Stars at Sundance Express Grief, Outrage at Minnesota Violence: ‘I Was Crying All Afternoon’ | Video
The Sundance Film Festival can be a bit of a bubble, where for decades, a year’s worth of independent movies would unspool sheltered from the outside world – but the 2026 version was different, as turmoil and deadly violence were unfolding several snowy states away in Minnesota.
“Yesterday, I was crying all afternoon,” director Petra Volpe told TheWrap on Sunday before screening her new film, “Frank & Louis,” about a friendship between two prison inmates. “You cannot normalize this and pretend it doesn’t happen. I think that we’re complicit if we do that.”
As filmmakers, distributors, media and movie buffs shuffled between screenings and parties being held for the last time in Park City, Utah – the festival is moving to Boulder, Colorado next year – the nation was reeling from a second deadly shooting in Minneapolis by federal ICE agents in a clash with protesters.
On Saturday, with Sundance-goers just settling in for more than a week of festivities, 37-year-old registered nurse Andrew Pretti was killed in a scuffle with federal agents in Minneapolis, just over three weeks after the killing of Renee Good.
The deaths of U.S. citizens protesting cast a shadow over Park City.
Natalie Portman and Olivia Wilde wore pins that read “Ice Out” at the premieres of their films. The dampened mood found its way to screening Q&As and interviews as filmmakers processed the news of yet another shooting death at the hands of federal authorities enforcing the Trump administration’s forceful immigration sweeps in Minnesota and elsewhere.
“I just wanted to take a moment to acknowledge everything that’s happening in Minnesota,” writer/director Kogonada said Saturday night while introducing his new film “Zi,” drawing a raucous round of applause.
“It feels so important to be back here for me at this moment, and I just feel so grateful and honored,” he told the crowd. “I’m a believer in what [the late Roger] Ebert says, that cinema is an empathizing machine, and in the darkest time, you hope that art doesn’t feel indulgent, but that deepens our feeling of the sense of humanity. And so I just feel like more than ever, it feels important to do that and to counter what’s happening around the world and create empathy – which we really desperately need.”
In a sit-down interview with TheWrap, Kogonada expanded on the idea that the gravity of violence and political conflict freshly circling – and so close to home – forces a reckoning with what it means to be a filmmaker in 2026.
“It is always, you know, a question about art in the face of tragedy, art in the face of turmoil, political turmoil, that you really have to question what you’re making, why you’re making it, and if it has validity, and often it’s that doesn’t have to be directly political, like a film doesn’t have to be directly political to be legitimate in a time of unrest, but it has to be something, right?,” Kogonada told TheWrap. “And maybe it’s distracting, maybe it’s like for escape, but you have to as, I think, as an artist, really question, what are you making? Why are you making it?”
“Because, you know, we are all human beings in this world, and if you’re making art, you somehow need to feed the experience of what it means to be human,” he continued. “So that’s what I was feeling. Because it’s very hard to present a film. It’s very hard to do a bunch of interviews, when we have things like that are happening.”
Jenna Ortega, who is in Utah to premiere “The Gallerist,” agreed with that sentiment – that it’s tough to celebrate a film release at such a time as this.
“It’s incredibly terrifying and disappointing to see that our government hasn’t taken any real action or reprimanded the officers … It’s hard to be in a place like this, wearing elegant clothes and talking about movies, when something so horrible is happening right next to us,” she said.
Adam Chitwood and Casey Loving contributed reporting for this story.
The post Stars at Sundance Express Grief, Outrage at Minnesota Violence: ‘I Was Crying All Afternoon’ | Video appeared first on TheWrap.