Sundance 2021

Alex Heeney / August 13, 2021

Sundance Review: CODA is a crowdpleaser with nuanced ideas about disability

Siân Heder’s crowd-pleaser, CODA, is a film that, in any other year, would have the Eccles Theatre on its feet with rapturous applause.

CODA is now streaming worldwide on Apple TV Plus.

This review was originally published on February 14, 2021 as part of our Sundance Film Festival coverage. It has been republished for the film’s release. Check out all our Sundance coverage.

A young woman sits on a boat in this still from CODA. The text on the image reads, 'Review'. — Sundance Review: CODA is a crowdpleaser with nuanced ideas about disability. Image courtesy of Sundance.

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Siân Heder’s unabashed crowd-pleaser, CODA, is the kind of film that, in any other year, would have had the entire Eccles Theatre on its feet with rapturous applause. Although this year’s virtual Sundance meant that the response trickled out, instead, through social media, it’s no surprise that the film picked up four awards — and not just because the US Dramatic Competition was so weak — including the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award for Best US Dramatic Feature, Best Directing (US Dramatic), and a special Best Ensemble Prize. Despite a plethora of coming-of-age story cliches, CODA still feels genuinely original, nuanced, and important because it has thoughtful, sensitive storytelling where it counts: in the depiction of disability and family, even as the film centres the only non-disabled family member.

Ruby Rossi (breakout star Emilia Jones) is a Hearing Child of Deaf Adults (CODA) who learns to find her voice both literally (as a singer) and figuratively (to stand up to her family). From the start of the film, Ruby is caught between two worlds: her insular, tight-knit deaf family, and the hearing world beyond where her class status and insecurities keep her isolated. The film’s first image is of a fishing boat at sea with no one else in sight, before Heder takes us on board to meet Ruby, her older brother, Leo (Daniel Durant), and her father, Frank (a hilarious and heartbreaking Troy Kotsur), all working seamlessly together on the day’s catch. Ruby is singing, her family’s oblivion the only sign that they are deaf. There’s genuine joy and camaraderie in their daily crack-of-dawn toil. As soon as they come ashore, Ruby hops on her bike to school, Heder’s clever signal that Ruby is moving from one world to another. It’s only when Ruby says her goodbyes to her family in sign language, after having a chat with the fishery inspector, that we understand she’s a CODA.

On the first day of school, Ruby has to pick an elective, and quickly follows her crush, Miles (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo), into choir. Though she’s initially terrified of singing in front of a hearing audience, her quirky Inspirational Music Teacher, Bernardo (Eugenio Derbez), soon assuages her fears and informs her she has a gift. This subplot is the most cliched and tired of the film, with Bernardo magically transforming the meek Ruby into a powerhouse belter with just a couple of goofy breathing exercises. Bernardo pushes Ruby to consider studying singing, offering free private lessons to prepare her for a music school audition — a climactic audition which she will, of course, almost miss but make at the very last minute. Ruby is constantly late to their sessions because of family obligations, but instead of being frank with her teacher about what’s on her plate, she creates unnecessary drama where he threatens to stop helping her.

Ruby's music teacher, Bernardo, conducts the school concert in CODA. — Eugenio Derbez in CODA. Image courtesy of Sundance.

Conveniently, in class, Bernardo pairs Ruby with Miles for a duet, forcing proximity between them, and helping to kickstart a romance. But Heder never lets the teen romance subplot take over; it’s just one of many balls that Ruby is juggling. Her relationship with Miles also parallels that of Ruby’s best friend, Gertie (Amy Forsyth), who is constantly in search of conquests, and who sets her sights on Ruby’s older brother. Both of these relationships provide insights into how hearing people can easily learn to interact with deaf people, without turning things into an afternoon special. The first time Ruby has Miles over to her house to rehearse, they’re interrupted by loud noises from the room next door: Ruby’s parents are having sex, unaware that they can be heard. Once Ruby informs them they have company, they insist on sitting down with Miles for a talk about safe sex. Ruby’s father’s signs are so vivid in their explicitness that Ruby is mortified and Miles understands and is amused by the parents’ frankness, without the need of a translator. Gertie and Leo’s flirtation unfolds via text messages while sitting opposite from each other, an easy solution to their need to communicate.

It’s a little problematic that most of Ruby’s regular teen problems — nervousness about a crush, finding her passion, pursuing her dream — all happen within a hearing context, while her struggles all seem tied to her parents’ deafness and their over-reliance on her because she’s hearing. In an early scene, played for laughs, Ruby accompanies her parents to a doctor’s appointment to serve as interpreter, as they describe, in vivid detail, an STI they’re both suffering through. Though an illustration of the easy rapport between parents and daughter, Heder never really takes the lack of boundaries in this family too seriously, focusing instead on the love and support that a close-knit family provides. But that also means conflating how much Ruby is responsible for helping her parents communicate with hearing people with something more toxic that goes largely unexplored.

Still, Heder is smart about the degree to which Ruby herself has cultivated her parents’ dependence on her. The bullying she’s received at school for being ‘different’ means she’s loath to let anyone hurt her family. But that also means constantly assuming that there could be a slight should they try to communicate directly with hearing people because they might unintentionally make a gaffe. Though the fact that the fishing culture is steeped in chauvinistic traditions supports Ruby’s fears, she never actually lets her family try their hand without her. She takes on more responsibility than she should of her own volition, and her parents never step in to stop her.

The key family-related subplot of the film revolves around the changing fishing industry (making the film pair well with another Sundance title, Luzzu) where auction prices are unfair, fishing quotas are challenging, and the only way forward is to collaborate with the hearing fishermen who have thus far ostracized the Rossi family. Leo wants to change the way they do business, but feels constantly left out of major decisions, despite being an adult, because his parents treat his deafness as a liability, choosing to rely, instead, on Ruby. The way Leo is sidelined is emotionally fruitful territory that Heder explores; it’s something Ruby doesn’t expect, because she always felt like the outsider as the only hearing member of her family.

The two halves of Ruby’s life collide when her family’s livelihood suddenly becomes dependent on her contributions. All at-sea communications are done orally, so it’s both unsafe and illegal to go fishing without a hearing crew member aboard the fishing vessel. Thus far, Ruby has fulfilled that role, but if she goes away to college, then they’ll be left in the lurch. They can’t afford to hire someone else just for this purpose. If Ruby. At the same time, their attempts at new ways of doing business mean needing to interact more with hearing people, putting additional pressure on Ruby to show up for her family, even when she’s supposed to be meeting Bernardo to plan her own future.

The Rossi family applauds in the audience of Ruby's school concert. — (From left) Amy Forsyth, Daniel Durant, Marlee Matlin, and Troy Kotsur in CODA. Image courtesy of Sundance.

Initially, Ruby’s family struggles to understand her passion for singing, despite being fans of music with a strong beat. Her mother, Jackie (the always great Marlee Matlin), dismisses it as teenage rebellion because Ruby is a CODA. There’s a wonderful scene where the entire family attends Ruby’s recital at school. They’re far enough back in the audience that they can’t make out the faces on stage, and of course, they can’t hear what’s going on. At first, they’re bored, talking about dinner plans. But Gertie informs Leo that Ruby is good, and soon, Frank is scanning the audience to see their reactions. Heder cuts out all sound, putting us in the family’s headspace, as Frank discovers, in awe, that that audience is incredibly moved by the performance, nodding to the beat, and even on the verge of tears. The scene that follows, at home, between father and daughter is so tender and sweet that I defy anyone not to cry their eyes out.

Ultimately, it’s that tenderness and care between the family that makes the film. As much as they rely on Ruby, they want her to be happy, and they are able to get on board with helping her achieve her dream. And like everything else they do, they do it as a family. Heder skips over a lot of heavy-lifting to get to a happy ending in which both Ruby and her family find independence and community as they become more integrated into the broader, hearing community. It’s almost too easy, but it does keep the focus on the family and their joint dedication to making sure everyone is happy and achieving their potential.

Marlee Matlin and Daniel Durant both recently starred in TV’s Switched at Birth, which more deftly navigated the challenges of living in a hearing world that defaults to forcing deaf people to conform to the hearing world, rather than vice versa. If CODA lacks this nuance, both because of its limitations as a feature and its attempt at mainstream-appeal, it still feels like a landmark film. It’s smart about how inaccessible the world is for deaf people — whether it’s the lack of an interpreter at court proceedings, or the fact that all communications at sea happen through sound even when we live in a world with alternative technology. Heder never underlines this inaccessibility (unlike, say, Sound of Metal). But she’s smart about planting how Ruby circumvents problems that we don’t even realise exist until she’s no longer present. By making us fall so hard for the Rossis, she gets us fired up about how the world is inaccessible, without ever preaching.

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The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be Quiet: Ana Katz on the best film of Sundance

Ana Katz’s The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be Quiet was our favourite film of Sundance and won awards at IFFR. We spoke with Katz about collaborating with her brother over a three year shoot.

Check out all our Sundance coverage.

A still of Ana Katz in front of a still of The Dog Who Wouldn't Be Quiet. The text on the image reads 'Interview'. — The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be Quiet: Ana Katz on the best film of Sundance 2021. Images courtesy of Sundance.

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The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be Quiet, the latest feature from Argentinian writer-director Ana Katz (My Friend from the Park), is a series of vignettes in the life of Sebastián (played by her brother, Daniel Katz) over the course of several years. Each vignette features small moments of connection, which taken together, feel like a full, rich life depicted in almost insignificant details. We see the moment when Sebastián is forced to choose between his day job and his dog; the moment he meets his future wife, but not when they marry; a moment of crisis as a father; and a moment of calm comfort that closes out the film. The moments are fleeting, but also often very funny and sweet.

The film opens with a gathering of Sebastián’s neighbours in his backyard. It’s a rainy day, and they’re all crammed into his backyard, their umbrellas hitting each other, as they complain to him about his ‘dog who wouldn’t be quiet’ whenever it is home alone without Sebastián. Of course, Katz never lets us hear the dog’s supposed cries of longing, so we can’t share in the neighbours’ frustration, only in Sebastián’s affection for his dog. This is soon followed by a meeting at work, where his two bosses explain to him that they can’t allow him to bring his dog to work would because it would be the first step into an office of chaos; it’s hilarious, if sad, then, when the film later takes a sci-fi turn, and everyone suddenly adapts to wearing giant glass helmets.

The image from the film that sticks in my mind is the wide shot of Sebastián and his dog traveling down the long hallway of the building together, leaving the corporate world behind for a place where they can be together. That place is rural, and we watch as Sebastián and his dog play together in a field, in a wide shot, as if watching a romance unfold — before suddenly being confronted by the dog’s death early on in the film, depicted through a series of drawings that are all the more heartbreaking in their abstractness.

Shot over three years, The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be Quiet asks us to fill in the ellipses between the vignettes, when we skip ahead in time with no warning and no signal but a change in the actors’ physicality — a new haircut, or changing weight. It’s a film that gives equal weight to the joy Sebastián gets from playing with his dog as it does to the encounter he has with a sandwich on public transport. On a train ride to his old office, hoping to get his job back now that his dog is gone, he eyes a sandwich left behind by another passenger. Katz shoots this as a sort of meet cute, in which the camera repeatedly eyes the sandwich in closeup as Sebastián gets up the nerve to switch seats so he can eat it. It’s a funny scene, but a melancholy one, too, and that tinge of sadness pervades the film and its often absurdist humour.

And yet the film is side-splittingly funny, at times. At his mother’s wedding, Sebastián eyes a woman on the dance floor (Julieta Zylerberberg), who eyes him in return, and they find themselves dancing together. Their goofy dance stands in for an entire courtship; in the next scene, she’s pregnant. Skipping right over the birth, we find the couple again at a doctor’s office where they’re concerned about their baby’s health. The doctor is perplexingly wearing a glass helmet, akin to what an astronaut would wear on a spacewalk, and yet the parents aren’t, leading us to spend much of the scene wondering what the helmet is for. The reveal that follows is one I can’t spoil, but it’s a moment of astute physical comedy that had me in stitches.

Before the film’s world premiere, I sat down with Ana Katz to talk about making a film about grief with her brother, crafting an elliptical film about a man coming of age through changing relationships in an often hostile world, and how real life melded with the life depicted on screen.

A man looks into the camera, his head encased in a plastic bubble. — Daniel Katz as Sebastián in The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be Quiet.

Seventh Row (7R): Where did the idea for The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be Quiet come from?

Ana Katz: It’s a film that comes from an emotional intuition more than a rational thought. I feel that human beings can adapt too easily to a system which is very complex and very cruel.

The initial idea was to tell a story about a man — and this is my first time telling a story closely about a man — who society avoids or rejects. It’s a man who has a special sensibility.

For example, he can’t accept that his dog cries when he’s not at home. He prefers to quit his job [than leave the dog alone], when he has to make a decision [between the two]. I feel that society marks a very clear path for how men should be. It’s like, we don’t need those kinds of men like [the character], so get out.

I wanted to think about a man in a different way, regarding sensibilities, thoughts, and feelings. I wanted to talk about the demands of work and the cruel daily routines of a human being’s life.

7R: We see Sebastián going through multiple different jobs at different stages of his life. How did you think about what those different stages look like and what was key in each of them?

Ana Katz: The human scale was the main thing for me. To put a very strong accent in those little things, which are maybe the ones we are not listening to. The pandemic part [where the film enters the realm of science fiction], I imagined that many years before [the actual 2020 pandemic] happened. I feel that it’s very complicated for us to listen to the world. There can be a meteor, a pandemic, and an illness, but still, we decide not to listen to [the planet].

It was a beautiful process because I always tried to connect with the emotional part of the point. For example, in the death of the dog, I wanted not to go to a conventional idea of a death. I wanted to be very near [to the character’s emotions]. Maybe to be very near, in our brain, we need to focus on our feelings and not in our typical way of telling stories in films or TV. It was like trying to make an experiment, but always with the human scale.

7R: I understand you spent three years shooting The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be Quiet?

Ana Katz: Yes. It reminded me of when I was at university studying cinema, and we made a short film, among friends. We were borrowing the camera from the university, and we tried to focus on the process of searching for something with no name.

Sometimes, producers need answers. I understand it, of course. For example, now, I’m in the middle of shooting a very big TV show. So I understand that there are different types of processes. But when you shoot with an answer, the process is very different. What I loved very much, with this process, was the freedom I had to search. Maybe not [freedom with] money, but we could do it with the money we had. We could search with no necessity of set ideas to sell the project.

7R: Did you have the whole script written before you started? Or did it evolve and change as you were shooting?

Ana Katz: I had very strong notes — the beginning, the end, the middle, and very strong scenes. But how to search for that idea was something very free. For example, I knew the neighbours complain about the dog, and [Sebastián] explains something. The concept was very clear from the beginning to the end, but not maybe how we could build it. That was maybe the documentary [aspect] that accompanied the whole process and provided me with a bigger canvas to search.

7R: Can you tell me a bit about how you worked with your multiple directors of photography (DPs) to develop the film’s aesthetic, especially as you were shooting over this long period of time?

Ana Katz: I needed to concentrate on Sebastián’s life. I felt that black and white could give me that concentration, that reduction of noise that I needed. I admire, in a deep way, all those DPs that worked with me. I always tried to find out where the truth of the scene was, that part that you can develop in a dream, but you can’t touch it yet in your reality. So we worked together looking at the take or the angle, to show that dreamy reality. I was so grateful to my producer and to the main actor [Daniel Katz], who is also my brother, because they really trusted me in a process that was very flexible. It wasn’t the script that was flexible, but the way to reach the script.

A man trims a bush of flowers in The Dog Who Wouldn't Be Quiet, directed by Ana Katz. — Daniel Katz as Sebastián in The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be Quiet.

7R: Can you tell me about the animation in the film?

Ana Katz: I worked with animation because I felt that [the scenes with animation were] impossible [to capture] with reality. Moments where I feel so much pain talking about them that I can’t do it with the tools of conventional cinema. I need to escape, and, at the same time, I need to do it more clearly.

Now that I’m talking to you, I’m thinking that maybe it’s like a childhood memory — when you’re a child, and you process a big emotion with drawings. I didn’t need professional animation. Our art director, Mariela Ripodas, made the drawings. She’s a great person and friend and artist, and she has a lot of drawings.

I told her what I needed. For example, the dog dies, and [Sebastián] runs to meet the dog that is dead, and after, the dog transforms into the wild flowers that were in his garden. She [Mariela] understood because she’s great. She’s very simple and deep, Mariela.

7R: What was the process for editing the film?

Ana Katz: I have a very great team. When I talk about this, I can really see what a big team I had. For example, my editor is named Andrés Tambornino, and has worked on almost all my films with me. He knows me very well. He likes freedom, and asks nothing. So with this project, he was very, very enthusiastic. I explained to him how I needed to build it, and we began to search and to make a lot of versions.

I was always thinking about the film Un Chien Andalou. It’s not so much realism, but a film in which you feel something, but you don’t know how you got [the feeling]. I wanted that impression, but I didn’t know how to do it.

Then, you need to taste and experiment. And there is a moment you think, “Okay, I’ve arrived. I don’t know how, but I arrived, so we are okay.” We began to work like that. There were periods of editing [throughout the shoot], but after I finished shooting, I really began editing.

Another thing I really enjoyed was finding the leading actor in different physical periods and emotional periods of his life. The ellipses of the main character of the film was another thing that was a very strong point for me. This would be impossible in a normal four-week shoot. So I really needed to have space to make, I don’t know, the hair change, and the weight change. Life comes and transforms different things.

7R: The film jumps forward in time repeatedly. We see these little moments in Sebastián’s life, and then we skip ahead.

Ana Katz: In the script, that was very clear. That was a strong point from the beginning, from many, many years ago. Even the pandemic part, those parts were there from the very beginning. The ellipses of your emotions is what is important to me. The scenes represent events that will be a very strong memory that marks and will remain in Sebastián’s life.

I thought that sandwich on the train, for example, is an important moment. It’s like a meeting with a sandwich in a train, and it’s like a new beginning and cruel, at the same time. I tried to build a structure on a human scale, in the script. I was trying to build the structure to Sebastian’s life.

7R: I love the dogs in the film. Are you a dog owner? How did you think about how to shoot all those wonderful, moving scenes with the dog?

Ana Katz: Thank you for the question. It is a very beautiful and moving question because the main dog of Sebastián’s [which is Daniel’s dog in real life] died in the middle of shooting. It was a very, very, very big pain for Daniel, who played the main character. Now, when we see the film, it’s very strong. That scene in the countryside, when he runs and plays with the dog, was something very sweet for me, very moving. I think, again, that childhood appears in a way.

Also, my dog is in the film, which also died. That’s the problem with dogs! They live shorter lives than us. In a way, I think that it’s a mourning film, a film about grief. We loved those dogs.

7R: What did you mean when you say the film is about mourning?

Ana Katz: With my brother, we shared a very painful process when we lost our dad, when we were younger, but he [our father] was [also] still young. I felt that my brother had, in his eyes, a knowledge of a deep [mourning] process, and I wanted to share with him something regarding that feeling.

The musician of the film [Nicolás Villamil] is my best friend, who I have worked with on all of my films, and he died. His music in the film is something magical for me. I also lived that grief; well, I’m still living with — I think grief is always with us. I don’t think it’s like conventional stories; it’s present, future, and past always together. In the film, there are some feelings of sadness, but I didn’t want it to be depressing. I wanted to see the start of change [and to see] life.

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Check out out more Sundance 2021 coverage…

The best films of Sundance 2021

‘The idea for the sound design was accepting silence’: Iuli Gerbase on The Pink Cloud

Ep. 78: Sundance 2021, part 1

Alex Heeney / February 16, 2021

What is the Sundance World Cinema Dramatic Competition?

The World Cinema Dramatic Competition at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival featured some genuinely exciting and original films, as well as many films that check the selection’s regular boxes.

Read all of our Sundance 2021 coverage here

Clockwise from top left: Stills from Human Factors, The Pink Cloud, The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be Quiet, Luzzu, and Pleasure. All of these films screened in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition at Sundance 2021

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In the eight years I’ve been covering the Sundance Film Festival, the World Cinema Dramatic Competition has been the most consistently under-rated and under-covered section of the festival, despite regularly featuring great titles. Reserved more for early career filmmakers than industry heavyweights, the competition tends to anoint exciting new talent each year.

Whether those films actually get seen by press or the public, at the festival or afterward, is another story altogether.

In 2014, the lineup featured the Ben-Whishaw-starrer Lilting, Eskil Vogt’s stunning debut, Blind, and Sophie Hyde’s debut, 52 Tuesdays. In the years since, the program has featured two films that we went on to write books about — Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir and Francis Lee’s God’s Own Country — and a whole slew of other wonderful films. Some of these disappear entirely from North America, like Rebecca Daly’s Mammal or Anne Sewitsky’s Homesick — neither of which you can even import on DVD. Others get modest limited cinema runs or VOD releases, like Tali Shalom-Ezer’s Princess or May el-Toukhy’s Queen of Hearts. The rare film breaks through to get a Criterion release (The Lure) or Oscar-shortlisted (The Guilty). And yet it’s the program where I tend to make the best discoveries. This year’s festival featured a particularly weak across-the-board selection, but the World Cinema Dramatic Competition was still the strongest program. It even featured the festival’s best film, the entirely original The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be Quiet.

How Sundance’s World Cinema Dramatic Competition compares to other international festivals

Unlike most international film festivals, Sundance separates its competitions into American and World Cinema competitions. The U.S. competitions are considered the centrepiece of Sundance while the World Cinema selections are regularly sidelined. That’s not just a choice by the largely American press corps but by the festival itself, which always programmes the single press screenings for World Dramatic titles simultaneously so that press have to work for it if they want to see the entire selection. The festival also requires that its competition titles are world premieres, which can make it difficult to premiere at other festivals more focused on world cinema.

Choosing to screen your film at Sundance means subjecting your film to a system that’s already stacked against it. For the most part, this means Sundance’s World Cinema Dramatic Competition has become a program for films that might struggle to get into other festivals. If you’re a first-time director, working with unknown actors, there’s stiff competition for slots at festivals like Berlin, Cannes, Toronto, and Venice.

There’s also very little space to ‘move up’ in the ranks at Sundance. By contrast, most other international festivals have programmes for unknowns which receive less press attention, but allow you to develop a relationship with the festival’s programmers. Once you get a foothold there, you can move up to the more prestigious sections that are better covered, whether your film is in English or not. At Cannes, you can start in one of the sidebars, like Un Certain Regard; at TIFF, you can start in Discovery, and move up to Special Presentations as you become a better-known director.

A still from Charter. — Amanda Kernell’s Charter screened in the 2020 World Cinema Dramatic Competition at Sundance

If you have a successful World Dramatic run at Sundance, when you return with another film, you’re likely to be stuck in the section unless the film is in English; the festival’s starry Premieres section is almost entirely comprised of English-language films. After achieving acclaim at TIFF, Amanda Kernell’s first feature, Sami Blood, screened in Sundance’s only section for films from other festivals, Spotlight. When she made her second film, Charter, it was ironically relegated to a section with even fewer eyes on it, the World Cinema Dramatic Competition, since these films don’t have the approval stamp of other festival success. Ana Katz, who directed this year’s best film of the festival, The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be Quiet, had previously screened a film in World Dramatic in 2016 (My Friend From the Park). After screening two films in the World Dramatic competition (Happy, Happy and Homesick), Anne Sewitsky was only promoted to Premieres for Sonja: The White Swan, because much of the film was in English and set in the US.

If Sundance is so uninterested in cultivating long-term relationships with international filmmakers, and does the bare minimum to help the films get seen during the festival, why screen them at all? It almost seems like the World Dramatic Competition regularly features excellent films almost in spite of itself. The batting average isn’t great, with at least a few stinkers each year, and a few OK-but-not-great films. But there are usually at least a couple of good films, and often two or more great films that often emerge as the best of the festival overall.

Blueprints for success in the World Dramatic Competition

Josh O’Connor (r) and Alec Secareanu (l) appear in *God’s Own Country* by Francis Lee. Courtesy of Sundance Institute.

The one blueprint for a film’s success that I have observed with this section, is if the film is in English, a crowd-pleaser, and leagues ahead of the other films in competition. That is, if it’s good enough to have been accepted by other festivals. Francis Lee’s first feature, God’s Own Country, for example, became a breakout hit after receiving a few rave reviews at Sundance (including from me). From the plot description and few press stills available, it appeared to be a punishing social realist drama rather than a sweet romance about discovering intimacy; I was pleasantly surprised, as were other critics. The only other World Dramatic film even on the same level as God’s Own Country that year was the great Georgian film My Happy Family, but it struggled to find its audience at Sundance because it wasn’t in English..

I could see God’s Own Country being a film that would be lost in the shuffle were it to screen in Un Certain Regard at Cannes or Discovery at TIFF, where so many great auteurs get their start. At Sundance, though, it was a clear standout, and word of mouth helped it go from a minor hit at Sundance to a major hit on the LGBTQ+ festival circuit, and a worldwide sensation by December. It would never have scored the opening night slot at the Edinburgh Film Festival without its earlier Sundance success. The Sundance premiere ended up setting the film up for a year’s worth of awards buzz, which paid dividends at the British Independent Film Awards, where the film picked up several major awards, and even more nominations. But as soon as Lee had starry enough actors to barter for a slot in a bigger festival for his next film, he took on the Cannes label for Ammonite, rather than returning to Sundance for a Premiere as an American filmmaker originally anointed by Sundance, like Richard Linklater, might do.

Stéphane Collonge served as production designer on God's Own Country, the subject of this book. Stéphane Collonge is one of our guests for the production design masterclass.

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Another case study for success is Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir. At the time, Hogg was a relative unknown among cinephiles, despite having already made three excellent features. The film proved one of the best of the year, and one of the best of the 2010s, so could have easily earned a place at a festival like Berlin or Toronto. But if it were relegated to a sidebar in one of those festivals, it might struggle to get seen. As the standout of the year in World Dramatic in 2019, it generated enormous buzz and picked up awards, putting the film and Hogg on cinephiles’ radar worldwide. But by being almost too good for the Sundance competition and in English, it received serious attention. Meanwhile, Queen of Hearts, an excellent Danish film that also screened in competition that year, was one of the best of the year if not the decade, yet it laboured in obscurity.

A program with fewer well-worn cliches than other Sundance sections

Compared to the rest of the Sundance selection, the World Dramatic Competition’s films tend to adhere less closely to well-worn Sundance formulas. At this point, most film fans could probably make a bingo card of regular cliches to be found in Sundance selections. While there are always a few duds in the World Dramatic Competition, it’s usually stronger than its sister competition, the U.S. Dramatic Competition, and often features more original films. Or, at least it may seem that way on the surface. But the closer you look at the programming through the years, the more you see it trends toward European cinema and cinema from the Americas, with the occasional Asian film thrown in; every couple of years, an African film sneaks in, too.

Most of the program’s films can be slotted into familiar boxes that the program returns to again and again over the years, even if there is variety and inventiveness throughout that year’s program. Even if Sundance is the best, or only, potential option for your film, you still have to fit into very regimented ideas about storytelling, meaning more original works might be getting rejected.

They love a good one-location thriller: from the Turkish Ivy (2015), in which crew members of a cargo ship get stuck on board for months, to the Danish emergency call centre thriller The Guilty (2018), to the game-show setting of Yalda, a Night for Forgiveness (2020), and this year, Prime Time (2021), a sort of Polish Money Monster with less tension. They also love a film about an unconventional parent — the newly transitioned transgender male parent of 52 Tuesdays (2014), the incest-adjacent dramas Mammal (2016) and Queen of Hearts (2019), the maid who is like a mother in The Second Mother (2015), or this year’s mother-daughter grifters of El Planeta (2021). This program also loves a good sexual awakening or uncomfortable experience with sexualisation, from The Summer of Sangailé (2015), to Princess (2016), to The Sharks (2019), to last year’s Cuties (2020).

2021’s selection still filled familiar slots in World Cinema Dramatic

A young woman sits in a pink inflatable raft on a swimming pool, wearing a bathing suit, in Pleasure. — Pleasure, which screened in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition, is one of the best films of Sundance 2021.

Most of this year’s program similarly slots into certain Sundance World Cinema Dramatic archetypes, too. The program’s buzziest title, Pleasure, about a woman making her way through the exploitative adult film industry, was originally slated for a Cannes 2020 premiere. But it fits right in with Sundance’s interest in sexually provocative films by female directors. Pleasure, fortunately, is more thoughtful and nuanced than 2018’s Holiday (Isabella Eklöf), which was about a sex worker in an abusive relationship who might herself be manipulative. It also chimes with 2017’s Berlin Syndrome by Cate Shortland (Black Widow), in which a date goes so wrong that a woman ends up held hostage in the man’s apartment, and Agnieszka Smoczynska’s The Lure (2016), a stylized musical about a pair of mermaids who take men as their prey.

Similarly, the multiple-award-winning Hive, which our Executive Editor Orla Smith was only lukewarm on, fits neatly into the festival’s desire to have a film about a woman fighting against (or brought down by) the patriarchy, usually also directed by women. In the past, many of these selections have been my festival favourites. In 2016, it was the tense Serbian drama A Good Wife, about a woman contemplating how to deal with the discovery of her husband’s war crimes, when her whole life revolves around caring for him and their children. Sand Storm (now on Netflix), one of the best films of 2016, also screened at the festival, and was about how patriarchal oppression is often enforced by women. In 2017, it was the excellent My Happy Family (now on Netflix), about a put-upon middle-aged house wife who decides to up and leave her family so she can take care of herself. And in 2019, Judy stood up to her abusive husband punch in Mirrah Foulkes’s well-intentioned Judy and Punch.

Two of my least favourite genres are the disability drama, which typically play into the worst cliches of disability stories, and the European family-based psychological thriller, which tend to be all style and little substance. In 2016, Between Sea and Land suggested that being a wheelchair user was worse than being dead, while 2019’s Dirty God was a surprisingly thoughtful and sensitive story of an acid burn victim.

Still from Ajiptal Singh’s Fire in the Mountains which screened in the 2021 Sundance World Cinema Dramatic Competition

This year’s disability drama, Ajiptal Singh’s Fire in the Mountains, set in the mountains of rural India, at least had the distinction of not explicitly claiming it’s better to be dead than disabled, though you’re left wondering how much better off the family would be if the wheelchair-using boy were dead. While it featured an entirely realistic cast of characters, the film itself seems to align with their problematic views on disability. The German film Human Factors served as this year’s psychological family drama-thriller, which like Koko-di Koko-da (2019), begins with a promising premise before fizzling out, though it does feature an impressive leading performance by Mark Waschke.

Fire in the Mountains is the story of a mother struggling against her abusive husband and unsupportive family, while trying to care for her son who recently lost the ability to walk, despite the doctors being unable to find a physiological reason for it. She doesn’t take things lying down though, crafting a plan to ensure her son gets back to school, even if it’s at the expense of her daughter’s future and her own bodily autonomy. The chauvinistic attitudes held toward women in the village and the pervasive corruption meant this paired well with one of the festival’s highlights, Writing with Fire (World Documentary Competition), which illuminated other aspects of women’s struggles against the patriarchy in India. Unfortunately, Fire in the Mountains tends to associate disability with cruelty, since the two disabled characters we meet are the corrupt, rapey town official, and our protagonist’s son, who is often shot sitting on his wheelchair as if it’s a throne, as if being disabled is an excuse to be pampered at other people’s expense. The landscape of the area is gorgeous, and this is a fascinating look at another culture, but one that falls into problematic cliches of so many other (often American) disability narratives.

This year, in a bid to keep the festival as American as possible, two films in the competition were set at least partly in the US — Pleasure and the disappointing One for the Road — and one film was directed by an American who also holds a Maltese passport. The latter film, Luzzu, proved one of the highlights of the festival. It also pairs nicely with the U.S. Dramatic Competition winner, CODA, as both films tackle the changing fishing industries in their respective countries.

How truly original films sneak into the World Cinema Dramatic Competition

Still from Iuli Gerbase’s The Pink Cloud

When a truly original film sneaks its way into the competition, I always wonder whether it can still somehow be slotted into boxes the programmers like to tick. Eskil Vogt’s formally inventive Blind, for example, was both a disability narrative and a sexually provocative film, addressing our relationship to porn long before Pleasure was in the embryo stage. The tender romance and family drama of God’s Own Country wasn’t a sexual awakening story, but it did fill the slot for explicit sex. Like this year’s Luzzu, though, it also tackled a changing industry that the family had been involved in for generations, and the economic precarity that they were now experiencing. Similarly, 2019’s Grand Jury Prize winner, The Souvenir, about a young woman finding her voice as a director in a male-dominated industry, could check the box of a landmark romance (like God’s Own Country) and a mother-daughter story.

It’s perhaps, then, unsurprising that the two most original films of the 2021 World Cinema Dramatic Competition are also the most zeitgeisty, each somewhat dealing with pandemic life, despite being made well before we’d even heard of SARS-CoV-2. They’re both also written and directed by women from South America. Iuli Gerbase’s The Pink Cloud is about a mysterious cloud that descends on the entire world, confining people to their homes for weeks, months, and then years. On the surface, it’s a prescient film about lockdown life, but it’s more of a dissection of a relationship, about how two people who are thrown together cope with unpleasant realities. The couple end up stuck together after a one-night stand, but unlike A Good Wife or An Unhappy Family, their struggles and differences have little to do with patriarchal norms.

The best film of the festival, Ana Katz’s The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be Quiet, features a little vignette in which the earth is hit by a meteor, and a sort-of pandemic lifestyle becomes the norm. I won’t spoil the details because it’s one of the film’s best laugh-out-loud moments. If the pandemic-adjacent story was the hook, I’m glad Sundance picked the film up, because it’s one of the most visually inventive, emotionally resonant, and laugh-out-loud films I’ve seen this year. Weeks later, I can still recall with perfect clarity certain scenes and images. It’s just a shame that it wasn’t until the film played the International Film Festival of Rotterdam that it actually won any awards.

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Seventh Row Editors / February 16, 2021

Ep. 79: Sundance 2021, part 2

This week we conclude our podcast discussion of the best and worst of Sundance 2021, including CODA, Judas and the Black Messiah, Pleasure, and The World to Come.

This episode is a Seventh Row members exclusive, as are all episodes older than six months. Click here to become a member.

Clockwise from top left: CODA, Pleasure, Judas and the Black Messiah, and The World to Come

This episode features Editor-in-Chief Alex Heeney, Executive Editor Orla Smith, and special guest Andrew Kendall (@DepartedAviator).

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Sundance 2021 films featured on this episode

At the Ready (Maisie Crow)
CODA (Sian Heder)
Fire in the Mountains (Ajitpal Singh)
Jockey (Clint Bentley)
John and the Hole (Pascual Sisto)
Judas and the Black Messiah (Shaka King)
Luzzu (Alex Camilleri)
Ma Belle, My Beauty (Marion Hill)
Mass (Fran Kranz)
Mayday (Karen Cinorre)
The Pink Cloud (Iuli Gerbase)
Pleasure (Ninja Thyberg)
R#J (Carey Williams)
Try Harder! (Debbie Lum)
We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (Jane Schoenbrun)
The World to Come (Mona Fastvold)
Writing with Fire (Rintu Thomas & Sushmit Ghosh)

Show Notes

Listen to part one of our discussion on Sundance 2021, featuring discussion of The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be Quiet, Flee, Passing, R#J, and more.
Listen to our podcast episode on Ammonite
We polled 39 critics on the best of Sundance this year. Flee, CODA, Passing, and The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be Quiet (all discussed on this episode) were among the top films receiving votes. Check out the link for the winner and all the other selections.
Read Alex’s review of CODA after listening to us discuss the film on this podcast
Read Orla’s review of Pleasure after listening to us discuss the film on this podcast
Read Orla’s review of Try Harder!
Read Orla’s review of We’re All Going to the World’s Fair
Read Alex’s interview with Luzzu director Alex Camilleri
Read Alex’s interview with The Pink Cloud director Iuli Gerbase
CODA’s Emilia Jones and Troy Kotsur, Judas and the Black Messiah’s Daniel Kaluuya, and Pleasure’s Sofia Kappel were among our picks for the best performances at this year’s Sundance. See why (and the other choices) here.
See our picks for the ten best films of Sundance 2021

Seventh Row Editors / February 13, 2021

The best films of Sundance 2021

Seventh Row’s editors pick the best films of Sundance 2021, from the big winner CODA to the under-the-radar Writing with Fire.

Check out all our Sundance coverage.

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Although Sundance is a film festival that primarily programmes American films, our Sundance 2021 was defined by the more adventurous and inspired world cinema offerings. Six out of the ten films on this best of Sundance list are international titles from the small but rich World Cinema Dramatic Competition and World Cinema Documentary Competition.

These films were a reprieve from a virtual festival that disappointed us quite a bit; the more buzzed-about titles continually let us down. There were plenty of middling US directorial debuts (On the Count of Three; The Blazing World; Ma Belle, My Beauty; Superior), including the grindingly tedious Mayday and the bafflingly bad Shakespeare adaptation R#J. Even the World Dramatic films that were actually rewarded — Hive, which dominated most of the awards, and Thai drama One for the Road — were among our least favourites in the category. In retrospect, TIFF 2020 was a treasure trove of quality. Perhaps we have the pandemic to thank for the low quality at Sundance this year (are the best films waiting for in-person premieres later in 2021?). Although I’m skeptical about Sundance’s American cinema programming in the best of years, as it seems to be less about actual quality and more about choosing films that fit their quirky indie brand, as well as inviting back previous Sundance alums.

The ten films we’ve selected for this list made our festival experience worthwhile, whether they were films we genuinely loved, films that gave us a lot to think about, or films that heralded exciting new cinematic voices (or all three).

Before we get to the full list, a few honourable mentions. We really liked the short films Raspberry and Doublespeak. The documentary Try Harder! was divisive amongst our staff, but you can read Orla Smith’s appraisal of it here. Mass is more a great actor’s showcase than a great movie. Together Together is a bit thin, but we appreciated its subversive gender politics. El Planeta is low on character insight but high on satirical laughs. Son of Monarchs looks gorgeous and rightfully won the Sloan Prize for Science in Cinema for its impressive photography of monarch butterflies, including in the lab, but it gets silly at times; and Strawberry Mansion wasn’t our thing, but it’s visually stunning and inventive, especially considering its small budget.

10. Writing with Fire (Sushmit Ghosh, Rintu Thomas)

A group of women sit on the floor, one of them looking into a smartphone, in Writing with Fire. — Writing with Fire is one of the best films of Sundance 2021.

The real strength of the documentary Writing with Fire is in how it drops you into a totally foreign world, of women journalists doing dangerous work in India, speaking truth to power at often great personal costs. It charts the development of the new digital side of the only female-run newspaper in the country. The filmmakers make similar use of video as its subjects do to bring you right into the reality of the problems that are happening: video allows you to see the faces of people affected. The journalists depicted are smart and impressive women, and it’s inspiring to watch them navigate sexism, patriarchy, and going digital. Alex Heeney

Writing with Fire is still seeking distribution.

9. We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (Jane Schoenbrun)

A closeup of Anna Cobb, faced smeared in glow in the dark paint, in We're All Going to the World's Fair. — We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is one of the best films of Sundance 2021.

From our interview with Jane Schoenbrun: “Jane Schoenbrun’s original, sometimes baffling directorial debut, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, traps us in the claustrophobic, lonely mind of a teenage girl. Casey (intriguing breakout Anna Cobb) spends most of the film in her darkened bedroom, glued to the unnatural glow of her phone or computer screen. We never meet her friends, see her at school, or see her interacting with anyone except online acquaintances; we hear her dad’s voice a few times, but never see his face. Casey is a mystery to us beyond the strange online world she occupies.”… Read the full interview.

We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is still seeking distribution.

8. The Pink Cloud (Iuli Gerbase)

A woman sits looking out of her pink hued window in The Pink Cloud, one of the best films of Sundance 2021. — The Pink Cloud is one of the best films of Sundance 2021.

From our interview with Iuli Gerbase: “After a night of revelry and casual sex, perfect strangers Giovana (Renata de Lélis) and Yago (Eduardo Mendonça) suddenly find themselves stuck together in Giovana’s apartment because it’s no longer safe to go outside. Out of nowhere, a mysterious pink cloud descends over the world, and it will kill you if you’re within its vicinity for ten seconds. Brazillian writer-director Iuli Gerbase uses this sci-fi premise for her feature debut, The Pink Cloud, to explore a relationship at its limit: how do you learn to live with someone you didn’t choose for days, weeks, months, and years, when there’s no escape but death?”… Read the full interview.

The Pink Cloud is still seeking distribution.

7. Passing (Rebecca Hall)

A still of Ruth Negga and Tessa Thompson in Passing, one of the best films of Sundance 2021. — Passing is one of the best films of Sundance 2021.

Rebecca Hall’s feature debut, Passing, features an incredible ensemble cast in this almost too faithful adaptation of Nella Larsen’s landmark 1929 novel about two light-skinned black women who form a friendship and flirtation. The book is a first-person narrative told from the perspective of Irene (Tessa Thompson), who lives in Harlem with her husband (André Holland) and their children. Her life gets shaken up when she reconnects with Clare (Ruth Negga), a childhood friend who is living her life as a white woman, married to a racist white husband (Alexander Skarsgård).

The film doggedly follows the book scene by scene, using most of the same dialogue, which often means we don’t get enough context for the characters and their relationships. Larsen’s narrator illuminates Irene’s inner thoughts, including when she’s lying to herself, whereas the film relies almost entirely on Thompson’s often opaque performance, meaning it plays better to book readers than those coming in fresh. Despite the screenplay’s shortcomings, this is a gorgeous film, exquisitely acted, especially by Negga, and Hall is extremely thoughtful about the blocking, costumes, and lighting. The black-and-white photography especially makes it difficult to assign a race to these women, highlighting the arbitrariness of passing judgement based on skin colour, despite the fact that it has huge ramifications on the people involved. AH

Passing will be distributed worldwide by Netflix.

6. Pleasure (Ninja Thyberg)

Ninja Thyberg’s directorial debut, Pleasure, was the talk of the festival for its explicit sex scenes set on porn sets, but what’s really astounding about the film is its nuanced exploration of consent. Thyberg really did her research about the LA porn industry, bringing in real people from the industry to work on her film, both in front of and behind the camera. It makes this story of young Swedish expat Bella Cherry (Sofia Kappel) trying to become the next big porn star feel incredibly real and unsensationalised. The film constantly asks us to question what a consensual porn shoot looks like. Bella’s first scene seems a little sketchy but mostly fine at first glance, until later, when you see her shoot a bondage scene with a female director. The female director (a real kink director who plays herself) is careful to establish consent at every stage of shooting, which makes you realise to what extent the directors of the first scene failed to do so. The film is also smart about how the more Bella’s boundaries are pushed by manipulative directors, the more she learns to manipulate other women in turn. Orla Smith

Pleasure will be released in Canada (MK2 Films), the US (A24), and the UK (Mubi) in 2021.

5. CODA (Siân Heder)

A closeup of a young woman on a boat in CODA, one of the best films of Sundance 2021. — CODA is one of the best films of Sundance 2021.

Siân Heder’s CODA is a formulaic film with so much heart, and so much emotional intelligence, that it manages to get away with some narrative cliches. It’s a step up from Heder’s first feature, Tallulah, a less ambitious film which we also appreciated for how smart it was about women’s relationships, even when the plot got silly. CODA follows Ruby (Emilia Jones), a child of deaf adults, who gets up at dawn each morning to help her family on their fishing boat, before heading off to high school. Ruby discovers a talent and love for singing, and so ensues a familiar coming-of-age narrative about a teenager finding her voice (literally). The film is skillful at balancing a lot of tricky narrative threads: Ruby’s singing practice, her relationship with her parents, her crush on a boy, and her family’s attempts to adapt to a changing fishing industry. CODA also refreshingly defies a lot of tropes common to disability narratives, and importantly, casts actual deaf actors to play deaf characters (we’re looking at you, Sound of Metal). OS

CODA will be distributed worldwide by Apple TV+.

4. Luzzu (Alex Camilleri)

A man rides a colourful fishing boat in Luzzu, one of the best films of Sundance 2021. — Luzzu is one of the best films of Sundance 2021.

From our interview with Alex Camilleri: “Jesmark Scicluna, who just won the World Dramatic Special Jury Award for Acting, plays a character also named Jesmark, a fisherman from a long line of fishermen, who is struggling to make ends meet in this age-old profession. He’s a new father of a son who needs special care, and his wife is desperately struggling to find funds to get by, even if it means cow-towing to her wealthy but possibly criminal family. All Jesmark wants to do is spend his days on his luzzu, a traditional Maltese fishing boat, and in the process, earn a living. But with new fishing restrictions and a corrupt marketplace, it’s increasingly difficult to do an honest day’s work as a fisherman and still feed his family.”… Read the full interview.

Luzzu is still seeking distribution.

3. Searchers (Pacho Velez)

A closeup of one of the documentary subjects in Searchers, one of the best films of Sundance 2021. — Searchers is one of the best films of Sundance 2021.

From our interview with Pacho Velez: “Searchers is a documentary about online dating in New York, made during COVID, although the pandemic is barely brought up, and only noticeable because of shots of New Yorkers on the street wearing masks. ‘The stuff about COVID was the least interesting,’ director Pacho Velez told me. ‘At the end of the day, looking for love and looking for connections has been going on since the dawn of time. It’s going to continue. The obstacles are different, but the search is pretty much the same.’ Because Velez avoids explicit discussions of the virus, Searchers is less a cheap attempt to make a ‘relevant’ film, and more a sweet, wholesome, and empathetic examination of finding love.”… Read the full interview.

Searchers is still seeking distribution.

2. Flee (Jonas Poher Rasmussen)

An animated frame of a man sitting in a hotel room in front of a cityscape in Flee. — Flee is one of the best films of Sundance 2021.

Flee, the Sundance World Documentary Grand Jury Prize winner, is told almost entirely through animation in order to preserve the anonymity of its subject. Amin is an Afghan refugee living in Denmark after migrating there from Moscow twenty-five years earlier. He’s also one of documentarian Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s best friends, and together (with Amin narrating and Jonas directing the animation), the pair tell Amin’s story for the first time. Animation isn’t just a necessity in Rasmussen’s film; it allows him to bring Amin’s memories to life in full colour and detail, and to fill in the blanks that Amin is too traumatised to state in words. But importantly, Flee is just as much about exploring how Amin copes with and recovers from his trauma today as it is about recounting his horrific past experiences as an asylum seeker. OS

Flee will be released in the US by Neon in 2021.

1. The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be Quiet (Ana Katz)

The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be Quiet is one of the best films of Sundance 2021.

Ana Katz’s black-and-white slice-of-life dramedy is a series of vignettes in the life of a man who doesn’t quite fit into common perceptions of masculinity: he’s sensitive and a bit directionless. The film follows him as he loses his job in order to be able to stay home with his dog who suffers from separation anxiety. He makes a foray into farming, falls in love, has a child, and finds a new lease on life.

Shot over three years, the film is full of ellipses, offering little slices of what each stage of his life might look like — a dance at a wedding that forms the courtship for an important romance, a short time spent struggling as a new father, and more. The film is, at turns, quietly moving, as when we see him in wide shot with his dog, playing in the field. It’s also laugh-out-loud hilarious. What’s most impressive though is how much the images stick in your mind with perfect clarity, even weeks after watching the film. It’s just disappointing that the best film at Sundance had to screen at the International Film Festival of Rotterdam in order to win an award. AH

The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be Quiet is still seeking distribution.

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‘The idea for the sound design was accepting silence’: Iuli Gerbase on The Pink Cloud

Brazilian filmmaker Iuli Gerbase discusses her feature debut, The Pink Cloud, about a couple unable to leave their homes for years but shot before the pandemic.

Check out all our Sundance coverage.

Renata de Lélis (left) stars as Giovana in The Pink Cloud, staring out the window, bathed in pink light; writer-director Iuli Gerbase is pictured (right) — Renata de Lélis (left) stars as Giovana in The Pink Cloud; writer-director Iuli Gerbase is pictured (right)

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After a night of revelry and casual sex, perfect strangers Giovana (Renata de Lélis) and Yago (Eduardo Mendonça) suddenly find themselves stuck together in Giovana’s apartment because it’s no longer safe to go outside. Out of nowhere, a mysterious pink cloud descends over the world, and it will kill you if you’re within its vicinity for ten seconds. Brazillian writer-director Iuli Gerbase uses this sci-fi premise for her feature debut, The Pink Cloud, to explore a relationship at its limit: how do you learn to live with someone you didn’t choose for days, weeks, months, and years, when there’s no escape but death?

As we head into year two of the global SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, Gerbase’s film feels like it’s tapping into the zeitgeist, but it was actually conceived of and shot before 2020. Watching it now, the situations are eerily recognizable, proving Gerbase impressively prescient. But it’s not what Gerbase gets right about the play-by-play of living in lockdown that makes the film so fascinating so much as how it shifts relationships. If you didn’t want to have a child because you want to keep your freedom to go places and do things, does that change when you can’t do those things anyway? How do you cope with a crushing reality with no escape but by inventing your own reality?

Gerbase describes the film as “intimate sci-fi”, an à propos description, because it’s not about the details of how you cope with lockdown. If I wanted to nit pick, I’d say it’s clearly written by someone outside of the colder parts of the world since in places like Toronto, Calgary, or Minneapolis, we have large overground and underground networks specifically designed to avoid ever having to go outside. If you lived in a Toronto apartment building with direct access to Toronto’s underground PATH network, would life with the pink cloud be different? Logistical questions are on our minds as we deal with the personal logistics of lockdown life, but the film encourages us to stay focused on the characters and their struggles. Shot entirely in a real Rio de Janeiro apartment, and set over the course of several years, Gerbase and her actors create a real, changing world where the characters are frustrated by how little opportunity for change there is.

Before the film’s world premiere in the World Dramatic Competition at the Sundance Film Festival, I sat down with Iuli Gerbase to talk about how she conceived of the pink cloud, created the soundscape of a locked down world, crafted the lead performances, and more.

Seventh Row (7R): Where did the idea for The Pink Cloud come from?

Iuli Gerbase: When the film became reality [with the onset of a global pandemic], we were already in post-production, almost in the final cuts. I wrote it between 2016 and 2017. I had no idea that we would [be] living this situation.

The idea was to talk about this couple that gets stuck together, and they didn’t know each other before — exploring this relationship, their differences as people, and their different reactions to the cloud. And for each one of them, what happiness is and what freedom is, because they react in a very different way to the situation and to the cloud.

It’s mainly, for me, a relationship movie. We have the sci-fi element, but it’s not the focus.

Eduardo Mendonça stars as Yago in The Pink Cloud. Yago is seen in near silhouette from behind, staring out the window at the pink cloud. — Eduardo Mendonça stars as Yago in The Pink Cloud

7R: How did you think about what sci-fi elements you wanted to bring into the film? There’s the cloud, but then, I guess, there’s also the tube where they get things delivered. It’s very minimalist.

Iuli Gerbase: While I was writing the script, I was always thinking, What should I explain? I didn’t want to explain that much. I thought that the more explanation I gave, the more explanations the viewer would look for. I had to explain how they get food. Otherwise, the viewer will only think, “How are they eating? They don’t die from hunger?”

So I put the tube on the window, and they get food from the tube that some drone drops there. In the beginning, Giovana asks, “Why doesn’t the cloud enter through the small cracks on the window?” And that’s it, that’s all that we explain because I didn’t want it to have many sci-fi elements.

One of my references for the film was The Exterminating Angel by Bunuel, because they’re all stuck in that house and there’s not much of an explanation, Why are they stuck? Why, suddenly, in the end of the film, are they not stuck anymore? What’s happening? You don’t know.

The Pink Cloud is also a movie about the relationship between people and how they’re getting crazy during this lockdown, and not so much about the physical explanation of their confinement.

7R: What do you like about sci-fi?

Iuli Gerbase: It’s like having this thing that shakes reality, and then we see how the characters react to it. It could be a cloud, an alien — something that takes us out of our comfort zone of what we know. We see how the characters have a transformation. That’s what attracts me — not so much big wars or explosions, but having these weird elements that make the characters uncomfortable, and we see them getting crazy. I like these sci-fis that are more intimate like Under the Skin and Ex Machina.

7R: How did you think through how Giovana and Yago’s relationship would evolve and how they’d react to the pink cloud? They think it’s temporary, and then, before we know it, it’s been years and years and years.

Iuli Gerbase: In the beginning, it’s easier for Giovana, the woman. She’s not so nervous. He’s like, “I don’t want to get stuck here for a long time.” This changes when he sees he’s getting more of what he wanted — a normal family life — but it was not what she wanted. Then, Giovana gets worse, and Yago is more easygoing with this situation. You can see that her hair changes. They get older. We put some small wrinkles on their faces, and you see these different stages emotionally.

We shot, not entirely in order, but we had these big chunks, like, “Oh, now it’s two months. Now it’s two years. Now it’s nine years.” We could shoot those time periods in order, and that was great for the actors and for the crew, for us to change the apartments and to change the clothes.

7R: Because they spend the entire film inside the apartment, its design becomes really important. How did you think about what it should look like and how it should evolve over the years?

Iuli Gerbase: We had to pay attention to the colours because we had pink light [from the cloud] all around the apartment. For the furniture, we were choosing dark blue, gray, brown — not colours like pink or red, because otherwise, it would be too much pink, and we wouldn’t see the light as well. It was this really good relationship between the director of photography (DoP) and the production designer to see how we could enhance this pink lighting, having the set designed with specific colours.

We didn’t want it to be a catastrophic film with a lot of garbage in the apartment, and a lot of things falling apart. But you can see that the wall changes; they start painting on the wall. Some furniture is not that new anymore. We don’t want them to trash the whole place, but there is some passage of time.

When I wrote it, I was like, “We need a two-floor apartment for their separation.” It’s this weird divorce in the same apartment. We had so many divorces in 2020 in real life because of the pandemic. That was one thing I predicted.

The pink cloud descends on Brazil in Iuli Gerbase's feature debut, The Pink Cloud, premiering in the World Dramatic Competition at Sundance 2021 — The pink cloud descends on Brazil in Iuli Gerbase’s feature debut, The Pink Cloud, premiering in the World Dramatic Competition at Sundance 2021

7R: How did you think about what that pink cloud should look like and how it should aesthetically come into play in the film?

Iuli Gerbase: I always wanted the cloud to be this light pink, so it doesn’t look very threatening or dangerous. It’s almost hypnotic. When people see it, it almost attracts the person, like you want to touch it. It’s kind of poetic.

I didn’t want clouds with lightning or dark clouds, mainly in the beginning. Later, the cloud gets a little darker. I wanted the initial situation to be, “There is something outside. It doesn’t look very harmful. It looks okay.” Time passes by, and you realize, “Oh, this cloud is not going away,” and it affects the characters in a strong way. The idea was for it to seem harmless, but then, you see it is not.

We had to decide in which scenes we’re going to have the cloud itself. In the rest, I think the pink light already signals that the cloud is still here, and the soundtrack, too.

7R: How did you work with your director of photography? I imagine there are both challenges and opportunities in shooting in such a confined space.

Iuli Gerbase: We shot in a real Rio apartment. We didn’t want to shoot in a studio, because, I think, for the actors, [shooting on location] was good. We really felt we were confining the whole crew and the actors [to the apartment].

We had this rule that the camera would not go outside the apartment. So from the scene that they shut all the windows and doors, the camera is stuck, as well. And we didn’t cheat. The camera is inside all the time.

We shot for four weeks. In the fourth week, we were like, “What angle can we still explore?” We had already shot from all the angles we could imagine. It’s a real apartment; there aren’t so many possibilities.

But I think we manage it. In the beginning, the camera is more still, and then it gets more movement by the end, in the fighting scenes. I think we managed to have a variety of images and angles.

7R: What was the process for working with the two leads? At the beginning, they don’t know each other at all, but by the end, they know each other very well.

Iuli Gerbase: I knew both of them before. I have worked with them on short films of mine, and [short films by] other people, as well. They have known each other for a long time.

We rehearsed a lot. We don’t have improvisation in the film. It’s really following the script and the dialogue. We rehearsed for more than one month.

We had a long time, as well, with the child that was four years old, because they needed to have this friendship with the child actor for them to be able to do the scenes. We were always singing together and dancing together. We did these games where, “Oh. Let’s pretend we are all crying. Let’s pretend we are happy. Let’s repeat the sentence.” So, for the lines that he [the child actor] needed to give, we would play this game,”Repeat what I say.” He liked this game.

7R: What made you want to rehearse the film? What do you like about rehearsals?

Iuli Gerbase: For me, it’s always good to hear the actors saying the lines. Sometimes, I realise in the rehearsal that I could cut some lines, or I change some lines if they’re not so easy for the actors to speak.

Rehearsals are also important for finding the character. I think they were realizing many layers of Giovana and Yago, of the characters, and seeing how much emotion we want from each scene.

I recorded some scenes so I could watch them later, but they [the actors] never wanted to watch it. I think, for them, they would be too self-aware. I also didn’t want to rehearse so much that we would feel bored with the scene, or waste the energy of the scene.

Giovana (Renata de Lélis) and Yago (Eduardo Mendonça) share a meal in The Pink Cloud. The scene is bathed in the pink light of the cloud. — Giovana (Renata de Lélis) and Yago (Eduardo Mendonça) share a meal in The Pink Cloud

7R: There are some interesting discussions in the film about whether or not they want children, and why they want them, or don’t want them. They end up having a child. How did you think about those discussions and why you wanted them to have a child in the end?

Iuli Gerbase: Giovana says, right from the beginning, that she doesn’t want to have a kid, and Yago really wants kids. So, in the beginning, they have this discussion like, “Well, we are stuck together, and I want kids, and you don’t.”

They have a kid after they are in lockdown. Giovana is so bored, and she doesn’t have anything else to do. She already explored the whole apartment. She bought roller skates. She did everything. So it was like, “Well, at least with a kid, I will have another person in the apartment.” Because they were sick of each other, as well. I think I would do the same. Like, “Well, let me have this new toy, this new kid to play with because I can’t stand just the two of us anymore.”

7R: As much as Giovana is bored and unhappy, it’s so much darker what’s happening to her younger sister.

Iuli Gerbase: The young sister is stuck at a sleepover party. In the beginning, she’s fine. She’s more or less twelve years old. There are four girls with one dad, who is the father of one of the girls. They have fun. They have popcorn, and they are dancing. Four years go by, and they become teenagers. So they start wanting to have relationships. Some start to do online dating, like a lot of people did during our pandemic. But then, well, should I spoil it?

7R: You can spoil it. This is a spoiler warning for a subplot in the film.

Iuli Gerbase: When they are, like, sixteen, one of them gets pregnant by the father of her friend. Giovana gets really affected by it. Like, What’s going on? Did he rape her? And then, she [Giovana’s sister] was like, “No. Who else would she have sex with? She wants to have sex. And the only man available is the father of her friend.” It’s this weird and dark situation. I think that could happen; teenagers want to explore. What is dark is that you don’t see the relationship. You just hear Giovana’s sister [talking about it].

7R: How did you approach shooting all those video chats? Giovana also talks a lot to her best friend through video chat.

Iuli Gerbase: In the first week, we shot all the supporting characters: Giovana’s friend, Giovana’s sister, and Yago’s father. The actors playing Giovana and Yago were there [on set] to talk with them. When we shot in the apartment with Giovana and Yago, they already had the [recorded] video on the cell phones, so they could interact.

Of course, it was difficult because they had to repeat the timing that they did before, because they were acting with a recording. But it was good having the reactions, and not just talking to a black screen.

7R: When Yago and Giovana decide to separate in the apartment, they both start dating. He’s dating online, and she has this sexual interaction with her neighbour through the window.

Iuli Gerbase: Yago starts a relationship online when he’s divorced, but Giovana was always trying to not follow what the cloud wants. She already had a baby, like the cloud wanted, in a way. She’s lost her freedom to go places.

So the relationship that she searches for is a little bit more real than Yago’s because at least it’s with the neighbour that she sees from her window. It’s the most physical relationship she can have at the moment. She prefers that to following what everyone else is doing, using Tinder. The app that they have in the film is called Infinite People. It’s like, all of a sudden, there are infinite people that you can talk with [online], but she doesn’t want that.

7R: Can you tell me about the sound in the film?

Iuli Gerbase: The idea for the sound design was accepting silence. We have some sounds of dogs from the neighbours, but we also felt, “Well, some neighbours will die, and then the dogs will die, as well.”

It was an experience for the sound designers because we didn’t have the normal sounds that you would put in an apartment, like the traffic, because there were no cars. We had to capture the silence. We had to dub some scenes, where we could hear a motorcycle or a car, so that we didn’t have traffic. We didn’t have people on the streets. We didn’t have airplanes. We didn’t have a lot of things.

So like, “What can we have?” You have these crickets, but crickets can’t be too present because they live in the city. We have dogs. We have some clocks, and we have the sounds of the apartment, like from the refrigerator. It’s something that we are noticing more now, in lockdown. My refrigerator is very loud, so I’m always closing the door to my room because it annoys me. So we had these different sounds that normally wouldn’t be so important on a film where life was normal. We had to think about how this new world would sound.

7R: There are a bunch of time jumps in the film. How did you think about how and whether to demarcate them?

Iuli Gerbase: We thought about it in the editing, if we were going to put titles with one year, three years. But we felt that because their son is growing older, it was already easy to see, “Oh, now it’s one year. Now it’s four years. Now it’s nine years.”

Before that, I think time is a little bit confusing in the film. But I think that’s also what we felt during the pandemic, mainly in the beginning: “I don’t know which day of the week it is today. It has been a week since that happened, but for me, it’s like it has been three months.”

Time is weird when you’re in lockdown. I used that as one of the excuses not to tell the audience exactly how much time has passed. But you see Giovana changing her mood, changing her hair, etc…

7R: Towards the end of the film, the two of them live in these different invented realities. She’s literally looking into VR glasses, and he has learned to ignore everything that upsets him. How did you think about their different reactions? Because there are similarities, too.

Iuli Gerbase: She has this way of denying reality, and Yago has his way of denying reality, by always being positive. He has this toxic positivity, always looking at the bright side. He doesn’t want to think about what’s going to happen with his son, that he’s alone in the house. They’re both alienated and not confronting reality for a long period of time, in different ways.

7R: Were you editing the film during the pandemic?

Iuli Gerbase: Yes. Of course, we started before. For us, the pandemic became more of a reality in March. By March, we had four cuts of the film, more or less, and then after the pandemic began, we did two more cuts. We were cutting and making it shorter.

Originally, the cloud was only in Brazil. And then when we started to see the pandemic was in the whole world, we thought it would be better that the cloud is also in the whole world. So in the beginning, you see the cloud is in London in that shot on the TV. That’s an idea that came after.

7R: How has your relationship with the film changed since the start of the pandemic? Was it like, “Oh wow. I was right”?

Iuli Gerbase: Even for me, it was very bizarre because I have watched it, and I have written it. I knew the film by heart. But when I watched it after my own confinement, I was like, “Oh my god.” The lines the actors said, they changed meaning.

Some days, I was not watching the film, but I was thinking about a line from the film. Like, “You have to focus on the positive side,” or “You can’t continue with thinking about the things you would like to be doing. Just focus on the possible.” It was like, “Oh my god, I’m talking just like one of the characters.” That was very bizarre.

7R: What are you working on next?

Iuli Gerbase: I’m working on an idea that is also sci-fi, but not so much sci-fi. It’s intimate sci-fi where the focus is the relationship, and what I can say now is that there is an alien visiting us.

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Show Notes

Never miss a great film again. Get exclusive content and hidden-gem recommendations you won’t find on the website.

10. Writing with Fire (Sushmit Ghosh, Rintu Thomas)

9. We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (Jane Schoenbrun)

8. The Pink Cloud (Iuli Gerbase)

7. Passing (Rebecca Hall)

6. Pleasure (Ninja Thyberg)

5. CODA (Siân Heder)

4. Luzzu (Alex Camilleri)

3. Searchers (Pacho Velez)

2. Flee (Jonas Poher Rasmussen)

1. The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be Quiet (Ana Katz)

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