The Six Best Indie Movies to Watch Out for This Year

Read: Shaka King on directing ‘Judas and the Black Messiah’

The Pink Cloud felt extraordinary not just because it eerily echoed real life, but also because it brought stylishness and grace to its setting of drab apartment interiors. The ostensibly sci-fi film is Gerbase’s feature debut, but it’s made with the confidence of a veteran director, fluidly switching among genres (romance, comedy, horror) as the quarantine stretches from days into years. Though I’m not really ready for movies about the actual COVID-19 pandemic (Doug Liman’s Locked Down left me cold), The Pink Cloud succeeds by being only inadvertently relevant, focusing mostly on the psychological toll taken on its main character, Giovana (Renata de Lélis), who’s holed up with the one-night stand she brought home the evening before the crisis began.

The online approach to this year’s Sundance was safer and allowed expanded access around the country. Rather than having to fly to a Utah ski town to see exciting new movies, you could buy tickets online and watch them live, even attending virtual parties with other cinemagoers. But the lack of a collective viewing experience was notable for some of the year’s biggest hits, especially Sian Heder’s fantastic CODA, a witty, sweetly told drama about a hearing 17-year-old girl in a deaf Massachusetts fishing family. Heder (whose previous film, Tallulah, was an underrated melodrama) zooms in on small details and humorous moments as Ruby (Emilia Jones) and her family navigate life.

The dilemma in CODA is that Ruby loves to sing—a passion that’s mostly inaccessible to her parents, Jackie (Marlee Matlin) and Frank (Troy Kotsur). With the encouragement of a high-school teacher (a wonderful Eugenio Derbez), she begins to pursue music seriously. But the film isn’t structured around overdramatic conflicts or exaggerated plot twists. Its key emotional moments are rooted in the family’s love for each other, even as Ruby’s parents and brother might struggle to understand her passions. The movie’s climactic scene is one I would have loved to experience with a hushed, tearful audience, the kind of moment I fondly remember from recent Sundance hits such as The Farewell. Still, CODA managed to build buzz virtually. It was reportedly acquired by Apple for $25 million, a record-breaking number for the festival, while winning both the Audience Award and the U.S. dramatic Jury Prize.

Another major acquisition came from Netflix: The studio purchased Rebecca Hall’s feature debut, Passing, an adaptation of Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel, for nearly $16 million. The figures for streaming acquisitions are always inflated, because the company is essentially buying out a film’s theatrical and home-viewing rights as one big package. Still, the eight-figure deals indicated that there was little long-term fear from major studios about the future of movie viewing. Passing might not be a crowd-pleasing blockbuster, but it’s a precise and self-assured work from Hall (whose African American mother has a family history reminiscent of the film’s story). With Passing, she’s taken on a great, but highly internal, literary work that might not appear easily translatable to the screen.