FQ editor-in-chief B. Ruby Rich presents her take on the online/hybrid Sundance Film Festival 2021. She notes the various ways in which the festival attempted to transfer the in-person experience to the at-home screen, including post-screening Q&As, a virtual lounge, online panels and “conversations,” and a VR interface for the New Frontier offerings. She appreciated that the online architecture allowed for a sequencing of events that eliminated her usual fear of “missing” an essential film. As has often been her experience at Sundance, she found the documentaries to be of greater interest than the fiction films, with entries from Europe being particularly strong. Festival highlights that she discusses include Summer of Soul (… Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised by Questlove (Ahmir Khalib Thompson), My Name is Pauli Murray (Betsy West and Judy Cohen), Hive (Blerta Basholli), El Planeta (Amalia Ulman), Flee (Jonas Poher Rasmussen), President (Camilla Nielsson), and Writing by Fire (Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh), all from 2021.

FQ editor-in-chief B. Ruby Rich presents her take on festival-going in the time of COVID. While noting the challenges posed by geoblocking and navigating festival schedules across multiple time zones, along with the absence of the excitement and comradeship that provide live festivals with their momentum, she observes that virtual festivals—liberated from geography—offer advantages in terms of access. Surveying the offerings at the Toronto Film Festival, New York Film Festival, and DOK Leipzig, Rich highlights feature films and documentaries that offered a welcome escape from her COVID-demarcated existence, from critical favorites such as Nomadland (dir. Chloe Zhao, 2020 ) and Steve McQueen’s “Small Axe” anthology series, to discoveries such as Hong Sang-soo’s Domangchin yeoja ( The Woman Who Ran , 2020) and En route pour le milliard ( Downstream to Kinshasa , 2020), by the young Congolese documentarian Dieudo Hamadi.

FQ's B. Ruby Rich files her annual report from Sundance, where the most powerful new dramatic films were by and about women. She singles out Kitty Green's The Assistant (2019) and Eliza Hittman's Never Rarely Sometimes Always for their meticulous attention to the hardly matter-of-fact rituals of life for two very different young women, as well as for a style that might be tagged “microrealism.” She also discusses Janicza Bravo's Zola and Pablo Larraín's Ema (2019), two very different enactments of female sexuality with varying degrees of agency. Praising the festival as the mothership of documentary, Rich recounts new favorites including Iryna Tsilyk's The Earth Is Blue as an Orange , Ramona S. Diaz's A Thousand Cuts , David France's Welcome to Chechnya , Hubert Sauper's Epicentro , Anabel Rodríguez Ríos's Once upon a Time in Venezuela , Kareem Tabsch and Cristina Costantini's Mucho Mucho Amor , Maite Alberdi Soto's The Mole Agent , Garrett Bradley's sobering Time , and Shalini Kantayya's chilling Coded Bias .

FQ Editor B. Ruby Rich reviews the offerings at the 2019 Toronto Film Festival, the first under the new leadership of Cameron Bailey and Joana Vicente. Avoiding Hollywood's tentpole films and Oscar buzz, Rich instead hunts down films presenting subtle studies of human behavior, in most cases with the help of subtitles. From the latest efforts from established art-house favorites Pedro Almodovar, Oliver Assayas, and Elia Suleiman, to discoveries such as the Romanian documentary Colectiv (Alexander Nanau, 2019) and the Brazilian director Karim Aïnouz's A Vida Invisível ( The Invisible Life of Eurídice Gusmão , 2019), Rich finds ample reassurance of film's emotive power and ability to provide a moral compass in challenging times.