Many Sundance films jump into gun conversation
The more than 40 mass shootings in the United States last year prompted politicians to hold forth and a large number of Americans to simply shake their heads. What needed to happen, they asked, for these tragedies to stop?
It’s a cultural question as much as a political one. And while Hollywood has carried on without much changing in how it portrays guns, a growing number of independent filmmakers are addressing the topic in urgent and bracing ways.
The Sundance Film Festival, long a ground zero for cultural movements, begins Thursday with a rare accumulation of movies about gun violence.
“Every conversation has to start somewhere, and sometimes that somewhere is Park City,” Utah, says A. J. Schnack, a documentary-film veteran who, with the input of Oscar winner Laura Poitras, has directed “Speaking Is Difficult,” a short about gun violence that will premiere at the festival. “Clearly everyone’s been talking about the issue, but the hope is that by talking about it artistically we can have a different kind of conversation.”
Schnack’s movie, a powerfully arranged collection of everyday footage and 911 calls, is one of several f ilms across both documentary and narrative categories to tackle mass shootings, def ined by federal statute as the murder by gunfire of at least three people.
“Dark Night,” an impres-
sionistic tale set during the prelude to a movie- theater shooting, is loosely based on the tragedy at a multiplex in Aurora, Colo., in 2012 during a screening of “The Dark Knight Rises” that claimed the lives of 12 people.
Historically, Sundance, the nation’s most prestigious f ilm festival, has displayed a penchant for setting a cultural agenda. A decade ago, Davis Guggenheim’s “An Inconvenient Truth” helped kick- start a climate- change movement, and Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s “Blackfish” in 2013 was the beginning of a long campaign to inf luence a policy shift at Sea World.
But rarely do multiple movies on a single issue come along at the same time, and from so many angles.
The Katie Couric- produced “Under the Gun,” directed by Stephanie Soechtig, directly examines policy aspects of the gun issue. Kim Snyder’s “Newtown,” about the December 2012 shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School, is concerned primarily with the aftermath of gun violence in one community.
Legislative questions are not addressed, and even the killer’s name is not mentioned. Instead, viewers are given wrenching access to a place that more than three years later continues to grapple with an attack that claimed the lives of 27 victims, many of them small children.
“I have this need to know what he experienced,” Mark Barden, who lost a son in the attack, says in heartbreaking tones. Imagine, he continues “try[ ing] to interpret what your 7- year- old experienced as he’s being murdered in his f irst- grade classroom.”
David Wheeler, who lost his son Ben at Sandy Hook, says, “We’re all terrified of forgetting what he looked like or sounded like.”
Snyder, a New Yorkbased filmmaker, traveled to Newtown just weeks after the attack and slowly won the trust of an understandably guarded community. She says she hoped to show the tragic effects of violence and the resilience that can emerge in its wake.
“This film is not an either/ or policy piece,” she says of her emotionally devastating movie. “I was trying to create a portrait of a collective trauma, and do it in a way that becomes universal. I think it speaks more to the issue of how a society deals with grief.”
An even more observational style characterizes the work of Tim Sutton, a veteran narrative filmmaker who in his film “Dark Night” offers a homage to Gus Van Sant’s 2003 Cannes prize winner “Elephant” in exploring the topic.
Taking a restrained, meditative approach, he follows a series of largely young people in a suburban town on the day a movie- theater attack will take place. Sutton subverts expectations of who the shooter is while also reveling in the banalities that heighten the effect of the impending brutality. “This [ movie] is going to be amazing,” one young moviegoer says later in the f ilm as she sits down in the theater, just after she compliments her friend on her eyeliner.
Though he describes himself as politically to the left and in favor of more gun restrictions, Sutton’s f ilm contains no overt ideology, and he says he has little desire to offer a policy rebuke. He hopes instead to offer exposure to the people who are affected by gun violence and, especially via long takes of a character cleaning and maintaining his gun, the weapons themselves.
“I wanted to show guns and the space they occupy in suburban America,” says Sutton, who grew up with modest exposure to guns in upstate New York. “They’re always around, and yet for a lot of people the only time they see them is in a Michael Bay movie. I wanted to get the audience really close to them, but not in a sensational or glitzy way.”
He adds, “I didn’t want to explain or judge [ gun usage]; I just wanted to observe. It’s just a portrait of America right now.”
Even though almost everyone behind these pieces says they want to stay away from policy prescriptions on gun ownership, they are all motivated by a growing political dissatisfaction. The last five months of 2015, they note, saw brutal tragedies in locations as varied as Roseburg, Ore., Houston and San Bernardino.
“I think it’s the zeitgeist,” says Maria Cuomo Cole, who produced “Newtown.” “It’s burgeoning and burgeoning, and we are horrified and move on, then are horrified and move on again. As Americans we’re not very good at paying attention long- term; we’re mobilized and then fall back into our patterns.”
These films, she says, can create a more enduring reminder of the issue’s potency. They also aim to offer an indie- f ilm corrective of sorts to mainstream Hollywood, which on movie screens continues to glamorize gun violence.
Taken together, they yield a composite portrait of a creative class angered by inaction.
Schnack’s movie, which will open in the coming months as part of a new season of the Field of Vision documentary series, stacks 911 calls from mass shootings — people in hushed scared tones speaking from hiding spots during the attacks to officious operators — with a depressing repetition. The idea that each time seems new and urgent to those victims is contrasted with the viewer’s growing sense of how familiar these calls have become.
Only when the film culminates in a speech from shooting victim and former U. S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords ( D.- Ariz.) is there some emotional release and hope for a policy solution.
But whether these works of cinema can sway opinion is an open question. Even the most optimistic f ilmmakers say they know there are limits to how much they can move the needle on an issue on which many voters have long made up their minds. ( That point was underscored recently when Taya Kyle, widow of “American Sniper” protagonist Chris Kyle, wrote a strongly worded op- ed for CNN arguing against gun control laws.) The entrenched opinions on the issue, the f ilmmakers acknowledge, are inf initely more complex than the politics of responsibility articulated by movies like “Blackfish.”
Sundance f ilmmakers must also contend with the idea that they are simply speaking to the converted, particularly in the left- leaning independent- f ilm business. As inf luential as the festival is among tastemakers and media elite, only a few movies each year, at most, break out in the larger culture and carry the possibility of reshaping a debate.
Festival organizers say they had no agenda in programming these movies. They simply slotted in the f ilms because they saw a wave of powerful stories.
“I thought I knew a lot about Newtown before I saw this movie,” says festival director John Cooper. “And then I saw it, and it changed my perception. You can be callous in looking at news stories in a way you don’t when you’re watching a film. That’s why I think these movies can really help change the way you think.”
Like Middle East war documentaries and other sprawling areas, the 2016 crop of gun movies may be less a moment than the beginning of a wave.
“As long as the problem doesn’t go away,” Sutton says, “neither will the films.”