Inflection Points: Sundance at a Distance, Berlin Up Close

FQ Editor-at-large B. Ruby Rich starts off a year of festival-going with reports from Sundance and Berlin. At Sundance, documentary highlights included Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat (Johan Grimonprez), about the machinations of world powers, and the United States in particular, in overthrowing the government of the Congo in 1961; and Yance Ford’s Power, a chilling examination of the US police force’s evolution and tainted presence. In Berlin, Rich found that the political turmoil over the war in Gaza couldn’t dim the incandescence of Mati Diop’s Dahomey, winner of the festival’s Golden Bear, which she declares a “masterpiece.”