At Sundance, Festivalgoers Grapple With Alex Pretti’s Killing: “We’re Sitting Here Talking About Movies”

Still, it can be difficult to reconcile attending Sundance with the knowledge of what’s happening several states away. “I couldn’t sleep last night because I read the news before I went to bed,” a woman named Elizabeth Gifford told me in a different line for a different movie: Alex Gibney’s Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie.

Gifford doesn’t work in the film industry, but was attending the festival with a group of friends who do. “I’m actually trying to shield them” from the news, Gifford said. “These are all people who are very politically active, and their films are politically active. They’re documentarians. They have got to try to focus for this period of five days. I don’t have that obligation, so I am reading the news, which is why I’m crying in line.”

Even those who tried to ignore the news this weekend might have found the task impossible. Reality rudely intruded on a private party thrown by talent agency CAA Friday night, where Democratic Florida congressman Maxwell Frost was allegedly punched by a man who crashed the event. Police say that 28-year-old Christian Joel Young allegedly told Frost, “We are going to deport you and your kind,” before yelling a racial slur and striking the representative. (Young, who has been denied bail, faces charges of aggravated burglary, assault, and assaulting an elected official.)

On Sunday afternoon, Vanity Fair even stumbled across a very small protest—about seven people marching down Main Street, anti-ICE signs in hand. None of the participants appeared to be directly affiliated with Sundance, but their message seemed geared toward those at the festival. “You have a voice!” one cried. “Use it!” That evening, even more people gathered on Main Street, holding their phone flashlights aloft in a show of solidarity against ICE.

In yet another line on Sunday, Park City local Michele Glicken told me that she usually experiences Sundance as something of a bubble. “I spend so much attention on the movies and the logistics,” she said, “that it’s almost like I put my mind on hold.” Still, she and her friends didn’t seem to be bothered when a pushy journalist punctured that bubble. A film festival is not the real world—but manufactured as the experience might be, it’s a communal one nevertheless. Processing difficult moments is always harder in isolation. So is survival.

Perhaps nobody understands that last point better than Rushdie. The writer received a sustained ovation when he appeared onstage at The Ray Theatre with his wife, poet-novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths, and Gibney following the premiere of their documentary, which follows Rushdie through the aftermath of the 2022 knife attack that almost killed him.

Though the subject matter is heavy, the movie is leavened by Rushdie’s wry sense of humor. He cracked several jokes during the post-screening Q&A as well, including when Gibney steered the conversation toward the present moment. The movie, Gibney said alongside Rushdie, Griffiths, and Sundance director Eugene Hernandez, feels especially resonant right now, as it’s about “how violence unleashed by an irresponsible political leader could spread out of control.”