CineManiax: Podcast Transcripts

203 Sundance Film Festival 2026

Friday, June 5, 2026

CM203_Sundance Film Fest

FELIPE BUSTOS SIERRA: Editing was a really balancing act, and you can both convey-- create a sensory experience for-- get a sense of maybe you didn't attend the protest, but this is what you may have felt. There's nothing like sitting in a dark room in a cinema and going to a protest. It is a collective experience that is enhanced by experience, all these emotions with all the people around you, whether they're strangers or friends. And so we wanted to keep that going but also keep the momentum going and keep an authenticity that this is exactly what happened.

[THEME MUSIC]

CHRIS REED: Hello and welcome to the CineManiax podcast I'm your host, Chris Reed, Editor at Film Festival Today and lead critic at Hammer to Nail. On today's show, we'll talk about the 2026 Sundance Film Festival and some of our favorites from the fest. Joining me is Jack Schenker, a fellow critic at Hammer to Nail and a prolific filmmaker interviewer. It's great to have you on the show, Jack. Thanks for coming on.

JACK SCHENKER: Thank you for having me, Chris. Hello, listeners of the CineManiax podcast.

CHRIS REED: Pleasure to have you. So you were actually on the ground. I attended the festival, as I have for a number of years now, virtually. What were some films that you came away with positive feelings?

JACK SCHENKER: Well, I saw around 20-plus movies at the festival, and most of what I really liked/loved was documentaries. I found that most of the narrative stuff that I loved, I wasn't crazy about. There were a few exceptions, such as Ha-chan such as Shame and Money.

But the best thing that I saw at Sundance, without a doubt, was Once Upon a Time in Harlem, which was made by William and David Greaves. William Greaves brought together the living luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance in the '70s at the townhouse of Duke Ellington. And he set up three cameras. He got 60 hours of footage.

And he was trying to put together this footage of this night where all these incredible people came together and talked about the Renaissance. And he passed away before he was able to finish it. And his wife carried on that vision, and she passed away before it was able to come out. So then his son and the granddaughter took it over.

What I think is so important about this movie, beyond the fact that it's literally just like a living, breathing verbal history of the Renaissance, what makes it so pressing for today is you have these people that disagree so vehemently and so aggressively, but they never disrespect each other. They have such an open and beautiful conversation, and that's so obviously not something that you would find today. So watching that conversation and watching these people disagree in such an intelligent and respectful way, I think, is what makes this movie essential for all humans in 2026 to see.

CHRIS REED: I just wanted to say thank you for highlighting that aspect of the film. I've heard nothing but good things about it, and now hearing you describe it in that way, it really makes me want to see it even more.

JACK SCHENKER: Eon picked it up, which I think is so incredible. I mean, it's amazing that a movie like this is going to get a wide theatrical release. You don't really see that very often for documentaries. It's just such a rich piece of restoration. The footage is so vivid. The sounds are just so rich. It's just such a beautiful event. And it just puts you there. It feels like you're at this party. It's definitely a movie that I would like to see many more times. There's infinite knowledge to take from this movie.

Going to narrative, I'm a huge Gregg Araki fan, and this is a real return to form.

CHRIS REED: Which film are you talking about? You mentioned Gregg Araki, but which film--

JACK SCHENKER: Sorry--it's called I Want Your Sex.

CHRIS REED: Got you.

JACK SCHENKER: And it premiered at the Eccles Theater. It was a really buzzy premiere. It was so amazing to be there. Crowd was really engaged and into it. It's basically the movie functions as a call for Gen Z to be having more sex. And it plays that out in this kind of modern art world, where Olivia Wilde plays this prominent modern artist who does basically sex as art, will do performance art where she's having sex with people, or there's videos of sex or whatever it is.

And she hires Cooper Hoffman as this new intern, and then they establish a dominatrix situation. She says very bluntly, would you like to have sex? And he's this really flustered, awkward guy, and it makes for an interesting dynamic. And they are incredible together. I could have watched them forever.

And maybe I'm a freak, but dare I say, I felt the movie was a bit tame as it went on. It just got more infectious and more crazy and wacky and just so Araki. And if you're an Araki fan, you're definitely going to get that fix here. I think that it could have a real normie life. Could it definitely break into mainstream spheres, especially with Charli XCX's inclusion. So yeah, I think it could do very well in theaters. It's a very fun movie.

CHRIS REED: And certainly it has some star power in it. I guess if you were going to write a review, you might call it "I Want More Sex."

JACK SCHENKER: Yeah. But it was still very fun-- just a little bit slight.

CHRIS REED: Yeah, sure. Well, also, Araki's getting older. His sensibilities maybe are changing. He's not exactly himself a member of Gen Z. It's a really interesting review of the film-- again, a film I'd heard a lot about, But? I appreciate you contextualizing what I'd heard. And you have one more for us?

JACK SCHENKER: Yeah, well, I'm the biggest John Wilson fan out there. I think How To with John Wilson is one of the most brilliant shows ever. So when I saw that he had The History of Concrete at Sundance, I was very much anticipating it. And there's just nobody thinking like John Wilson. He will take concrete, and then he turns that into a dissection of a rockumentaries or Hallmark movies, or Kim Kardashian, or this Asian-American judge, this trailblazing Asian-American judge.

He somehow finds his ways into all these corners of the world. He'll start with this very basic subject, and then he makes these connections. And you're like, how did he do that? And his editing is just so incredible. He'll just go out there and just shoot hundreds and hundreds of hours of footage and comb through it and find the narrative that way. And he's just able to take an image of just some random New York City moment and find something really poetic or funny out of it.

And it is very funny. It is very entertaining. But with this one-- and this was the case with the show, too, but to a lesser extent. It was the case with the show if you binged a season. But watching this over the course of an hour and 40 minutes, it gives him the chance to do a real character arc, a real emotional character arc with this really wacky guy that is in this cover band that plays at all these dingy dive bars just outside of the city. And he gets really close with him and finds out this deeply personal information.

And it becomes very emotional and intense and sweet and life-affirming. And he's able to touch the full spectrum of human emotion. I am curious to see if he dives into a different form of documentary filmmaking, because this is literally just a full life. It's just a feature length How to with John Wilson episode. I would say that the movie definitely benefits a little bit from having seen the show, because it really just throws you into the concept without any explanation. And there's some inside jokes to the show, but you can watch this without having seen the show and get a lot out of it.

And yeah, one of my favorite parts is some of his agents were secretly recorded on a Zoom meeting with him when-- it's right in the beginning of the film, so it's not really a spoiler. But he reveals the title to them. He's on a Zoom, and they're like, so what are you thinking about for the title? He's like, The History of Concrete. And there's just this deafening silence. And it got one of the biggest laughs I heard the whole fest. So yeah, I think it might be the defining piece of New York City media of the Eric Adams era. It really just nails that whole time period so beautifully.

CHRIS REED: That's a great, great description there at the end that, as per your other reviews of the two other films, really makes me want to see it. So I also have three films to talk about, all of which won some awards, jury awards. I don't know if any of the ones you talked about did. We can return to that in a sec.

But my three films are Filipiñana by Rafael Manuel, which won the World Cinema Dramatic Special Jury Award for Creative Vision. And this is indeed about a Filipino woman, but it's set on a high-end golf course in the Philippines. And the film really leans into a critique of social hierarchies, of disparities between the ultra-wealthy and the have-nots. And it's beautifully photographed, with very deliberate compositions, almost too carefully composed, but you get into it. It has a languorous pace. And the deliberateness of the shot choices sort of seduces you into just allowing the languorous pace of the filmmaking to wash over you. And gradually you realize how serious of a narrative there is beneath the surface of these gorgeous visuals.

I really enjoyed it. I thought it was a really powerful film, with a climax that is treated as almost an afterthought as the camera holds, and you wonder, is there going to be more? And I really found it very effective in not spoon-feeding you its message and just letting you enjoy that experience of watching slow, beautifully shot cinema. So I'm not surprised that it won a jury award for creative vision, because I'm here for that.

So I know you interviewed the filmmaker of my next film, because you told me that before we started recording, and that's Shame and Money, which won the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize for Drama. And it's directed by Visar Morina, who is a Kosovan director, or Kosovar director. It is a study of social hierarchies, and, as the title implies, of the shame associated with such.

So we start with a family that's middle class or even upper middle class on a farm. But then a family member does something really terrible because he's angry, and suddenly the social position of the main characters changes drastically. They have to leave the country, move to the city, and things become quite challenging for them.

And the film examines what that means to them and to their relatives in the city who are-- they're trying to do the right thing by their standards but not always so understanding of what it means to suddenly have your position in society shift and to be hurting for cash. I thought it was really, really strong as well. And the acting of the two main characters. I didn't know these actors before, but who played the wife and husband, was really quite phenomenal. So yeah, I'm really happy I had a chance to see it.

JACK SCHENKER: And I also don't know really any other filmmakers from Kosovo, to be honest. This was his second premiere in the World Cinema Dramatic competition, but I don't think I've seen another film from Kosovo.

CHRIS REED: It's funny you should say that, because somehow I have been seeing a number of Balkan films, including my next choice on this list--

JACK SCHENKER: It isn't from Kosovo?

CHRIS REED: --which is not from Kosovo, but it's from Montenegro, the next film, which is also in the Balkans and not far, and that's To Hold a Mountain. So that's a documentary by Petar Glomazic and Biljana Tutorov which won the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize for Documentary. So clearly this is a fest this year that's celebrating Balkan filmmakers.

And this film is about resistance to government overreach, and it follows this woman who's living with her daughter. Her name is Gara. Her daughter's name is Nada. And they live on this mountain-- hence the title-- which is Mt. Sinjajevina in Montenegro that is-- it's not pristine. Human beings have been living there for a long time, but it's pretty untouched.

And they live and farm on this mountain, and suddenly the Montenegrin government decides that this is now going to be a military training ground. Gara decides, as one would, that this is not acceptable and leads popular resistance against this, all the while sort of struggling in a very patriarchal society. And we learn a lot more about her and her daughter and the tragedies they suffered at the hands of toxic masculinity.

And so the film has a lot going on in it. And beautifully shot. You can imagine this mountain probably looks beautiful in the frame. It is. This is one of two Balkan films in my list that I recommend.

I wanted to ask you, Jack-- since you were on the ground, you could hear the buzz far more than I could from home, what do you think is going to come out of this year's Sundance Film Festival with perhaps a chance to reach a wider audience?

JACK SCHENKER: Well, I think, an-- I'll give you an obvious pick and a less obvious one. Obviously, I think Josephine will be in awards competition by the end of this year. It is just really such a great film, and obviously it won the Audience Award. I think it won the US Dramatic Competition as well, and previous films to do that were Minari and CODA. So it's definitely likely that it'll be in the conversation for the Oscars next year, and I think it very well should be.

It was really, really hard-hitting stuff, and it was deeply affecting and incredibly shot, incredibly performed. It was just a very, very good and personal film. Very tough watch, though, but one that I came in with-- I came with a little bit of expectations, but I didn't know what the reception was surrounding it. It was Chasing Summer. I'm a huge Josephine Decker fan. I love Madeline's Madeline. I love Shirley.

For this one, she's doing something extremely different from Madeline's Madeline and Shirley. She's not doing her typical psychologically naughty stuff. This is just kind of like a straight rom-com, and it's really good. It's just really good. It had the people roaring at Eccles that day. It's got a really fun plot and just this real millennial, strong millennial vibe to it. And yeah, it's just recommendable to everybody. I think that with the right marketing, that one could be a big hit.

CHRIS REED: Well, great. So we've got Josephine and Chasing Summer, from your mouth to the cinema audience's ears. Thanks for those recommendations and for your thoughts on how they're going to perform outside of Sundance. Jack, I want to thank you for being on the show and for sharing all your thoughts about this year's Sundance.

JACK SCHENKER: Thank you. Thank you for having me, CineManiax fans. I appreciate it.

CHRIS REED: Next up, I'd like to share my interview with director Felipe Bustos Sierra, who made Everybody to Kenmure Street, another one of my favorites from this year's Sundance Film Festival. Let's check out a clip.

[AUDIO PLAYBACK]

- I was quite surprised, actually, at how blatant it was. The van had immigration enforcement, I think, in big letters on the side. I messaged some friends, and I tweeted about it as well, saying. Precisely what do you do in this situation? Because I had no idea.

- I opened up the door, and I was saying, what's going on? And he was being marched down the stairs by Home Office officials. Heads down, don't talk to you anything.

[END PLAYBACK]

CHRIS REED: In the film, we go back five years to a citizen uprising in Glasgow, Scotland, that demonstrated the effectiveness of peaceful dissent. On May 12, 2021, two immigrant men in the Pollokshields neighborhood of Glasgow were pulled out of their flats by the United Kingdom's Home Office.

Bustos Sierra begins the movie with a montage of archival footage that shows the long history in Scotland of public defiance in the face of repressive policies. One of the unique filmmaking twists here is how the reenactments are handled, with actress Emma Thompson appearing as one of the principal activists, known as Van Man. The movie proves an inspiring look at the power of the people.

Thank you so much for joining me, Felipe Bustos Sierra, to talk about Everybody to Kenmure Street for the podcast CineManiax. I'd like to start with your own background, since I think it's relevant to the movie. You are the child of an exiled Chilean journalist. How has this family history informed your filmmaking choices?

FELIPE BUSTOS SIERRA: I guess documentary was always going to be pre-destined. The first time I held the camera, I was 9, and I was going back to Chile for the first time, still during the dictatorship. And my mom-- and my dad had bought-- was still on the blacklist as a journalist. But he bought one of those gigantic VHS camera where you have to carry a VCR with you.

And so me and my mom were sort of splitting up the work and just going to the place that he'd grown up with, interviewing friends, interviewing families. And I think I remember feeling very, very aware of my audience at the time. This is for my dad, and this is going to be how he sees a country he hasn't seen in 15 years. So the idea of how you talk to people and the relationship between reality and audience is something that's kind of been building up ever since.

CHRIS REED: You were raised in Belgium, if I'm not mistaken.

FELIPE BUSTOS SIERRA: That's right.

CHRIS REED: How did you end up in Scotland?

FELIPE BUSTOS SIERRA: Being part of the exile, the concept of home, it gets a little diluted over time. And so I travel a lot. I was feeling quite restless. And Scotland is where I found-- I've always been obsessed with film. I saw Stand By Me when I was 12, and that changed my life. I wanted to be a filmmaker since.

And since Scotland, and particularly Edinburgh, had so many festivals, and one of the-- or possibly I think the old-- they're going to kill me for this-- I think it's the old film festival in the world, the Edinburgh Film Festival, continuously running. I guess I find my people, and I started making films.

CHRIS REED: So when did you decide to make a documentary about the 2021 protests in Glasgow? That is the subject of Everybody to Kenmure Street.

FELIPE BUSTOS SIERRA: Within days, actually, within days. I lived in Govanhill at the time, which is mentioned in the film, in the south side of Glasgow, which is the most diverse community in all of Scotland. And, as I say, solidarity has been a big part of my life.

And my first film, Nae Pasaran, which was about a story from my childhood about the Scottish workers who refused to work on airplane engines for Chile and used the Scottish weather. They just took their engines outside in the yard to let them rest. And it became the longest continuous boycott ever. So for four years, the engines were in the factory, refusing to work and refusing to be sent back until one night they disappeared.

So the process of making that film in Scotland created a sort of community around solidarity and human rights issues. And then chemistry happens, and I get the image. My film Nae Pasaran was on TV at the time, and so people were saying, can you share this? It's the same thing happening here.

And I just didn't see the hope. I saw that picture of the van with maybe three or four people around it. And there's all these things going on in the world at the time, which made me feel like the police is not going to back down. And I don't want to feel that today. Didn't want to get a bad face, and I didn't go.

But I was tracking it throughout the day, and it blindsided me. And basically what happened at the end after eight hours of standoff is something I never got to feel my whole life. And some people turned up to the protest for the first time in life and felt that in one day.

And so the next day, I went to see friends who had been to the protest, and I started talking to people. And I realized that was a whole new level of intelligence about solidarity was expressed. And I guess because of my first film, the access was just so easy. I think people knew what kind of films I was making. And I got to meet some of the key characters, including Van Man, including Aamer Anwar, the human rights lawyer, very quickly.

And I reached out to a friend, Ciara Barry, who lived on the street and went to protest and who is one of the emerging producers in Scotland. And I was like, I think there's something really new here and really exciting. And we started from there.

CHRIS REED: So your film is made up almost exclusively of interviews with the protest participants, archival material about the area and the history of civil disobedience, and footage from the actual event. But you then have three actresses playing the parts of three crucial roles on the ground, including Van Man, who is played by-- drum roll-- Emma Thompson. So what motivated the choice to do that, and what came first? Emma Thompson being a producer on the film, or you approaching her to play one of those parts?

FELIPE BUSTOS SIERRA: Safeguarding was the real reason behind all of it. It's a protest that happened four years ago, but we're still living through it. And people who went to the protest are still going through it in some cases. So we were very careful that the film doesn't diminish the quality of life and really celebrate what happened on the day.

And as you can imagine, Van Man, in the weeks after the protest, became a sort of near-mythical character around Glasgow. So it took a while to get to him, and it's through him that I found out about the nurse, who nobody had really mentioned the nurse before. And he was being very humble. He was saying, I was only useful for about 15 minutes. My skill was the opportunity of being there really early on and having no cops around the van, which means I had time to get in.

Sometimes people I think, particularly with these kind of events, people get put on a pedestal. The word "extraordinary" gets brought about, and I think it takes away the idea that anybody could have done this. Again, it's just an opportunity. It was just he saw a moment, he took it. And anybody could have done that. And that's what he-- I don't want people use my face or my corpulence as an idea of this is the kind of person we need, but also just safety, not being recognized, is an important thing in the times we live in.

Really quickly, I thought it would be great to work with actors on this. And I had an existing relationship with Emma Thompson from the making of Nae Pasaran, which she wrote me a beautiful letter when she saw it. And we've sort of been in touch ever since. So at that point, I was like, look, I've got this idea. What do you think about this? Here's the testimony. Here's the transcript.

There's all these little points that we can hit it, that a lot of the research of solidarity and protest and civil disobedience and resistance in Scotland, as far back as you go, it's always been women and migrants first. And I thought it'd just be lovely to just also gender-swap Van Man and show that really when you see the opportunity to do something good, you have to take it. There's definitely a level of mischief by seeing Van Man, and he takes off his mask, and it's Emma Thompson underneath there.

CHRIS REED: It took me a second, just a split second, to realize it was Emma Thompson. She's so familiar to me. And then, of course, Kate Dickie has such a unique face that she was not hard to recognize. What would you describe as your biggest filmmaking challenge on this documentary?

FELIPE BUSTOS SIERRA: There were many. This wasn't an easy film to make. Funding didn't come easy. I think it's obviously a very controversial topic, despite being an absolute reflection of what happened on the day and being essentially quite a joyful film. But funding didn't come easy. So we did use crowdfunding. We had a Kickstarter campaign to help us move forward.

We received a huge quantity of footage from people on the streets, and obviously 80% of the film is that. And the editing process, which we spent about 20 weeks, myself and Colin Monie, who's one of the best editors in Scotland. We'd worked together on Nae Pasaran, so there was an existing relationship. There was a shorthand in how to put that together.

But it was really a challenge to create a timeline. And we had all these kind of fragments, sometimes three, four, five seconds, sometimes much longer. We had people who, thankfully, were live-streaming, so we had long, unbroken files, which helped us massively to create a timeline but also track people, see who else was filming. So it was a really painstaking process of we're getting all these interviews, and people are all telling us all these amazing things, but we don't have any footage of it. Can we trust that?

People tend to embellish things. And sometimes false memories play a part. And a month later, this piece of footage would turn up, and we're like, here it is. So there was an-- editing was a really balancing act. And both create a sensory experience for-- you get a sense of maybe you didn't attend the protest, but this is what you may have felt. I think sitting in a dark room in a cinema and going to a protest is a collective experience that is enhanced by experience, all these emotions with all the people around you, whether they're strangers or friends. And so we wanted to keep that going, both keep the momentum going and keep an authenticity. And this is exactly what happened.

CHRIS REED: What we see on the screen is a great example of how important peaceful protests are in the quest for justice. And we're obviously at a really crucial juncture in the United States right now where it feels like parts of the country are about to go up in flames. I'm just curious, based on what you learned here and in your previous film, and perhaps lessons from Chile-- of course, Chile is about to backslide now-- what advice would you give to Americans about next steps?

FELIPE BUSTOS SIERRA: You have to go in knowing that these things are always going to happen. And so therefore you just have to continuously show up, over and over again. There's the story of the Glasgow girls in the film, about these schoolmates, all teenage girls, who were making a documentary about their life as children living in the UK, living in Scotland, and not being born there. And while they were filming this, one of their friends got lifted and got detained.

That was such a big story at the time. It was such a big campaign and so, so well supported that it actually changed legislation in the UK, which, for many people, 20 years later to see what happened on Kenmure Street, it was such a shock. It was like, well we thought this was done. We fought that battle, but all of a sudden there's another immigration van on our street.

And so I think knowing that it's going to be this compromise where we're always going to have to do this, and while at the same time living a rich, happy life, creating a community around you, creating a safe space, which is really what won the day at Kenmure Street. The police response on Kenmure Street was over the top for us. I understand it's very tame compared to what's happening in the US. The availability of guns here create a short path to violence that we don't have to deal with yet.

So it's incredibly clear that the sacrifice that people are going to have to make are a whole different level. And we're seeing it from Europe. We feel like it's about to happen to us. But I think the idea is, it's going to take all of us, regardless of borders.

CHRIS REED: No, I think you're right. And fingers crossed about the future. Well, Felipe, thank you so much, both for making this film, which I found really inspiring, and for talking to me for the podcast CineManiax. I really appreciate it.

FELIPE BUSTOS SIERRA: Thanks so much, Chris. Thanks for taking the time as well.

CHRIS REED: Everybody to Kenmure Street is definitely worth watching. And who knows? Perhaps it will get some Oscar love this time next year. You can read the full transcript of my interview at Hammer to Nail. If you're curious about any of the films discussed on today's show, be sure to look for them in theaters or via streamers. You can read my interviews at Film Festival Today and Hammer to Nail.

For the CineManiax podcast, I'm your host, Chris Reed. Thanks for joining me, and I'll see you at the movies.

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203 Sundance Film Festival 2026