The best 2023 Sundance Film Festival offerings by Brooklyn-based creators

By Joshua Encinias

The Sundance Film Festival — the annual gathering of the best in indie movies, shorts, limited series and documentaries — is serving up fresh work this week from, among other folks, a lot of Brooklyn-based creatives. Thankfully for us, the programming is available to stream online in addition to in-person screenings in Park City, Utah. So if elevation sickness gets you down, you won’t even have to leave your couch to see the best from the borough this week.

One of the best projects at this year’s fest is “Chanshi,” a new comedy series with the flavor of Lena Dunham’s “Girls,” but set among Jewish friends in Israel (and without Lena Dunham). Chanshi is played by ex-pat Brooklynite Aleeza Chanowitz, and the series draws heavily from her own experience leaving her Orthodox family behind for a different taste of freedom in the Holy Land. In the show, Chanshi quickly makes the decision to “Aliyah in Israel” (move to Israel), and in the process makes a bold assertion of her sexual identity. But her family in Brooklyn won’t give up on her without a fight (Henry Winkler co-stars as Chanshi’s father).

That’s just one of Brooklyn-based offerings at this year’s Sundance. Tickets are $20 per movie or TV show, and they’re available to stream on Sundance’s website from January 24 to 29. The festival has apps for the major TV services like Apple TV, Roku, and Fire TV (and in our experience, the Fire TV app works the best of all).

Here’s what else to check out, wherever you are:

Chanshi
Director(s): Mickey Triest, Aaron Geva
Based partially on the experience of actress Aleeza Chanowitz, who left her Brooklyn community as a young woman for a new life in Israel, Chanowitz plays Chansi, who, like other young women from her observant Jewish community in Brooklyn, is on the right track. Engaged to a great guy she barely knows, she will play the part of the good wife and birth at least six of his children — if all goes according to plan. Which, of course, it doesn’t. Unlike her peers, Chanshi harbors a fantasy that good religious girls like her shouldn’t: She wants to have a lot of sex — not with her future husband, but with Israeli soldiers. Once there, Chanshi abandons her inhibitions to become the free, adventurous woman she was born to be.

Victim/Suspect
Director: Nancy Schwartzman
Brooklyn-based Motto Pictures co-produced this documentary about Rae de Leon, a reporter working at The Center for Investigative Reporting, who discovers a surprising number of legal cases nationwide that involve women reporting sexual assault to the police, only to be accused of fabricating their allegations. These women are then charged with crimes, sometimes facing years in prison. “Victim/Suspect” follows de Leon as she gathers firsthand accounts from numerous young women and their families, as she interviews police and legal experts. At the same time, de Leon re-examines elements of the initial police investigations, unearthing telling recordings of police interviews of women reporting their sexual assault.

Mutt
Director: Vuk Lungulov-Klotz
Vuk Lungulov-Klotz is a director from Brooklyn and they filmed 85 percent of “Mutt” around the borough. The movie also co-stars Cole Doman, one of our 50 Most Fascinating People of 2022. Feña (Lío Mehiel), a young trans guy trying to get through life in New York City — one single, incessantly challenging day in New York — that resurrects ghosts from his past. Feña is tasked with settling the disruptions in relationships with his family, friends, and lovers in this emotional drama that overlaps past, present, and future.

Invisible Beauty
Director(s): Bethann Hardison, Frédéric Tcheng
Bethann Hardison co-directs this documentary about her life as model-turned-activist with French filmmaker Frédéric Tcheng, who lives in Bed-Stuy. Hardison fondly refers to Bed-Stuy by its full name and what it was called when she was growing up in the neighborhood: Bedford-Stuyvesant. In “Invisible Beauty,” the co-directors trace Hardison’s impact on fashion from runway shows in New York and Paris in the 1970s to roundtables about lack of racial diversity in the early 2000s. Hardison’s audaciousness and candor are inspiring and inviting.

My Animal
Director: Jacqueline Castel
Director Jacqueline Castel brings a new energetic, luscious, and romantic approach to the family drama in “My Animal.” Beneath the surface of a harrowing family saga, a steamy teen romance, and a classic monster tale, Castel bolsters this genre gem with a tactile and emotional excavation of otherness. The director and the movie’s two lead actors Bobbi Salvör Menuez and Amandla Stenberg live in Brooklyn. Re-shoots were completed in Brooklyn at Castel’s studio last summer with a crew of Brooklynites.