While the people of Earth await a vaccine or other lasting solution to the ongoing coronavirus crisis, we’ve been left with no choice but to contrive novel methods by which we might continue onward with the things that made life worth living back in the before-times. Sundance London, the offshoot bringing the choice cuts from the sprawling American film festival across the Atlantic, was scheduled to take place in its usual springtime slot, but inclement circumstances forced an indefinite postponement.

The postponement may now be upgraded to “definite,” as Sundance London has issued a press release announcing a virtual edition of the 2020 festivities, with a few films set for their UK premiere. For a truncated three-day run, the programme will stream online to a wider audience than ever, bringing the screenings and special events that would have otherwise transpired in person.

Three features will be made available to those with a £20 festival pass: the first will be Uncle Frank, Alan Ball’s road picture about a gay man (Paul Bettany) in the ’70s coming to terms with his own past, the second will be Luxor, an Egypt-set romance from Zeina Durra, and the final film will be Boys State, a documentary chronicling one thousand teens’ effort to build a representative government from the ground up.

The festival will also corral five directors for a group discussion about their work that swept the original Sundance back in January, though the movies in question will not be on display for patrons. The chat will include Janicza Bravo (director of Zola), Emerald Fennel (director of Promising Young Woman), Romola Garai (director of Amulet), Justin Simien (director of Bad Hair), and Julie Taymor (director of The Glorias). In the free-to-stream panel, they’ll get into the vicissitudes of the independent sector, and where this cataclysmic event will leave them and their to-be-released films.

Pass holders will also have access to a panel discussion on inside-baseball industry matters with executive from Film4 and NEON, as well as a programme of eight short films. (The offerings include an animated fantasy about a beautiful large slug, and a dark vision of violent uprising by a school’s a cappella club against their bullies.) In terms of sheer size, Sundance London 2020 may be scaling back, but what they’ve got still has the same international heft as their programming from years past.

Sundance London take place 7-9 August, 2020. For more info visit picturehouses.com/sundance

Bringing the spirit of Park City, Utah to London, England is no small feat, but the kind folks at Sundance Film Festival have been attempting it for the past few years, bringing a selection of the best films from their January extravaganza across the pond for a series of exclusive previews and events. This year sees new work by established filmmakers including Lauren Greenfield, Debra Granik and Desiree Akhavan premier to British audiences, as well as the directorial debuts of Idris Elba and Bo Burnham.

Burnham, best known as a stand-up comedian, is responsible for Eighth Grade – an illuminating and exceptional portrait of teendom, propelled by a magnificent lead performance from young actor Elsie Fisher. Set during the final week of middle school for awkward teenage outsider Kayla, it’s a truly warm and compassionate look at the fragile and fleeting nature of youth, capturing what it’s like to be young in 2018, but also, more universally, writing large the universal excruciating nature of being young and feeling everything and nothing all at once.

Elsewhere (and not technically a Sundance film, but a TIFF favourite) Paul Schrader’s much-lauded comeback First Reformed received a special presentation ahead of its July 17 UK release. Starring Ethan Hawke in a career-best performance as a pious preacher who experiences a crisis of faith after attempting to aid a young member of his congregation, it’s a cinematic confessional booth – one in which “nothing can change, and there is no hope”. Bleak? Perhaps. An incredible insight into the death of America? Undoubtedly.

There’s no hope either in Ari Aster’s chilling debut Hereditary, which shows Toni Collette unravelling following a death in the family. A masterclass in reinventing genre cinema, Aster’s remarkable debut is likely to terrify, delight (and probably offend) audiences in equal measure, but most notably examines the uncomfortable notion of what we pass onto future generations, and how we try to be better than our own parents. It lands in UK cinemas on June 15 –incidentally, you can read our review and interview with Collette in LWLies 75.

Finally, keep an eye out for Desiree Akhavan’s assured second film, The Miseducation of Cameron Post. Set in 1993, the film follows an all-American teenager (played by a pitch-perfect Chloe Mortez) who is shipped off to a Christian conversation camp after being caught with another girl on Homecoming night. Exploring the same fragility of being young and in love as Eighth Grade as well as the religious fallibility more brutally examined in First Reformed, it’s a quiet, poetic look at understanding, identity, and the strength found in creating your own family.

Sundance London runs June 1-3 at Picturehouse Central. For tickets and info visit picturehouses.com

At the beginning of The Tale, Laura Dern’s voiceover informs the viewer that, “The story you are about to see is true, as far as I know.” An exercise in remembering, misremembering and trying to make order out of chaos, Jennifer Fox’s debut narrative feature is based in fact – the story of the sexual abuse she experienced as a child. “You know, I always saw this story as fiction,” Fox told LWLies ahead of the film’s UK premiere at Sundance London. “There is no evidence, there’s no one who would speak. If I had taken my camera around on the journey you see in the film, who would talk? Nobody. Also, it’s really a film about the mind, and construction of self, and so how do you show that in a documentary? How do you show the past?”

In fictionalising her memories, the role of Jennifer is split between Dern, who plays her at 48-years-old, a successful documentarian with a loving fiancé, and Isabelle Nélisse as her 13-year-old incarnation, a quiet and delicate child who feels invisible at home as one of five children. After spending a magical summer at a riding school under the tutelage of Mrs G (Elizabeth Debicki) and her lover Bill Allen (Jason Ritter), she becomes close to the couple. What starts as a seemingly innocent relationship – whereby the teenage Jennifer gets the attention and parental figures she’s always craved – soon becomes insidious, while the adult Jennifer attempts to uncover the true nature of her connection to those she was so close to in her childhood.

The Tale has already been heralded as ‘the mother of all #MeToo movies’, but to categorise it solely as a film about abuse would be remiss. First and foremost, this is a story about the fallibility of memory, and how we frame and reframe events within our own minds. Early in the film, the elder Jennifer misremembers how young she appeared at 13 years old, envisioning a teenager where there was actually a child. Confronted with photographs she is startled by the realisation that the image she built of herself – that of a worldly young woman – was not so in reality. Fox’s manipulation of the camera mimics the malleability of her memories – as her age changes, so do her clothes, her words, the weather. “When I was a child I was obsessed with changing myself,” the adult Jennifer says. “Now I don’t even remember who I used to be.”

It provides a terrifying insight into how perpetrators of abuse not only legitimise their actions but justify them – time and time again, Bill tells Jennifer he’s doing her a favour by taking a sexual interest in her; he whispers, “Do you know how lucky you are?” highlighting the way in which abusers situate themselves within their victims’ lives, and how they are able to manipulate through reinforcing the notion of exclusivity and being special. “We don’t always consider the complexity of what a child feels,” Fox says of this troubling idea. “Not to take away that it’s abuse, but we don’t really allow that the child can feel love, and feel special, and feel grief at the loss of that adult figure.”

Fox urges understanding of victimhood, particularly in relation to children, and compassion when confronting the past. “I only used the word sexual abuse for the first time when I was 45,” she explains. “When I realised that that’s what happened to me and that it’s universal and that it happens to women all over, I also realised that the reason I could never say that to myself is because being a victim would have killed me more than the abuse itself.”

Owning one’s perceived victimhood highlights the need for women to tell their own stories, rather than serve solely as inspiration for male filmmakers – pertinent at present, as Ryan Murphy considers making a TV series based on the #MeToo movement. These stories belong to those that lived them. It’s vital we learn to listen.

The Tale premieres on Tuesday 5 June on Sky Atlantic at 10pm.

Returning to the UK capital for its fifth edition, the 2017 Sundance London Film Festival boasts an impressive programme of features and shorts mostly culled from its parent festival in Park City, Utah.

This year’s festival will open with the international premiere of Miguel Arteta’s Beatriz at Dinner, and will close four days later with the UK premiere of David Lowery’s A Ghost Story, starring Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara. In our first look review we describe the film as a “quietly haunting tale of loss and redemption”.

Lowery will be attending the festival to take part in a special ‘In Conversation’ event, where his acclaimed debut feature Ain’t Them Bodies Saints will also screen.

Elsewhere there’s UK premieres for Marianna Palka’s Bitch, Jeff Orlowski’s Chasing Coral, Craig Johnson’s Wilson, adapted from Daniel Clowes’ graphic novel, and for the first time festivalgoers will be treated to a Surprise Film.

Sundance Film Festival: London takes place 1-4 June at Picturehouse Central. Check out the full programme here.