In January of this year, the Sundance Film Festival commenced in person for the first time since COVID burst on the scene in spring of 2020. We weren’t sure how lingering crowd avoidance and the online availability of some screenings would impact the festival’s attendance or how we would feel about going back to theaters after the convenience of watching screenings in our sweats at home. Here’s what transpired, what we saw, and our thoughts on it all.

Jason and I watched three films at the festival this year, significantly less than the two prior years, those in which we critiqued films from our couch. Per our usual, our curiosity got caught up in the documentaries, and that’s all we saw. Why fewer? Traveling and waiting in lines are part of the great festival time suck. The hours on roads and in queues add up and it’s not feasible to do a whole slew of screenings, unless you have no other assigned life tasks.

Did others find the festival unbearable without their pjs? There wasn’t much of a line at our first screening even though we arrived later than we typically prefer, just 35 minutes prior to start time. Our theater didn’t hold a huge number of people, about 140. It did fill up, and two other auditoriums were loaded for screening the same show at the same time. Since we didn’t enter the others, it is impossible to guess how packed they were. Our second screening was in the Grand Theatre, which holds 1,100. It was about 80% full. For our final movie, back in the same theater as our first, every seat was again occupied. Attendance seemed solid but probably not as high as in the past. What about the shows themselves?

The Longest Goodbye, which was part of the World Cinema Documentary Competition, is specifically about keeping astronauts sane in space and more broadly about the impact of isolation on mental wellbeing. For a space mission, the breaking point of each piece of equipment must be calculated and tested extensively. Unlike that equipment, the soft, squishy humans, vital components of mission success, can’t be quantified. How do you predict, control, and rectify the psychological impact of separation, stress, and lack of privacy on space explorers? With a three-year mission to Mars on the horizon, the question of how to keep fallible humans mentally sound, motivated, and productive is a difficult but critical one.

What were some of the most interesting nuggets panned from this flick? Space travel is evolving. In the 50s and 60s, it was about quick-thinking heroics in brief situations. Now, it is more like a marathon where astronauts must fight sensory monotony as much as high-stakes situations.

I appreciated the film’s portrayal of astronauts as human beings foremost and heroes secondary. Today’s astronauts, like their predecessors, are not superhumans but talented, regular people striving toward greatness. However, that doesn’t mean they easily acknowledge their human shortcomings. As this documentary conveyed, they often resist opening up about their psychological strains because they fear they will not be chosen again for space travel if their inward struggles are known. This drastically impedes NASA’s ability to monitor and understand the mental state of their crews.

Although their reporting system has flaws, NASA has put considerable effort into understanding isolation psychology. Their studies on the topic have helped more than people above; they’ve helped people below. NASA assisted authorities in keeping 33 Chilean miners and their families rational and functional when the miners were trapped underground for over two months in 2010.

Larger takeaways from this documentary? You don’t have to be in space to experience seclusion. In 2020, we all suffered ample amounts of alone time. It may take decades before we understand the full impact of that isolation.

The Q&A for The Longest Goodbye featured the two primary filmmakers, Ido Mizrahy and Nir Sa’ar. They spoke about how hard it was to get access to the active astronauts featured in the film. Apparently, NASA was much more comfortable with the idea of the documentary when they heard PBS was on board. Yes, PBS will be distributing this film, and you should be able to watch it in early 2024.

Our second show, Deep Rising, was in the Premieres category at Sundance. This documentary is fundamentally about who do the seas belong to? And what is the cost of companies extracting metal-rich nodules from the bottom of the ocean’s deep, two to three miles down, to power the battery cells of electric vehicles?

Rare minerals like nickel and cobalt are used in energy storage for the batteries found in everything from electric vehicles to cell phones. As the electric vehicle market has boomed, the quest for these uncommon metals has escalated. Although EV drivers regularly pat themselves on the back for their environmental awareness, the metals used in their batteries often come from mining operations catastrophic to ecosystems and fueled by coal. For instance, nickel-rich soil is being torn out beneath rainforests via a grimy coal-powered operation in Indonesia. The country has made a deal with Tesla to buy that dirty nickel for five billion dollars. “Green” energy isn’t as green as you’d think.

The latest jeopardized environment in the quest for battery components is one of the least understood ecosystems on the planet, the deep ocean. Nodules found on deep-sea floors are high in scarce minerals. Hence, companies are now competing for the technology to extract these potato-sized stones and the legal authority to do so. The International Seabed Authority, an organization created by the United Nations back in the 1990s, is supposed to oversee deep-seabed mining and the environment fallout from it. However, since international waters belong to no nation, this group appears to have many conflicts of interest.

What does that potential money behind nodule extraction and the disorder of the only organization with some authority over these operations mean for the oceans’ darkest waters? Unfortunately, we don’t know enough about these mysterious regions to ascertain that. We do know these nodules only grow millimeters in millions of years, so they cannot be readily replaced, and mining operations inevitably disrupt ocean floors. Those should be enough reasons for pause and consideration before commencing a deep-sea free-for-all, but vigilant heads often do not prevail when lucrative gains are at stake.

Along with gorgeous and fascinating footage of gelatinous life forms in the abyss, this documentary provided a substantial amount of information on a subject we knew little about. In fact, that was one of the filmmaker’s primary incentives to make the movie. He logically feels that because the oceans belong to all of us, we should be knowledgeable about the interests potentially threatening their wellbeing.

While informative, the film jumps around quite a bit making it hard to follow at times. Plus, it doesn’t give an indication of where we should go from here. What is the call to action? What are the alternatives to providing demand for these minerals and depleting our oceans?

The Q&A, which included director Matthieu Rytz and the Chilean scientist featured in the film, Dr. Sandor Mulsow, offered clearer solutions. Those solutions? Green hydrogen, produced from the electrolysis of water, along with batteries made from more common metals like iron phosphate. Iron phosphate is slightly heavier and less efficient, so it doesn’t stay charged for quite as many miles as other types of EV batteries. However, iron is much more common in the Earth’s crust and, therefore, much easier to source without devasting environmental impact. Tesla is trying to decrease its dependency on nickel and cobalt and now does offer a lithium iron phosphate battery. About half of the company’s vehicle production has switched to utilizing these batteries.

Jason Momoa is the narrator of the film and was at the festival but didn’t come to our screening, probably because it wasn’t in Park City and many actors don’t venture out of the Park-City scene when attending Sundance. Take note filmmakers, the Salt Lake City crowd is much more representative of real audiences than the Park City peeps. Getting outside the Hollywood bubble is worth it.

Judy Blume Forever, the last documentary we saw at Sundance, is about, you guessed it, Judy Blume. Judy Blume has written over 25 books, many for children and young adults. Such favorites as Tiger Eyes, Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret, Blubber, and Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing. These titles will sound familiar to those who grew up in the 70s and 80s. I read her books as a kid. However, I wasn’t aware of how many of her works got banned in those days for candidly covering the awkwardness of puberty and adolescence.

Judy Blume Forever incorporates interviews with Judy as well as some of her readers. Her motivation for writing those controversial books? She believed she should be honest as an author and include situations kids were going through but adults wouldn’t talk to them about. She hated adults “keeping secrets” when she was a kid.

Judy Blume, currently in her 80s, isn’t writing anymore but is still full of spunk and candor. She continues to fight against the “moral majority” that now seems more intent on banning books than ever. Through the decades, she has gone out of her way to respond to readers who wrote to her, establishing long-lasting relationships with some of them. These letters are now at the Yale University Archives.

We found Judy Blume Forever a vibrant documentary with good flow and interesting content. Amazon bought it, so expect it to show up in Prime. Our screening was followed by a Q&A with the directors Davina Pardo and Leah Wolchok, along with one of the producers.

Attending Sundance in person for the first time in three years was mostly an upgraded experience. It meant we couldn’t see as many shows due to the required driving time and theater lines, but it also meant we could enjoy screenings with friends again. Two came with us to The Longest Goodbye. And although Q&As via Zoom back in the COVID gap were still enjoyable and enlightening, it was more rewarding to interact with directors and producers physically present. Like those Zoom years, each of our 2023 screenings had a Q&A. Yay!