Making a podcast wasn’t on my bingo card a month ago, but Kent has a way of making things happen. He had a virtual press pass for Sundance this year and invited me to watch as many of the documentaries with him as I wanted to. He intended to watch all forty-three of the documentaries on the docket and I had no reason to doubt him, as he’s obsessive once he gets going. Honestly, at the start I didn’t think I would watch very many with him, maybe one or two a day at most.
So I started out rather resistant to the experiment, pushing back firmly on Kent’s puppy-dog excitement. Undeterred he persisted, every morning asking, “What do you want to watch today?” as he pulled up his spreadsheet of all the movies, which days they were available, who made them, and a link to the offering on the Sundance website. Reader, the man is impossible. But also, he was right. Between his enthusiasm and the winning power of the films unspooling before me I was hooked by the second day. By the third day I was watching four to five with him. By the end of the week I’d watched 29. He, of course completed them all and is still lamenting about the ones I missed.
The Zeitgeist of Sundance Documentaries
For as long as I’ve known him, Kent has been talking about the extraordinary power of the documentary curation at Sundance. Before the pandemic he was there every year covering the Virtual Reality experiences at the New Frontier section and interviewing the makers. He made sure to catch as many of the documentaries as possible and every year he came back raving about the selection. He claimed it offered a window into the cultural zeitgeist of the world, and what was happening was dynamic, exciting, and a sneak peak into the seeds of deeper patterns that would slowly ripple out into the world.
I don’t know why I didn’t believe him, you’d think I’d know better by now, but I guess there’s nothing like experiencing it first-hand for yourself. Squirreled away in our guest room for five days we hunkered down together in our fuzziest bathrobes and glued ourselves to the stories springing forth from our TV. I’m not sure where the idea for the podcast came from, honestly. I remember Kent was anxious about how to cover the films absent of being able to interview the makers. His medium really is conversation. I may have suggested recording conversations with me as a way of getting his thoughts out. Certainly by the time we started recording a week later we had plenty of thoughts to get out!
The Astrology of Stories
One of our favorite ongoing debates is how astrology might be used to talk about stories so it was always going to find its way into our conversations. We took some stabs at it in the 30 conversations we had about the films we saw, but aside from one foundational observation (more on that below) the biggest thing to emerge was how much more we wanted to explore the topic. It became clear this series was not only something we wanted to release, it was something we wanted to keep making.
For three thousand years people have been looking to the heavens and making connections between the sky and events on the earth. That would be impossible without a fairly detailed map to trace the patterns humanity leaves behind. In short, astrology offers a system millennia of years in the making that describes very accurately what humans care about and how it affects them. Tracing the themes of stories is something astrology ought be able to not only handle but excel at. The question we are asking ourselves now is, how would it do that? We have some thoughts we want to explore in future episodes, but for now we will leave you with the philosophical nugget we used to guide our exploration for this first series of stories we covered.
The Power of Witness
Astrology is, at heart, a system of light. What light shines, what light reflects, and what light casts onto. The ancient Hellenes described this process as a way of witnessing. The sun casts light and bears witness, the moon reflects it and thereby gives its own. In the human body the eyes are said to be ruled by the sun and moon, because this is how we generally give witness at the most basic level (although please check out our episode on The Tuba Thieves for an example of how we could do with expanding our idea of witness beyond vision and into other realms of presence!!)
A fundamental principle of astrology, then, is what can “see” and “be seen” and what does that say about the experience of a life. Something that becomes quite obvious when you study astrology is that difficult signatures are defined by lack of witness or the wrong sort of witness. In life this is easily understood by noting that bullying is precisely the sort of witness we’d like to avoid whereas a sympathetic therapist to talk to about it is the way to heal.
In our conversations, then, Kent and I explicitly bear witness to the stories and their makers from this years selection of documentaries. The makers all share something they’ve witnessed and by witnessing their witness we hope to pass it on. I’ve come to believe it is only by creating collective witness that we will ever resolve individual distress.
There is a lot we don’t know yet about this project, but this seems like the most important place to start.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Rough Transcript
[00:00:13.541] Kent Bye: My name is Kent Bye. And my name is Wonder Bright. And welcome to Story All the Way Down. We're here to talk about the Sundance Film Festival 2023. We just got done through a weeklong binge watch of I ended up watching around 43 documentaries. And I don't know how many you watched around 20.
[00:00:31.729] Wonder Bright: I think at last count, you said I'd watch 28. But I want to say that I didn't know I was going to be watching from the start.
[00:00:43.051] Kent Bye: I kind of roped you in. So let me give you a little bit of background and context. So I normally go to the Sundance Film Festival to cover the new frontier immersive selection, the virtual reality selection. And I've been doing that every year since 2016. So I've been able to be in the Sundance system to get a press pass for their immersive selection, but also the wider film selection. But I've never really covered the film selection before. And since the pandemic set in, in both 2021 and 2022, they've been virtual festivals. They've just done everything online. So this year is the first year that they've come back and they had a bit of a hybrid approach where they were maintaining different aspects of that hybrid festival where people would have access to these films remotely. You wouldn't have to go into Park City to watch them. And so I managed to get a press pass to be able to watch all these different documentaries. And I'm a huge documentary lover. And yeah, I wanted you to bear witness to a lot of these stories as well, because I know that my experience of the Sundance Documentary Festival is almost like you're tapping into the deep side guys to what's happening in the culture. And so a way to bear witness to all these patterns. And yeah, we're sitting here to kind of unpack it all.
[00:01:50.646] Wonder Bright: Yeah, and I just to say that I've always been interested in how you would talk about it would be you would come back from Sundance and you would be full to the brim, not only of the VR experiences that you'd had and the creators and makers that you'd spoken to about their experiences, But you would also be very excited about the documentaries that you'd managed to catch. So you would come home and you would be flush with this experience of this zeitgeist, as you call it. And Sundance was always different than any other festival. Tribeca was fun, but you didn't come back with that teeming momentum of all the voices and all the lands like crying out. So there was always something very exciting and dynamic about it. But when you initially said, well, I've got this press pass and you were really excited about going to Sundance from our TV room, I was like, OK, well, you know that Ken does this and he goes away and then he comes back. But I just had it that you were going to go away in our house and I would maybe like pop in and you were like, oh, you should come and watch some of them with me. And I was like, yeah, I'll probably catch like four. But I had things to do this weekend. I was not prepared for the tractor beam, the pull of these stories. And you know, you often talk about how you're sort of like an inch deep and a mile wide. And I'm always more like, a mile deep and an inch wide. So like my focus is usually very, very focused. And it was quite intense to get roped into this and go like watch four to five films one day. But I'm really honestly blown away by that experience that is exactly as you described, where you come away feeling like, oh, these are conversations that are happening around the world and I get to be a part of them. And they're conversations that are not happening globally, like the whole world isn't having this conversation, but some people are. And to be a part of those conversations and to have access to it was just an extraordinary experience. And I am so happy that I got to join you and happy to be having an opportunity to talk about what came up.
[00:04:17.553] Kent Bye: Yeah. And there's something about when I would watch a random film at Sundance, you could watch the narrative, but you could also watch the documentaries. And over and over again, I would always be blown away with being transported into another world. It's like John Gerson has this saying about documentary is the creative treatment of actuality. So it's like, Documentaries are recording different aspects of physical reality going into somebody's world and to share what is happening You have to not only tell the story of an individual but it's also I think in a lot of ways the documentary is Reflecting the broader context of the world that we're living in right now. Mm-hmm And so you start to get the relational dynamic of an individual going through an experience in their story, but also you reflected back this broader context. And you also look back into history to see what is the broader cultural context of this moment that has led us to this moment. And I think the documentary as a form is able to pull in a lot of those different relational dynamics. You know, we talked previously about like what our mission statements are, and I've settled upon this idea of wanting to bring about this process relational thinking. And so I think that there's something about the documentaries that are able to tell the stories of individuals, but also set it within that broader context. And so what are those relational links that are being brought up and how to start to describe them in some sort of archetypal way? And I think that's, what we're going to attempt to do here in some sense is try to unpack some of the deeper dynamics of some of these stories and what is it telling us about our lives. But I guess the unfortunate thing also I should say up front is that some of these documentaries will be made available for people to see and others won't. And I think that's part of the dynamic is there's a broader economic context under which this is operating. Whereas Sundance is showing within this artistic context, but then the things that get out to the mass culture are filtered through this economic lens as to what's going to sell and what's going to be interesting.
[00:06:09.133] Wonder Bright: or what people think is going to be interesting, which means what is interesting to the people who are there to buy films, the distributors who at this point are still, I would imagine, largely white, straight, cis, hetero guys, obviously not entirely. But since, as we shall see going through the films that we were so excited about, a lot of these films take place at intersections of marginality throughout the world, maybe some of these themes and some of these stories and some of these films won't get the wider audience that they really deserve, that I think you and I were both so blown away by and excited by stories I just I've never seen on a screen before. And it was thrilling. It was so much fun to enter into this discovery of people and places and landscapes and experience that I don't have any access to prior to this, you know. So Yeah, it's sort of in a way like one of the things that we will be talking about is themes of marginalization and invisibility and what gets seen and what doesn't. And so it's a fundamental irony after all of that, that we have this rich privilege of having access to these stories that may in fact ultimately continue to be marginalized simply because they don't get widespread distribution.
[00:07:32.018] Kent Bye: Yeah, so at this point, we know that some of them have distribution. We don't know what will be made available later. They just do the festival circuit and disappear from the broader distribution channels, which is a bit unfortunate because these documentary filmmakers are just immersing themselves into these people's lives for years and years and years and to be able to go through thousands of hours of footage and then to distill it down into a cultural artifact that is able to describe different movements, different ideas, different histories. So maybe I'll give a little bit of a context for my backgrounds in engineering. And so I'm coming from this math and science background, but then I've always had a foot in the art world. And so my career had gone back between engineering and science, but then also into more artistic expressions. And so whether that's being a radar systems engineer for the F-22 Raptor on into making independent documentary films, into doing podcasting and video blogging at the forefront of a lot of these technologies and covering the virtual and augmented reality and being able to talk to the artists in that context that are using the modalities from theater and film and video games and interactive design. And so you have this fusion of all these design disciplines that I've been really focusing in on and breaking it down into quality, context, character, and story as I go back and look at these documentary films, starting to look at it through these relational lenses. But maybe you could just give a bit more context as to your background and what other influences that you're bringing into this conversation.
[00:09:00.471] Wonder Bright: So I come from a life that I was steeped in story from the time I was a child. My parents took great care over the library that they curated and then read to me and my brother from infancy, toddlerhood, all the way up until I was 12 or 13 years of age. My father read to my brother and I every night before bedtime. And then as I developed, I got very interested in acting. And so I became a performer and storytelling through performance and acting was my medium. And I studied theater. I got an undergraduate degree in theater in the UK in my 20s, in the 90s. I actually stumbled into astrology at that point and got really, really bit by the bug in a big way. And by the time I left there and moved to Los Angeles, I was so much more interested in understanding story through the lens of astrology than I was through making art. And I got completely obsessed with it. And it led me into this deep exploration of how do you tell the story when your story is being told for you, essentially, right? Like, so what happens when, you know, like, I think like a lot of people, astrology got its hooks into me when it appeared to answer questions that were primal, like, why me? Why does this keep happening over and over again? And I would see these patterns that would emerge astrologically that would point to an answer that satisfied me in a way that nothing else did. Although I've been studying traditional astrology dating back to the Hellenistic era and through the medieval era all the way up to the Renaissance for the last 20 years of my life, in some ways I've sort of come full circle and I'm at this point in many ways so much more interested about the stories people tell about their circumstances than their circumstances themselves. And fundamentally, astrology is a system of light, what light shines and what reflects that light. And ultimately, how does that light occur on Earth? From our vantage point, how do we experience light? We're always talking about what's visible, what's not visible, and what becomes invisible, becomes hidden, becomes removed from view, can't be seen, or it can be imperiled by an aspect from another planet. And I'm extremely interested in how if we are hidden astrologically by the light, like how we can receive that light. And I think one of the primary ways we do that is actually revealed through a Hellenistic doctrine of aspects. Because there's this idea in Hellenistic astrology that when a planet receives the light from another, and it can cast that light to that other planet, that they're in witness to one another. They're making testimonies to one another. And one of the most beautiful acts of grace that we're experiencing in this period of time is from that experience and expression of testimony and witness that we can bear witness to one another, that through giving testimony to one another, we're no longer hidden or no longer invisible. And I think this is one of the things that I found the most moving about the selection of films that were showing up at Sundance this year. I don't have the experience of the films from previous years, But it was absolutely undeniable the kinds of stories that were showing up in the selection that I did get to see this year, where I was experiencing stories that I've not experienced in film before. And it was shining a light on subjects and people and stories that I have never had access to before. And these people were shining and sharing their stories. It wasn't just filmmakers going in and filming them. A lot of these stories were coming from first person. There's like a number of biopics that were just extraordinary where the person themselves is telling their story or even directing it. So there's this really powerful space of people giving testimony and the opportunity to witness that testimony that comes up over and over again in the slew of films that we'll be talking about. So that's sort of where I'm coming at from story. That's what I'm interested in exploring in our conversations here.
[00:13:32.802] Kent Bye: All right, well, now is probably a good time to actually talk about some of the different broader themes that we're going to be diving into. And we each have our own orientation, our own lens. And I think we'll be focusing on a subsection of the different films and putting them in relationship to each other as each on their own right telling a story. But they're also common themes that we saw that I think are worth combining things together in different ways. because we have different ways of clustering things together. And I think as we go into conversations, things have like natural associative links. I initially put up these categories to have a tight coupling of clusters of films that had these connections, sometimes very close connections, sometimes very broad connections. But there's films about artists, there's ways of looking at these authoritarian impulses in ways that as you have different repressions within different societies, how did the society react to that and the different wars that break out. I have a ton of films that have badass women. And then in fact, 53% of all the films that were accepted this year by Sundance were made by women. And so this is a category that's very broad that could get into many other stories, but you have the different business aspects of film kind of reflecting on itself, but also reflecting on what does or does not get distributed and why you have some films that are exploring different dimensions of communication. A theme that I think came up again and again is our relationship to the earth and ways that we may not be in right relationship to the earth and ways that that plays out into different lives of the impact of climate change or ways that we can perhaps be more in right relationship to the earth. I think erasure was a topic that I saw come up again and again, and how are they erased? Why are they erased? Who are they being erased by? Illness was a theme with a couple of different films that were focusing on illnesses that have come about people and ways that their community did or did not know about it, but also reacted to it. how the pandemic was accelerating, different aspects of some of those illnesses. There's a number of different indigenous themes that are being covered in a number of different films that I found really fascinating in terms of this indigenous perspective through the history, but also their mode of thoughts that may be different. LGBTQIA plus films that were exploring different dimensions of that, both in the present and the past. Technology was one that came up with a number of films that I had a chance to see that were diving into different reflections of the philosophy of technology. And I have a broad category of true crime that actually goes in and out of looking at either crimes that have been committed and trying to do reporting on some of those crimes. kind of a true crime genre, but also just ways that are more like the relationship between the laws and communities around them and how that's impacting the communities. And so exploring new laws that are being passed or the changing of constitutions and the indigenous communities for freedom of press, as an example. So those are my broad categories. I'd love to hear maybe you give a bit of an overview of some of the different themes that we'll be diving into into some of these future episodes.
[00:16:31.790] Wonder Bright: So the biggest emerging theme that I saw had to do with bodily autonomy, often through women, and how that bodily autonomy was repressed or denied or outright penalized. Like that theme continued to emerge and we would see people expressing themselves through their bodies in ways that were met with violence or with exile. And I think we're at a point in our culture in the wake of Roe v. Wade being overturned where we would expect to see the amount of abortion rights films that show up, but we were also seeing it with two films about black transgender sex workers. There's a couple of biopics with women born between 1938 and 43 who also are evidence of women fighting back for their bodily autonomy and what that looks like. And then another broad category that I was also looking at was sort of the results of authoritarian power on cultures and communities and countries. So there's a couple of films that look at that where you're like experiencing the impact of it as it's happening. the war in Ukraine, North Korea dictatorships, where you're really seeing this happening in real time. And then there's films that are looking at it retroactively as well, so we're getting the long-term effects of authoritarian regime with people who have been colonized in one way or another, whether or not that's South Africa, whether or not that's indigenous people in North American continent. these really wonderful films that are exploring those themes in a really rich way that I found really both heartbreaking and resonant, especially when we consider the ways in which people are being abused currently. Right. And then I have two other categories of films that for me were really resonant. And one is I've titled it our baseline relationships with our own humanity or the earth. And I don't really have a better way of putting it than that. But the films that fall under that broader category fall into two realms. One is people who have a certain amount of privilege who aren't at the mercy of economic stress or racism or all of those things who then suffer illness. Right. So like you were talking about those films that have to do with illness. But what we actually get is this extraordinary distillation of the impact of illness in a person's life and how it deprives of several humanity. and the redemptive expression of love and what happens when people overcome those experiences or just learn to live with them, you know, or the people around them learn to live with them in a different way. And also in that category, we have stories about how food is being produced in this country in the wake of covid and also in big ag. and what people are doing to work on those food systems in this country. So there's this way of thinking about how we're relating to one another and to the earth. Another category for me that definitely showed up was, and these were films about people that I wanted to watch because they were so inspiring. So whatever they were going through, they were sort of outliers, not only because of the conditions that they found themselves in, but because of the way they related to the conditions that they found themselves in so that they became activists. They're sort of like light bearers. You know, if I'm thinking about like this quality of like who is shedding light, who gets to shed light, these are people who don't necessarily have permission to shine and yet somehow they manage it and their acts of courage and authenticity in the context of a world that punishes people for shining in the ways that they do was just really moving and encouraging. Like these are the films that If you, like me, sometimes can't bear to watch a documentary because you don't want to get serious and you don't want to have to go through the self-examination that might be necessitated on the other side, these are the ones where these people will lead you through. They will hold your hand and they will pull you through the eye of the needle and they will leave you feeling restored in your own humanity because of the journey that they take you on.
[00:21:12.129] Kent Bye: Yeah, there's a couple of films that kind of bookend my entire experience at Sundance. And I just want to elaborate, setting the context as we have these future conversations. But 20 Days in Maripol, I saw near the beginning of my journey of watching these 43 different films at Sundance. And one of the things that that gave me was this commitment to bearing witness and the filmmaker of that film, how he was having to tell people, look, I have to record this. This is historic information. I have to record and tell these stories. And this is often graphic content and it's hard to watch, but it must be hard to watch because we need to bear witness to these stories because these are dispatches from what's happening from around the world. And it's our opportunity to really get connected to the actuality of situations of what's happening. So that commitment to put out and to bear witness, which I think is what we went through this past week. And by sharing the stories as best as we can to help lift up the films that we loved and the insights that we gathered, but also the ones that may still be searching for distribution or searching for their audiences for us to also record the impact that they had in our own insights that we take away from them because it's not everybody's going to have the same opportunity to have the same experience we had because they're not just not going to be made available. So that is the one in the beginning. And I know that you were resistant to seeing this at the beginning of the journey, but by the end, you found that you could actually bear witness to that. So any reflections you had by your journey at the beginning and the end?
[00:22:51.767] Wonder Bright: So, yeah, when you first were like, oh, come watch all of these films from Sundance. I was like, ha, yeah, no, that's not I have X, Y, Z to do. And so we went through all of the films and I looked at the summaries and all of that. And I immediately was like, oh, I cannot watch 20 days and Mario Paul. I don't have the bandwidth for it. I don't have the capacity to be with that misery right now. You know, I just, I knew I didn't. And I felt that way about a number of films, but just was like, I can't, I'm not going to watch that one. I'm not going to watch that one. So I started with some of the ones where I was like, I knew I'd be inspired by Judy Blume, for instance, and I'm familiar with Michael J. Fox. So I started out with the ones that I knew would be like a bit easier to watch, you know, stories that I was already familiar with in some way. And, you know, when it came to 20 Days in Mariupol, I get, like, a newsletter from The Guardian, because that's the newspaper that I subscribe to. So I get a newsletter from them, and they start out with, like, what's happening in Ukraine every day, and I never read it. Because I just, like, I have this much capacity, you know, for things that I can't do anything about, you know? Like, what am I going to do? It's just it's overwhelming. It's hard to be with what's happening. And over the course of the week, just the act of bearing witness started to feel like it was already something like just being with these stories, just being with these people, just honoring their humanity. became a process of honoring my own and exalting my own. So by the end of the week, once we'd gone through and we only had like X amount of days left to watch any of the films, fortunately, 20 Days in Mariupol got a well-deserved audience award, I think, right? Yeah. And so that film became available for an extended period of time. And I was able to watch it. And I'm so glad that I did. I just, you know, this morning when I got up, I got the newsletter from The Guardian and I actually clicked through. That was like the first thing I wanted to read was like, well, what is happening today in Ukraine? Because now... Now I know those people in a way that I didn't before. Now their story is a part of my story in a way that it wasn't before. The filmmaker of 20 Days in Mariupol, as you said, is like telling soldiers and police officers and whoever confronts him, please, you know, put your camera away. He's telling them, I have to film. And then there's one person, a police officer who's named Vladimir, who says to him, you must film. And he asks him to film him telling the camera directly, telling us who might be watching. You need to know this story. We need your help. The story must get out. It's essentially, we need your witness. We need you to see that this is happening. I need you to see that this is happening. And it's just the most human thing there could be. See me. See this. Witness this. This is happening. This happened. This is still happening. As Chernoff the filmmaker says, it's hard to watch. It must be hard to watch. And that might be true. It's also true that at this point, having seen all these films, it is harder for me to imagine not having watched. And I'm so grateful to feel this connection to the people who made these films, the filmmakers, the people that they made the films about, their subjects, and just the global community that I was able to experience this week.
[00:27:07.533] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, I feel like that's a probably a good place to wrap up this first podcast because yeah, I just feel really moved by all the stories that we saw. We'll have an opportunity to dive into much greater detail of the different films and the themes and Yeah, it's been an honor and privilege to be able to have access to and to be able to watch them and hopefully we can do justice some of these stories that we've been able to bear witness to over the past week and to start to impact them a little bit more. So with that, we'll go ahead and start to dig into these different clusters of films and looking forward to diving in with a series with you.
[00:27:44.664] Wonder Bright: Me too. Thank you for sharing this opportunity with me. And I just also in my very sentimental way, I'm just really in awe of all the filmmakers and competition this year. It's just some amazing work and really in awe of the curators of this competition. It's just such an extraordinary, exemplary experience of humanity and what is possible. when we witness and when we create.
