THE just ended Sundance Film Festival (London edition) introduced 12 feature films from this year’s main festival held in Park City in Utah, US. Following its tradition of supporting emerging voices in filmmaking, the festival featured an equal number of male and female directors in this year’s selection, granting a range of British, Finnish, French, Indonesian, Canadian, Lebanese and US filmmakers to tell their authentic stories.

Winner of the audience awards was Brian and Charles, directed by Jim Archer – a story, set in rural Wales, about a lonely inventor who takes on his most ambitious project yet. By assembling a washing machine and a few odd pieces of junk, he invents Charles, an AI bot, who learns English from a dictionary and has an inexplicable obsession with cabbages.

Heart-warming and nonconformist amusement, it takes its childishness totally seriously producing a wonderful weird and magic movie about depression, isolation, friendship, and love.

The festival’s opening movie Sophia Hyde’s clever Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, follows Nancy Stokes (Emma Thompson), a retired schoolteacher, who yearns for adventure, and some sex, and hires a young sex worker named Leo Grande.

Totally honest and funny, it succeeds in showing the insecurities women have about sexuality, ageing, femininity and self-worth, and the ways men can relate to these themes in their own way.

In Hanna Bergholm’s debut Hatching, an inventive Finnish horror, Tinja, a 12-year-old gymnast desperate to please her mother, brings a strange mop egg home and nurtures it until it hatches. The creature that emerges soon becomes her closest friend and a living nightmare, plunging Tinja into a twisted reality that her mother refuses to see.
 
Another horror was the weird psychodrama Resurrection by Andrew Semans. Margaret, a proud single mother of a teenage daughter has everything is under control, until ex-boyfriend David returns, bringing with him horrors from the past.

Excited audiences have deemed it a new cult movie, however, personally I found it totally indigestible, with a flaccid and unrealistic script that offered nothing to the cast, except looking sweaty.

As in previous years, the London edition provided a strong documentary offering. The standout of this year was Julie Ha and Eugene Yi’s Free Chol Soo Lee who was initially wrongly convicted of a gangland murder in San Francisco and received the death penalty for killing a fellow prisoner. It’s both a stimulating story of people’s activism and a dreadful example of what the US prison system represents.

Joe Hunting’s groundbreaking and immersive debut documentary feature We Met in Virtual Reality takes place entirely within the online platform VRChat. It explores the social relations developed by users of VRChat during the pandemic. It captures the excitement and surprising intimacy of a burgeoning cultural movement, proving the power of online connection in an isolated world.
 
Among Sundance Film Festival Short Films was Warsha — a little gem by Lebanese director Dania Bdeir — about a Syrian migrant working as a crane operator in Beirut who volunteers to cover a shift on one of the most dangerous cranes, but a place where he can find his freedom, reminiscent perhaps of Crane World (Mundo grua), 1999, by Argentine Pablo Trapero.

Traditionally, the Sundance London is a worthy film festival, but this year’s selections, ranged from the hapless to the tasteless, miserable in fact and without the usual verve and variety this event delivers.