Sundance Is a Feast of World Cinema

In 2021, in response to the covid-19 pandemic, the Sundance Film Festival went entirely online. When the in-person event resumed, in 2023, the online component continued, and it’s still going. However, not everything that’s screened at Sundance is available for home viewing; only the films in competition at the festival are required to be streamable, and only during a short window at the tail end of the festival. That’s how I saw many of the offerings in this year’s festival (which ended on Sunday), and, although I didn’t get to see some films that I’d been impatient for, I did see two that struck me as especially noteworthy—indeed, two of the most aesthetically distinguished Sundance films I’ve seen in recent years.