Although the narrative features have left something to be desired, consistently Sundance delivers on the documentary front (some of 2024’s most acclaimed documentaries such as “Daughters,” “Black Box Diaries” and “Union” all premiered at last year’s festival). I’ve already named three docs that are worth checking out scattered all across the other categories, but this trio from the US Documentary Competition, though difficult to watch is exactly the type of work that will have lasting power. I see these being instrumental in shaping discussions around themes such as caring for the Earth, disability justice, and female autonomy amidst capitalistic systems.
“Life After” warrants praise for how it approaches its difficult subject matter with a kind of mercy and control that can easily be flung to the wayside when telling such a deeply personal story. Directed by Reid Davenport (“I Didn’t See You There”), the film focuses on his search for Elizabeth Bouvia, a disabled woman who lived in California and who in 1983, demanded the right to end her own life. Bouvia’s desire sparked national outrage and debate, catalyzing conversations around the intersection between where individual autonomy begins and where the coercion of self-harm induced by lack of options ends. After many years of being in the public eye, Bouvia disappeared, and Davenport’s film is a summation of his attempts to try and find out what happened to her. Along the way, he meets other members of the disabled community and draws a parallel to how what happened to Bouvia intersects with his thoughts about the right to die, especially as a disabled director himself.
There’s an urgency and refreshing honesty that courses through Davenport’s exploration, particularly in how he refuses to tiptoe around any hard conversations and his willingness to abandon niceties in order to get at real issues. While Bouvia may be the white whale for whom Davenport is chasing, his investigative journey introduces him to other people who have wrestled through similar struggles as her. These moments are hard to witness but Davenport does justice and honor to them by telling their whole story without caricature or glossing over. By telling the stories of someone like Jerika Bolen, a disabled Wisconsin teenager Jerika Bolen who was encouraged by her family to end her life at 14 years old, and Michael Hickson, a quadriplegic who was denied care when he contracted Covid, Davenport highlights the ways differently abled bodies are seen as lesser than and how such mindsets are not just bigoted and harmful mentally, but cause irrevocable damage and harm.
For Davenport, he does not view disability as an automatic death sentence and his pursuit to tell Bouvia’s story rightly and in highlighting stories like Jerika and Michael stems from a deep love for them. Through it all, he never ceases to allow himself or his other subjects to be denied the full range of humanity that is so often done by society.
Director Rachel Fleit’s “Sugar Babies” is another film that attempts to have its central figure define her own story and speak on her terms, though to less successful results. It’s not a knock on her direction, which is characterized by a type of free-flowing and loose hand that stems from an innate trust in her subject, but it becomes difficult to discern the purpose of Fleit’s presentation when it lacks the editing (or perhaps clarifying perspective) that would help solidify her own stances.
The focus of Fleit’s film is Autumn, a high school student and popular TikTok influencer who runs an online sugar baby operation. The key word is “online,” or as Autumn herself explains, “I’m a sugar baby without the sugar … I text men and I talk to them and they send me money but I never meet them.” For Autumn, she’s hoping to attend college and sees her work as just a way to help pay her way there. There’s an element of safety in that she never has any in-person meet-ups with these men, but there’s an inherent tragedy in her choice to make money in this way and that at such a young age, she’s had to be exposed to the darkest corners of the internet. “I did it because I had to, not because I wanted to,” she tells the camera, citing that Covid changed her initial approach in two major ways: she couldn’t make as much money as a waitress, and people were isolated and looking for connection more than ever. Fleit also uses Autumn’s predicament and work as a way to comment more broadly on socio-economic problems in Louisiana; between Autumn’s journey, Fleit shows how Governor John Bel Edwards has unsuccessfully tried to raise the minimum wage in Louisiana since he took office in 2016, leaving people like Autumn few options to pay for college’s inordinate costs.
It’s evident and admirable that given the sensitivity of the subject, Fleit wants to protect Autumn and show she’s someone who shouldn’t be defined solely by her chosen vocation. This type of candor cuts both ways and Fleit’s choice to not interrogate or follow through is questionable in some places. One scene sees Autumn share how some people have accused her of trying to be “ghetto” and “ratchet” and that she’s trying to be black just because she talks with slang; it’s a thorny subject that warrants more exploration but at times, Fleit seems content with just letting Autumn speak and then move on.
Shot in a gorgeously rendered black and white palette, “Seeds” is the type of documentary that acts as a sort of sabbath amid a heavy Sundance screening schedule. That’s not to say that director Brittany Shyne’s film doesn’t deal with serious subject matters but rather that her contemplative approach to her subjects moves and weaves with a type of poetry that’s earnest, soothing, and recalibrating. It’s the type of pensive picture that in the commotion of life, actually acts as an invitation to luxuriate in what is being explored.
Shye’s film focuses on Black farmers who are in crisis in the United States, specifically in the American South. Years of discriminatory attitudes have crystallized into cruel practice; the farmers articulate how they’re approved for a menial amount of loans to help with their farming compared to white farmers and for many farmers for whom they’ve been tilling the land for generations, it’s heartbreaking to see them wrestle with the future of their work and vocation when they can’t afford necessities or things to help them with their lives. This information does not come to viewers through interviews or Shyne interjecting himself in the story; it comes out through the farmers just naturally talking to the camera as if the audience is an old friend and they’re just in the throes of conversation. In one scene we see Willie Head Jr., a farmer in Pavo Georgia, call USDA officials for updates about money that was to be issued to 40,000 Black farmers across the country; “The president said he had our back,” he says exasperated, “… and I voted for him. But nothing has been done.”
Shye also serves as a cinematographer and she renders the mundane exciting: hands hungrily reaching into watermelon flesh, roads worn down by horse hooves and car tires, fireworks crackling in the sky … there’s a lyricism that’s hard to not be swept in by. In one scene, a farmer holds old-fashioned corn, pointing to it as he says, “The healing of the body is breaded into this” and it feels like nothing short of a benediction. Ever playful, Shye’s camera peeks over and zooms into the corn, as if a curious child hearing a relative share a story. “Seeds” is a stunning portrait of the people who labor not only to feed the world but also their lifestyle that runs counterintuitive to the exploitative forces and which many of us live our lives. It’s a reminder too of what we might lose if not protected fiercely.
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