As part of an ongoing series, Alex highlights some of the major titles featured in the first virtual edition of this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

Amin Nasar, the protagonist of Flee, is first seen laying on a couch with his eyes closed. We can tell he is a young man, but his expression suggests one whose experiences have aged him well beyond his years. As he attempts to recall his childhood, the tension from his brow indicates a man grappling with vicious demons tormenting him his entire life.

In honor of its first virtual edition, Alex is taking a look at some of the highlights from this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

During the 2020 New Year’s celebrations in Wuhan, China, a fleeting news broadcast announced the arrest of eight individuals for spreading false “rumors” regarding “an unknown pneumonia.” This unknown pneumonia would later make its presence known to the world as the deadly Coronavirus, quickly crippling the global economy and upending millions of lives. On the surface, it seems as if Covid-19 came from out of nowhere, but the brief news blurb in In the Same Breath’s prologue warning of its arrival raises the question of whether this pandemic could have been prevented.

Time seemed to freeze in 2020. As a global pandemic brought our usual routines came to a grinding halt, so many of the cultural markers which traditionally spread across the calendar year seemed suddenly to vanish. Performances were cancelled, art galleries closed their wings, and movie theaters shut their doors. Audiences the world over turned to streaming for consuming content, either returning to beloved classics or catching up on what had been in their Netflix queue for years. It was among the old that so many of us discovered something new.

Virtually every elementary school student in America is aware of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. His delivery of the iconic “I Have a Dream” speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963, cemented his legacy as one of the most highly revered figures of the Civil Rights Movement. Pictures of the wisdom exuding through his coolly reserved visage lend him a regal, almost deified persona. His powerful cadence and eloquent diction can be heard in countless YouTube videos, and his array of accomplishments, including receiving a Nobel Peace Prize and having Congress pass the Civil Rights Act, rank among the greatest feats in American lore.

Young rapscallion Michel’s (Jean-Paul Belmondo) iconic introduction in a long trench coat and dark fedora lends him the appearance of the typical film noir antihero from the 1940s as he enters the radical decade of 1960s France. We watch him observe (in the first of many instances of reflexive scopophilia) his reflection in a poster of The Harder they Fall (1956), the face of the film’s star as well as Michel’s idol, Humphrey Bogart, displaying prominently across.