Drones: Sundance Film Festival 2025
Three films watched online from the Sundance Film Festival, where the remote-viewing offer was throttled back to a tasting menu. The festival may still be off to some new location in 2027, at which point an online offer might be surplus to the business plan entirely. It's probably surplus already. The online commentariat has fallen out with the social media platform where most of the talk about the films used to go, and the web chatter was diluted and spread out into less a metaphorical buzz than an actual buzz - small, distant and indistinct. Someone pirated bits of two films onto X anyway, rather proving the point.
Andre is an Idiot is a documentary about a terminal colorectal cancer patient and there are criticisms to make, if you felt enough of a brute to make them. Avoiding misery porn by finding an unmiserable comedian patient and then not framing his torment as Fighting Cancer works well enough, although the film's message doesn’t extend much beyond the Star Trek quote I shoehorned into the review. But the look on the faces of the guy's daughters rules out anything but a sympathetic appraisal of honest intentions.
Sukkwan Island was watched under the impression it might have involved Tuppence Middleton under duress in a snowy climate, something no one who watched Sense8 would want to miss. But she’s hardly in it, since the film is about father and son falling apart in the fjords rather than whatever domestic travails with the boy's mother led to them being up shøt creek in the first place.
And then there's 2000 Meters to Andriivka, a doc built from body-cam footage and military drone shots during Ukraine's 2023 offensive against Russian invaders, which like most authentic footage from war zones leaves you wondering if the word progress should be applied to human events at all. Time loses its meaning. The landscape is a dead zone with modernist backdrops, drone warfare manages to embody style elements from James Cameron and Denis Villeneuve films, and the sight of Russian soldiers jumping out from camouflaged trenches and killing and being killed has beamed in from a century ago, or ten centuries. Not the only hell on Earth by far, but one of them.