The 2017 Sundance Film Festival started yesterday, which, for indie movie lovers everything, is a pretty big deal. It’s been running for nearly 40 years — beginning as the Utah/US Film Festival in 1978 — but it still manages to bring in fresh, unique titles and be the largest independent film festival in the country. We already previewed our top five picks that we can’t wait to see, and in the video above, Fandemonium sat down with Sundance Director of Programming Trevor Groth for his must-see films to check out.
His first two selections, Mudbound and The Big Sick, are titles with a lot of buzz at this year’s festival and overlap with our own Mike Ryan’s list. The latter of the two stars and is co-written by Silicon Valley‘s Kumail Nanjiani with Judd Apatow as a producer, while the former is about a soldier returning from WWII only to deal with cultural issues and racial tensions that are still relevant today. Groth’s final recommendation, The Force, is a documentary focused on the Oakland Police Force as it goes through federal reform, and he describes it as watching like a “Scorsese or Michael Mann film.”
With these highlights (and most likely many more interesting movies that will be discovered), let’s all live vicariously through the Sundance coverage out there and make notes to see these films whenever they reach theaters everywhere.
