One day we awoke to the realization Sundance wasn’t everything. Your film shouldn’t need to be presented as a tidy sales package to make it into a festival. From the ashes of Sundance’s indie credentials, Slamdance was designed to solve a problem. And so it continues, having shoved off from Park City for LA, just as Sundance now faces imminent relocation from Park City to Boulder, Colorado, Slamdance once again provides us a salve of raw and curious indie picks, that you may not get to see anywhere else.

Clovers

Electoral college? Why are privileged college kids in charge, asks a woman in Clovers, as she watches the tense 2016 voting results roll in, as Hilary Clinton collects 46.17% of North Carolina’s vote, as does Donald Trump. In Asheboro, North Carolina, she cannot see past what’s around her — everyone she knows is in on Trump and so the rest is Fake News. In their household they talk of politics but also Meth — “the best thing ever but also the worst thing ever.” Clovers stays with the small community of Asheboro, circling the lives of some folks who work at and frequent a strip mall casino with a sweet virtual fish table and some slot machines around the wall. Over two years, both not much changes, and things are hard for the people in Asheboro, also known as “Zoo City,” as we see folks become destitute and down and out, as the systems around them atrophy, and tumultuous events surround them, like misinformed political instability and theft at gunpoint. Nothing much changes. That’s how they like it, or the only way they know, but the way things are, is how they will stay, in these liminal spaces of a Lost America.

Kings of Venice

“There’s going to be screaming. Crying. People are going to need psychological help… Let’s make Paddle Tennis Great Again,” goes the pitch to save paddle tennis round the Venice (California) boardwalk, as a fierce competition arises to crown who is the best at Tennis with Paddles — don’t call it Pickleball, the players of this sport are adversarial about that. When the Paddle Tennis community band together to create a competition for awareness and crown the King of Venice, a team of Pickleball players join and rise up the standings. What transpires is a contest not just of sport but of ideologies, in the fight to preserve a shrinking sport against the waves of an infringing, rising one.

House 4

House 4 examines youth detention centres and whether they have the desired effects on the rehabilitation of the youth. You can imagine that young imprisonment dramatically alters the outcomes for any kid. Generally, the assumption might be that it causes rises in recidivism rates. So, what impact does it have? House 4, at least, tracks what happens in the “youth prison,” and then sends them off into the world. We’d need to see what happens next, to really know if the program is working. But during their stint at the facility, we see some internal change, while also witnessing a system that does not exactly know what to do with these kids.