Good morning 🐣

And so our impromptu Sundance Month comes to a close. Today we have two documentaries from this year’s fest: one about fighters decades after the battle and the other about a battle still being waged. I’m not sure when these movies will be available for mass consumption, but I’ll be sure to keep you updated.

Winner of the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize for documentaries, “The Eternal Memory” follows a Chilean couple, Augusto Góngora and Paulina Urrutia, over the course of four years after Augusto is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. He was a prominent journalist who covered the Pinochet dictatorship and its aftermath, while she’s an actor and former Minister of Chile’s National Council of Culture and the Arts.

Look, I won’t beat around the bush; I just sat there eating my Pocky, crying my eyes out. It’s heartbreaking to watch someone lose their memory, but there are also moments of pure joy and Augusto is adamant that he loves life and wants to savor it until the very end. While they’re out for a walk, the couple stop in a garden and look at one another, as if seeing each other for the first time:

“You’re pretty.”

“You’re pretty too.”

This betrayal of memory is a subject he’s strived to address all his life, whether it was chronicling the horrors of Pinochet or writing about needing to remember that painful past while moving toward a better future. At one of his book readings earlier in his life, Augusto tells the audience:

It’s very important to us to reconstruct memory, not to be anchored in the past, because we think reconstructing memory is always an act that has a sense of future. It is always an attempt to know oneself, to know the problems, to know our weaknesses, overcome them and be able to generously face the future. It’s important to us to also say that it’s not enough for memory reconstruction to be merely a rational act. Numbers and statistics aren’t enough. I think we Chileans also need to rebuild our emotional memory, because these have been such rough, traumatic years, so full of pain. We also need to get our emotions back, embrace pain, and work on our mourning.

You may remember a story early in the war in Ukraine about journalists being targeted by Russian soldiers, so they have to sneak out of the hospital disguised in scrubs. “20 Days in Mariupol” is their story, featuring footage shot by Ukrainian filmmaker and AP News video journalist Mstyslav Chernov and his team. Some of the most famous images of the war were taken by these journalists, footage smuggled out of the country through intermittent cellular connections.

Winner of Sundance’s Audience Award for World Cinema Documentary, it’s a candid chronicle of a city in denial and then in ruins. You will see the best of people and the worst. You will see the surreality of war. And you will see a defibrillator used on a baby and a grieving mother crying, “But why? Why? Why?” At one point hospital workers take a break outside, saying to themselves in disbelief: “The whole world fell apart and we are just standing here and smoking.” Later tanks drive by the hospital and suddenly turn their turrets directly toward the camera.

It’s hard to watch, but it’s a powerful reminder of human resilience at a time when sources show that we’re growing numb to the news coverage.

Now watch this 👀

You didn’t think I’d leave you high and dry with nothing to watch this week, did you?

Revisiting last year’s Sundance fest, here’s what I wrote about “Descendant”:

In 1860, five decades after the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves was signed into law, two men from Mobile, Alabama, successfully smuggled enslaved people from Africa to the U.S. onboard the Clotilda without getting caught. They burned and sank the ship afterwards. The Civil War broke out a year later and the survivors of the last known U.S. transatlantic slave trade went on to found a community nearby named Africatown, which exists to this day, populated by some of their very descendants.

Winner of Sundance’s U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Creative Vision, “Descendant” recounts this story and its generational aftermath, including footage filmed by Zora Neale Hurston of one of the survivors, Cudjo Lewis, who lived until 1935. (Hurston went on to tell Mr. Lewis’s story in the book “Barracoon,” which was finally published posthumously in 2018, about 90 years after initially being written.)

The rest of this powerful documentary follows Africatown’s community members as they attempt to find the Clotilda. Spoiler: it’s eventually discovered and you get the sense that some people knew it was there all along. In fact, the descendants of the human traffickers are still major landowners to this day, their family name forever etched into old survey markers dotting the land surrounding Africatown, land which is now occupied by toxic industrial plants, poisoning its citizens. It seems there are always echoes through history.

Until next time! 👋

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