BY: Amanda Jane Stern

Every year the Sundance Film Festival draws in a crowd of film industry personnel and film aficionados raring to see what’s new. This year, as usual, many fantastic new movies were screened at the festival which ran from Jan 23, 2020 – Sun, Feb 2, 2020. Now that Sundance 2020 has just come to an end and, let’s take a moment to look at 5 interesting films that came out of the festival this year.

Bad Hair

From the man who brought us Dear White People comes a Faustian horror-comedy about an evil weave. In Justin Simien’s Bad Hair, a wannabe VJ (Elle Lorraine in her feature film debut) is told that in order to succeed in the image obsessed music scene she needs to change her natural hair. So, she gets a weave that turns out to have a mind of its own. Bad Hair was picked up by Hulu.

Dick Johnson Is Dead

In this meditation-on-death documentary, Kristen Johnson (who directed the movie) tries to come to terms with her father Dick’s inevitable death. She does this by staging and restaging his death throughout the film, with Dick playing along of course. Through enacting different ways in which he may die, Johnson confronts her anxiety over the idea of losing her father. Dick Johnson Is Dead was picked up by Netflix.

Nine Days

What if your soul had to pass a series of interviews for the chance to even be born? That is the premise of Edson Oda’s new science-fiction movie Nine Days. Set in a sort of pre-life purgatory, the movie follows Will (Winston Duke) as he interviews different souls over the course of nine days to determine which of them gets to be born.

Shirley

Shirley Jackson is having a moment these days. Not only was her novel The Haunting of Hill House adapted into the wonderful Netflix series, but now we’re getting a movie about her from Josephine Decker. In Shirley, a young couple move in with Shirley Jackson (Elisabeth Moss) and her husband and find themselves thrust into a psycho-drama that inspires Shirley’s next book.

Zola

Janicza Bravo’s movie Zola is a new kind of road movie. The movie follows a waitress named Zola (Taylour Paige) who embarks on a road trip with a stripper named Stefani (Riley Keough). The road trip soon takes a wild turn involving prostitution and even murder. Sounds crazy right? Well, it’s actually based on a true story. Truth is often stranger than fiction. Zola was acquired by Sony Pictures Worldwide.