The Particular Urgency of Sundance’s ‘Issue’ Films

But Taymor wanted to end The Glorias on an uplifting note, so Steinem’s solemn reception of Clinton’s loss wound up on the cutting-room floor. Instead, she uses a clip from the 2017 Women’s March in Washington, D.C., in which Steinem encourages the crowd to resist President Donald Trump and his policies. It’s an invigorating sequence, one that makes clear the true message of the biopic: that as much as The Glorias may be a dramatization of Steinem’s life, it’s also meant to be a rousing call to action.

Read: The most crowd-pleasing films coming out of Sundance

The Assistant, meanwhile, uses its small scale to tremendous effect. The drama tracks a day in the life of Jane (played by Ozark’s Julia Garner), an entry-level employee who works for an unseen, unnamed Hollywood executive, who will inevitably remind viewers of Harvey Weinstein. The documentarian and first-time narrative filmmaker Kitty Green directed the film—which Vulture called “the first great movie about Me Too”—like a thriller: Jane spends her long workday trapped inside a Midtown Manhattan office, fulfilling questionable tasks for her boss that hint at his predatory practices. She cleans his couch, delivers a new hire to a meeting with him at a hotel, and quietly returns an earring she finds to a woman who had stopped by for a rendezvous with him earlier in the week. The film keenly demonstrates the way abusive behavior can be kept hidden, even protected. Jane’s suspicious, but she’s operating in a world in which no one else has reported a thing.

The movie—which will donate 10 percent of its profits to the New York Women’s Foundation—treats the issue of workplace harassment and sexual discrimination as serious and scary, not sensational. After one of the festival screenings, the programming staff invited the labor and women’s-rights activist Ai-jen Poo to join Green and Garner onstage to talk about the issues explored in the film. To Poo, The Assistant’s choice to observe a character with little power helped capture the feeling of “witnessing and bearing a thousand cuts.”

The drama Never Rarely Sometimes Always tackles a similarly heavy subject: that of an unwanted pregnancy. In her film, the writer-director Eliza Hittman (Beach Rats) follows Autumn (Sidney Flanigan), a teenager from Pennsylvania who seeks a legal abortion in New York City. Like The Assistant, it examines the issue by keeping the story small and intimate, magnifying the desperation, dread, and distrust that Autumn feels in every moment of her journey.

Hittman, who attended Planned Parenthood’s annual reception at Sundance on Sunday and joined the organization’s “Storytelling as Activism” panel on Tuesday, doesn’t commend or condemn Autumn’s ultimate decision. Rather, she makes clear through her film that, in a time when the legality of abortion is being freshly debated, there is a dire need for a way to keep women out of danger.