More Great Cinema from Sundance.
Ha-chan, Shake Your Booty!
U.S. Dramatic Competition, United States. In Japanese, English, Spanish
Rinko Kikuchi was the first Japanese actress to ever be nominated for an Oscar for Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel (2006)* and while she’s made many films in the last two decades, nothing prepared me for her extraordinary work in Josef Kubota Wladyka’s dazzling, inventive, exhilarating gem, Ha-chan, Shake Your Booty!, one of the best films at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, a Fest loaded with great works!
Kikuchi plays Haro (aka Ha-chan) a ballroom dancer, living in Tokyo with her beloved Mexican-born husband, Luis (a terrific Alejandro Edda). The couple enjoy competing together until one tragic day Luis dies, and Haro is left to mourn this heartbreaking loss. Her sisters Yuki (Yoh Yoshida) and Hiromi (YOU, stealing all her scenes) are on hand to help Haro get on with her life—but mostly cause mayhem. Yet Haro is haunted by Luis (in quite the fascinating way) and still in mourning.
Haro also manifests a daydream world many can relate to. She often experiences her life via song and dance numbers. (If you’ve ever daydreamed to musical numbers as a way of escaping reality and allowing your dreams to come true in song and/or dance you will relate, trust me!)
When Haro meets the handsome, super sexy dance instructor, Fedir (handsome, super sexy Alberto Guerra) she embarks on an affair with him, but Luis is always there as well—which makes for some hilarious and poignant moments.
This is Wladyka’s first feature film, and he manages to blend a host of genres into an absolutely captivating cinematic experience—one that examines the grieving process in a most original manner.
There are so many standout scenes. One of my favorites has Haro and Fedir chatting outside as one of a group of drunk Asian businessmen disrespectfully bumps into her. When Fedir demands that the rude man apologize, he scoffs and a fight ensues—which leads Haro to envision a fisticuffs dance number set to a multi-lingual version of “Be My Baby.” It’s inspired absurdity!
Kikuchi radiates charm, sadness, joy, sensitivity, whimsy, audacity and a joie de vivre, often all together within the span of a few seconds, its sheer enchantment to experience. Her performance is destined to be one of the most outstanding of 2026.
The film’s message: no matter how lousy and fucked-up life can get, you will survive and triumph if you keep on moving forward and dancing! Not a bad outlook to have in today’s troubling times!
Wladyka was awarded the Directing prize in the US Dramatic category.
The film has been acquired by Sony Pictures Classics.
*Miyoshi Umeki, who won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Sayonara (1957), was born in Japan but became an American citizen prior to her win.
How to Divorce During the War
World Cinema Dramatic Competition, Lithuania/Luxembourg/Ireland/Czech Republic. In Lithuanian, English, Russian, Ukrainian
Writer-director Andrius Blaževičius compels his audience to wonder how much they might be willing to sacrifice for a good cause. Would we have enough empathy in a crisis situation? How would we feel about someone intruding on the comfortable groove we’ve cut for ourselves? Could we open our home to strangers?
Of course, these questions can only be asked by people who live well.
It’s 2022 and Vilnius (Marius Repšys), Marija (Žygimantė Elena Jakštaitė) and their young daughter Dovile (Amelija Adomaitytė) live very well. But Marija stuns Vilnius one day, sitting in parked car, by asking for a divorce and then tearing him to verbal shreds in an intense monologue exploding with pent-up rage and resentment. Vilnius feels blindsided and starts to strangle her. He stops, gets out of the car, returns, apologizes. They spar some more. The sequence plays like the famous, “I just want to smash your face in,” scene from Danny DeVito’s War of the Roses—only without the broad comedy, but with a searing satiric edge.
And that’s what makes How to Divorce During the War such a glorious, chilling and penetrating work. That satiric tone is there throughout, so the film is always one step removed from realism, allowing for a true analysis of the character of the characters.
Shortly into the dissolving of their marriage, the war in Ukraine begins, sending a dark, unsettling cloud over their lives and the lives of their family, friends and colleagues.
As opposed to other Western countries, these people spent decades occupied by the Soviet Union, so they experience the Russian invasion of Ukraine with great fear and trepidation. Many citizens of the Baltic countries of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia are afraid they might be next.
Blaževičius ingeniously shows just how the lives of these three people begin to crumble and how it, in particular, affects the daughter who begins to act out at school, beating a male Russian student, learning hate at an early age.
Vilnius, an art house filmmaker who can’t seem to write anything new, moves in with his parents but cannot stomach their watching Russian propaganda on TV. His father holds the beliefs of many older Lithuanians, “Better stay out of politics. You never know who might come into power in this country.” Vilnius also becomes involved in performance art protests against the war.
Marija, the breadwinner, embarks on a same-sex affair with a co-worker, then quits her lucrative job in protest over the company having a Russian branch they refuse to close. She also takes in a family of Ukrainian refugees who very quickly drive her crazy.
This often-hilarious, emotionally-charged film won the Sundance Directing Award in the World Cinema Dramatic Category.
New Europe Film Sales acquired the film’s international sales rights.
Hanging by a Wire
World Cinema Documentary Competition, United States/United Kingdom/Pakistan. In English, Urdu, Pashto
I’ve seen a quite a few documentaries at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, but only one fully grabbed a hold of me, beguiled me from beginning to end, and had me doing my own research afterwards, Mohammed Ali Naqvi’s totally engrossing chronicle of the miraculous story of the rescue of eight passengers—including six schoolboys — from a cable car in the Pakistani Himalayas, Hanging by a Wire.
Even if you know the outcome of this pressure-cooker story, it’s still one of the most suspenseful films you will experience. The director appears to be channeling some of the best disaster movies, like The Towering Inferno, in how he’s crafted his work to create the most edge-of-your-seat thrills possible.
He weaves actual footage recorded from the local townsfolk who were out there, terrified out of their minds videotaping on their phones with incredible drone footage shot by a vlogger that is astonishing and terrifying. In addition, he’s crafted cinematic recreations using the actual survivors as well as the rescuers, based on their accounts of what occurred. These are not those cheesy reenactments we too often see in docs.
In the early morning of August 22, 2023, a group of young men, most of them teens enroute to school, boarded a ramshackle cable car (as they did every morning) to cross a vast mountain pass over the Himalayan foothills of northern Pakistan. Then, unexpectedly, two of the three cable car’s wires snapped, turning it upside down and leaving the eight passengers dangling above a 900-foot ravine. What happened next is legend. Thanks to the villagers posting on social media, the story was picked up by a local journalist. And because of the drone footage, it went viral, leading to international press coverage. This gave the fraught situation an urgency it may not have had—basically, it’s surmised by some interviewed that the local authorities may not have paid any attention to it, leaving the boys to die.
Naqvi managed to have sit downs with all the major players involved, some who are now seen as local heroes. He, also, delves into the politics of what was going on, including some class biases that are fascinating…and angering.
All doc filmmaking is manipulated. Here, at least, it’s done by using the actual people involved and subverting Hollywood tropes. It’s a thrill ride, but also a hopeful story of the good that can come when people do whatever it takes to save lives.
Hot Water
U.S. Dramatic Competition, United States. In English, Arabic, French.
As mother-son road trip movies go, Hot Water is one of the best. Wait? How many mother-son road trip movies can you name? I can only think of The Guilt Trip and that was a looney comedy with Seth Rogan and Barbra Streisand — very different from Ramzi Bashour’s lovely, lyrical debut feature which explores the relationship between Layla (Lubna Azabal), a Lebanese professor at an Indiana University and her troubled son, Daniel (Daniel Zolghadri).
After Daniel is expelled from high school for hitting another student with a hockey stick, the only way to assure his getting a diploma is to have him go live with his estranged father in Santa Cruz, California. So, the two embark on a road trip where they begin to understand each other more, which isn’t to say they don’t fight along the way and have some strange encounters. But Bashour makes sure the humanity is always explored, even in the most outrageous or unconventional situations like when they encounter a super smelly hitchhiker and must get him out of the car or suffocate!
The casting of the two leads is perfect. You instantly believe they are related—they are both hot-headed and have the same irreverent sense of humor. He loves to talk to himself in the mirror, admiring his own reflection. She loves to scream when she’s exasperated.
Azabal, so memorable in the Oscar-nominated Incendies and more recently, The Blue Caftan, gives us one tough but conflicted mother, who fiercely loves her child but also misses her family back in Beirut.
The charismatic Zolghadri, who has made good impressions in supporting roles recently (Lurker, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You), proves he’s ready for lead parts.
One particularly wonderful sequence involves the fabulous Dale Dickey playing a hippie nudist. Dickey dives into all her scenes with aplomb. And her character’s insistence that people need eight hugs a day, is rendered so lovingly. The actress etches such a vivid portrait in just a few brief scenes, it made me long for an entire film devoted to her character.
The final reel (old school terminology, so sue me) finds dad living an unusual lifestyle, and, although I was fine with the ending, I felt much more cinema-satisfied when it was just mother and son, on the road sparring or stopping off at a diner where she impatiently waited for him to finish his meal. “I love diners. Best thing in America,” he exclaimed. I couldn’t agree more.
The Huntress (La Cazadora)
World Cinema Dramatic Competition, Mexico/United States. In Spanish.
The Huntress (La Cazadora) could have easily been just another revenge tale, but in the hands of writer-director Suzanne Andrews Correa, it becomes a compelling portrait of fearless women who come together to force change in the dangerous and misogynistic border town of Juárez, Mexico.
Inspired by true events, it’s also the tale of Luz (Emilia Pérez’s mostly unsung Adriana Paz), a woman driven to taking extreme measures in order to keep her daughter safe because, as another desperate character, Ximena (Teresa Sánchez), tells a twisted police chief, “The most dangerous creature is a mother with nothing left to lose.” Amen, sister!
In this provocative, too-true horror movie, set in 2013, women are raped, murdered and disappeared with the local authorities doing nothing about it. Sometimes they are actually the perpetrators themselves. Luz, a tech factory worker, haunted by her own past trauma, decides to take matters into her own hands.
Correa uses fantastical images to show us the pain and confusion Luz feels as she relives past moments and foresees future atrocities—if no one stops these men.
Paz grounds the film. Her Luz is not a female Eastwood, Bronson or Neeson. She’s disturbed by what she must do, sickened, but she also knows she doesn’t have much choice.
Sánchez’s Ximena is more of a strong and bold figure. She knows her daughter is dead, so she truly doesn’t have much more to lose.
More to come…
