Think the Cultural Insanity is Over? Welcome to Sundance 2025
The elite film festival preaches the same old dogmas
When you want to have a laugh, which names and brands do you turn to?
I bet none of you said Harvard’s Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative.
It’s a brand, no doubt an impressive one in many circles. But it’s not exactly the Comedy Cellar.
Yet the RCPI apparently has an interest in standup comedy. The folks there have invited one comedian to Cambridge to develop material. No, it’s not Dave Chappelle, Whitney Cummings, Karith Foster, Surbhi, Sam Morril or my super sharp comedian brother Matt Balaker.
No, Harvard’s RCPI bestowed the honor to Noam Shuster Eliassi, who recently finished a stint at the United Nations, another organization not known for being funny— at least not on purpose. (Fidel Castro torturing the General Assembly audience for four and a half hours is unintentionally hilarious, especially since his speech was scheduled to be 15 minutes.)
Anyhow, Eliassi seems to build a lot of her act around the conflict in the Middle East. In fact, the progressive Israeli is the first Jewish comedian to perform at the 1001 Laughs Palestine Comedy Festival.
Well, now Harvard’s Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative can boast about what I’m guessing is another first—its comedian-in-residence headlines Coexistence, My Ass!, a documentary about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that premiered this week at the Sundance Film Festival.
The documentary says a lot about Sundance, one of the world’s most influential enforcers of the monoculture worldview. And for all I know the film probably isn’t the most monoculture offering in this year’s lineup. As I’ve noted before, Hollywood is less united on the latest Middle East conflict compared to other hot-button issues.
But those who insist The Maddening is behind us should inform Sundance, because the festival seems to be stuck in 2020.
The View from Park City
Sundance films tell a story: America is irredeemably racist, sexist, and transphobic. And also this — the world is headed for a climate catastrophe. (Perhaps the catastrophe’s inevitability is why film industry jet setters feel little pressure to stop hopscotching to chichi festivals around the world.)
The climate emergency dominates discussion of global problems, even though deaths from extreme weather have plummeted this century, and even though the climate obsession causes societies to overlook problems that kill many more poor people (for instance, tuberculosis, malaria, and poor maternal and newborn healthcare).
And not every offering is as strident as Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, which scored three standing-Os at its 2006 Sundance premiere. For instance, this year the drama Rebuilding represents what looks to be a rather low-key addition to the canon. Its director doesn’t preach fire and brimstone like Greta Thunberg. Instead, in NPR tones, he warns of an “uncertain, warming world.”
And that’s important.
Like most cultural forces, the festival’s influence comes from the aggregate impact of its films. Not every Sundance movie fervently affirms the monoculture dogmas, but they rarely contradict them.
One exception that helps prove the rule is 2010’s Waiting for Superman.
Related
It’s astounding that a documentary that criticizes teachers unions and calls for school choice would premiere at Sundance and win the audience award!
How could monoculture mandarins allow such a scandal?
It probably has a lot to do with Davis Guggenheim being a club member in good standing. After directing An Inconvenient Truth, which (of course) went on to win the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, Guggenheim had enough juice to mess with the monoculture, at least a little. Afterward, he quickly fell back in line and directed the Obama doc, The Road We’ve Traveled.
But wait!
What do I spy but a Sundance doc that confronts censorship, one of the defining themes of The Maddening!
Maybe I was too hasty in my judgement.
Maybe Sundance is joining with so many of us who yearn to turn away from the cowardice and conformity that has defined the past decade.
Sundance Stands Against Censorship?
Let’s see how Sundance describes The Librarians:
Across the U.S., sweeping book bans target stories addressing race and LGBTQ+ issues. [Director Kim A.] Snyder immerses us in this escalating conflict, capturing heated community meetings that lay bare the arguments for censorship.
At the center of it all are the steadfast librarians, determined to protect children’s right to access books that educate, empower, and provide solace — despite facing harassment, threats, and even laws aimed at criminalizing their work. A cautionary tale and rallying cry, Snyder captures how these librarians transform their seemingly quiet profession into a bold stand for freedom.
Ah, I see, Sundance is against that kind of book ban.
In Sundance Land, censorship apparently refers to libraries that won’t let minors check out books that detail sex acts.
I wonder what the Sundance position is on mob censorship that has prevented adults from buying books such as When Harry Became Sally. What about the censorship that happens every day on college campuses? What about Big Government leaning on Big Tech to muzzle dissidents with “fact checks” that often turn out to be false?
What about the rampant intellectual intolerance in the film industry?
You’d think the denizens of Sundance Land had already frittered away their credibility on the topic of free speech culture. Just three years ago, Sundance denounced my friend Meg Smaker’s documentary. And Jihad Rehab wasn’t just any film, it was one that Sundance was set to premiere, one that had been praised by reviewers from lefty outlets such as The Guardian and Variety.
But Sundance allowed a mob to derail an excellent film, to expunge it from the elite festival as well as all the other festivals that follow its lead. Never mind that most of the outraged mobbers hadn’t even bothered to watch the film they decried.
Sundance Keeps on Sundancin’
Who knows how this cultural moment will shake out.
Maybe recent momentum will continue. Maybe we’ll soon enjoy a new era of intellectual openness. Maybe Harvard’s Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative will offer cushy gigs to problematic comedians.
I wouldn’t count on it.
The monoculture enjoys too many structural advantages, and its dogmas remain too deeply ingrained. Next year we should expect more of the same from Sundance and its cultural copycats—the same old dogmas masquerading as dissent.
The same old posturing. The same old groupthink.
Ted Balaker is a filmmaker, and former network newser and think tanker. His written work has appeared in many publications including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Reason, and The Washington Post.
His recent film work includes Little Pink House starring Catherine Keener and Jeanne Tripplehorn, Can We Take a Joke? featuring Gilbert Gottfried and Penn Jillette, and the new feature documentary based on the bestselling book, The Coddling of the American Mind, by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. Stream the very first “Substack Presents” feature documentary here on Substack or on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, and Google Play.
Ted and his wife and producing partner Courtney Moorehead Balaker are now making a narrative feature film based on Rob Henderson’s bestselling book Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class.
It's clear to me that there's at least one person on the inside at Sundance who wants to take more risks and screen films that don't don't fit neatly into the monoculture - he basically told me as much during their deliberations in October 2022 before Sundance ultimately passed on my film, which remains unreleased because 30 other festivals also passed on it after that - but it also really seems as though his hands must be tied by the culture and ideology that's captured Sundance (and the vast majority of the rest of the nonprofit institutional film world as well) over the past several years.
https://cinematimshel.substack.com/p/ideologically-out-of-line-and-insufficiently
The sense I get is that he wanted to pull things in a new direction after what happened with Jihad Rehab, but simply didn't have the power to do so as one programmer, even a veteran programmer.
Still, I'd love to be a fly on the wall at some NEA meetings right now. Beyond the artistic constriction, there's also clearly been a great deal of illegal discrimination taking place in the context of these nonprofit institutions in recent years, and, as weird as it is for me to find myself thanking the Trump administration, it really looks like the new executive orders about DEI are going to start pushing things back in the right direction again. Guess we'll see how things play out.
I forget who did the research, but someone determined that few books by political conservatives appear in school libraries. But books by political liberals flourish. Don't bet on finding either of the Bush's books, or Trump, or Ted Cruz, or Rand Paul. But try to find a school library that DOESN''T have books by both Obamas, Hilary, Joe Biden, etc.
You don't have to be mindless hypocrite to be a progressive, but it helps.