20 Films We Can’t Wait to See at Sundance 2024 | Festivals & Awards

“Exhibiting Forgiveness”

Utilizing his paintings to find freedom from his past, a Black artist on the path to success is derailed by an unexpected visit from his estranged father, a recovering addict desperate to reconcile. Together, they learn that forgetting might be a greater challenge than forgiving.

This soulful, sophisticated, and beautifully crafted debut feature blossoms a hard-to-tell story about destructive parenting, the seasons of angst weathered by an abused child becoming a successful human being, and the deep meaning and salve of creative practice.

Oscar-shortlisted filmmaker and celebrated painter Titus Kaphar turns his attention again to cinema to innovate a fresh cinematic language that incorporates the language of paint and canvas to tells the story of Tarrell (André Holland), an art star reckoning with his own traumatic childhood by creating powerful and transcendent paintings.

At the radiant heart of Exhibiting Forgiveness is Tarell’s artistic process, which illuminates how a creative practice can redeem illnesses of the soul, forge pathways toward regaining power over one’s own destiny, and forgive and transform despite the spiritual damage.

“Freaky Tales”

In 1987 Oakland, a mysterious force guides The Town’s underdogs in four interconnected tales: Teen punks defend their turf against Nazi skinheads, a rap duo battles for hip-hop immortality, a weary henchman gets a shot at redemption, and an NBA All-Star settles the score. Basically another day in the Bay.

Since premiering their short Gowanus, Brooklyn at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival, Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden have forged careers marked by fresh story sensibilities, rigorous character complexities, and outstanding performances. A mind-blowing mixtape and joyful ode to the ’80s, Freaky Tales imaginatively fuses styles and cinematic influences with giddy abandon, yielding a pastiche of pulp, pop, comic books, anthology horror, Old Testament wrath, and kung fu by way of a bloody crescendo that leaves no appendage unsevered. The supernatural storm brewing above Oakland empowers its ensemble of underdog warriors with a spirit of righteous retribution as they take on bullies, corruption, racism, misogyny, the Man, and the Lakers. A stirring anthem to solidarity and Oakland’s egalitarian, countercultural, and multicultural spirit, Freaky Tales reminds a world of wrongdoing that this is what you get when you mess with the underdogs — after all, there are more of us.

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