The challenge in making ambitious movies goes beyond budgetary restrictions. It also involves the changing threshold for tolerating discomfort and the encroaching sense that any radical statement could backfire. The presumption of cancel culture may be reductive, but it certainly scares filmmakers from taking real chances.
Toward the end of the festival, I spoke with another major American director who emerged from the same Sundance era — Ira Sachs, whose first feature “The Delta” premiered at the festival in 1997. His latest movie, “Passages,” is a sexually charged depiction of a gay man who cheats on his husband with a woman he meets at a bar. Set in Paris with an all-European cast, the movie provides the latest example of a director finding more hospitable circumstances abroad (a subject I explored not long ago).
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