems with Japan’s legal and judicial systems, Ito’s film is more interested in the personal side of her case. Scenes are introduced with handwritten intertitles explaining Ito’s emotions and helping the viewer adjust to sudden jumps forward or backward in time. The film even begins with a note encouraging viewers for whom Ito’s story may be triggering to close their eyes and take deep breaths as necessary—“it’s helped me many times.” This is a nice gesture, and also one of the few times that the film reaches beyond Ito’s immediate experience to consider other people in similar circumstances.

The other moments where the film looks outward are its clear highlights. In one scene, Ito goes to a forum of women journalists who shower her with support and share their own stories of survival, which they had overwhelmingly been discouraged from speaking about publicly. Getting up before the group to say a few last words, Ito is brought to tears explaining her feeling of being “covered with blankets” by the women’s words, in contrast to her feeling of nakedness when bringing her case before a skeptical public. And in a scene set some years later, on the penultimate night of her trial, Ito receives an unexpected show of solidarity from a working-class ally that may have ultimately been what pushed the case in her favor. On the strength of these moments one would have hoped that Black Box Diaries would have more to say about the bigger picture of Japanese rape laws and the people they do and do not protect. It’s possible that Ito felt she already covered this territory in her book, instead choosing to use her film for more therapeutic purposes. Unfortunately this makes the film feel a bit solipsistic, if not just an advertisement for the book.

Union (2024)

From 2021 onward, filmmakers Brett Story and Stephen Maing joined the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) at Amazon’s Staten Island warehouse to document the group’s efforts to organize the workforce. If you’re watching Union today you probably already know that the Staten Island workers became the first Amazon workplace to win a union election, so there won’t be too many surprises in the narrative arc of the film. What it provides instead is a valuable on-the-ground look at the challenges of organizing, especially at at workplace with a 150% annual turnover rate.

Story and Maing primarily focus on the organizers, including ALU leader Chris Smalls (a former Amazon employee), rather than the common worker. This limitation feels like a deference to worker privacy as much as a result of restricted access to filming inside the warehouse itself, although the movie incorporates a few illegal cellphone videos taken by workers on the job and in union-busting workshops. We do get to hear a variety of worker stories secondhand, and at least one firsthand account from a former ALU member who remains skeptical of the union efforts through the whole film. Her perspective is among the most interesting the movie gives a platform to: she isn’t against unions in theory, but she has concerns that without the backing of an established union the ALU is fighting a losing battle. Moreover, as she voices to a fresh-faced college grad who moved to New York specifically to help with the union efforts on Staten Island, she’s concerned that without proper accountability measures in place to hold male leadership in check, the ALU will turn into just another boy’s club that doesn’t take the concerns of female workers seriously.

Story and Maing thread a tricky needle between the uplifting story of the underdog union taking on the business Goliath (or is it more of a Godzilla?) and the unglamorous two-steps-forward, one-step-back of democratic procedure. The story of the Staten Island workers is ongoing—title cards at the end of the film explain that Amazon has yet to go to the bargaining table with them—and efforts to unionize neighboring warehouses have come up short. All eyes are on Staten Island as the futures of the 1.5 million–strong Amazon workforce (to say nothing of workers everywhere) hang in the balance, making Union the rare documentary that begs for a sequel.

Sebastian (2024)

One of the most enduring film discourses on social media is whether movies should have sex or not. Mikko Mäkelä’s Sebastian isn’t going to settle this debate but it isn’t making a very persuasive case for its position either.

Max (Ruaridh Mollica) is a 25-year-old grad student and writer in London. He’s just placed a story in Granta and he’s hard at work on his next big project, a novel about a sex worker. For research purposes, he’s doing sex work on the side, and transposing his experiences basically as they happen directly onto the page. Most of the clients who hire Max (or Sebastian, as he goes online) are older men. Max doesn’t need the money from sex work—not at first, anyway—but something about it keeps pulling him away from his other work and other relationships, to the detriment of both. Eventually he gets hired by a debonair litterateur (Jonathan Hyde) and the two strike up more of a friendship than what Max has to that point found from his other clients.

When this friendship makes its way into the novel, Max’s agent isn’t convinced that it’s a compelling route for the story to take. Max begs to differ, arguing that this kind of cross-generational relationship is one of the great unsung possibilities of (gay male) sex work. Okay, but it’s a sad state of affairs if the baby gays only know how to meet their elders through transactional relations. It’s clear from the narrative arc of the film that Sebastian is intended as a statement of empowerment and sex positivity, so then why are the sex scenes so rote and unimaginative? Simply showing a thing isn’t the same as demonstrating its goodness. Not to invoke an arbitrary comparison to All of Us Strangers just because it’s the last gay movie I wrote about in this newsletter but there’s a movie that knows how to make sex both tender and, well, sexy.

Nocturnes (2024)

They said there was a moth movie at Sundance and I was like, I’m in. Not since 2014’s The Duke of Burgundy have lepidopterists and their objects of study had such a chance to shine onscreen. Directors Anupama Srinivasan and Anirban Dutta head out to the forests of the Himalayas to follow a small team of scientists studying a specific species of moth, one of hundreds in the area and one of the more than 150,000 species of moth worldwide.

Nocturnes borrows a lot from narrative slow cinema. There are long establishing shots of mist-filled mountains, with particular attention paid to the soundscape of the environment. When the moths come out at night, they gather in the thousands (viewer discretion advised). Through lots of extreme closeups, we get an exclusive look at the dazzling biodiversity of the region’s nocturnal fliers.

The movie is as much about the moths as it is about the difficulties of conducting research in the Himalayas. Rockslides block the roads; steady rainstorms render firewood useless. Good relations with the indigenous peoples of the area are necessary for getting around and learning how to treat the flora and fauna with proper care. We only gradually learn what the scientists are trying to find out: namely, how the earth’s rising temperatures relate to the elevations where certain moths live, and the cascading effects of moth habitation on the rest of the food chain. At one point one of the scientists makes an unexpected discovery and exclaims that it will take years to test a hypothesis about it. I for one hope there will be more than enough years for them to do so.