Associated Press video journalist Mstyslav Chernov had just broken out of Mariupol after covering the first 20 days of the Russian invasion of the Ukrainian city and was feeling guilty about leaving. He and his colleagues, photographer Evgeniy Maloletka and producer Vasilisa Stepanenko, had been the last journalists there, sending crucial dispatches from a city under a full-scale assault.

The day after, a theater with hundreds of people sheltering inside was bombed and he knew no one was there to document it. That’s when Chernov decided he wanted to do something bigger. He’d filmed some 30 hours of footage over his days in Mariupol. But poor and sometimes no internet connections made it extremely difficult to export anything. All told, he estimates only about 40 minutes of that successfully made it out to the world.

“Those shots which went out were very important. They went on the AP and then to thousands of news outlets,” Chernov said. “However, I had much more. … I thought I should do something more. I should do something more with that 30 hours of footage to tell a bigger story and more context to show the audience of the scale.”

Chernov decided then that he wanted to make a documentary. That film, “20 Days in Mariupol,” a joint project between The Associated Press and PBS “Frontline,” premiered Friday at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, where it is playing in competition.

There were, he knew, many ways to tell this story. But he decided early on to keep it contained to those harrowing first 20 days that he and his colleagues were on the ground, to evoke the claustrophobic feeling of being trapped. He also chose to narrate it himself and tell the story as a journalist would.

“It’s just a lens through which we see the stories of Mariupol’s residents, the death, their suffering the destruction of their homes,” he said. “At the same time, I felt that I can do it. I’m allowed to do it because I’m part of the community. I was born in eastern Ukraine and (a) photographer who worked with me was born in the city which is right next to Maruipol, which got occupied. So this is our story too.”

As an AP employee, Chernov was extremely aware of maintaining neutrality and being unbiased.

“It’s OK to tell the audiences about your emotions,” he said. “It’s just important to not let those emotions dictate what you show and don’t show …. While narrated by me, I still tried to keep it fair.”

He encounters quite a few different reactions to him and his colleagues being on the ground. Some thanked them for doing their jobs. Some called them prostitutes. Some doctors urged them to film graphic scenes of injured and dead children to show the world what had been done.

After Chernov left Mariupol and was finally able to catch up with the news reports around the world, he was stunned by the effect their footage seemed to have had. They followed up with people they’d met during their time there, some of whom got out, some who didn’t, and asked whether or not they’d affected their lives.

Some said relatives had found them because of the footage, or that they’d been able to get help. Doctors and officials said it made it easier to negotiate the green corridor to safety.

“I don’t know how much of that is our footage, how much of that is just what happens,” Chernov said. “But I really would like to believe that we did make a difference, because I guess that’s what journalism is about, to inform people so they make certain decisions.”

Another mission for him was to provide historical evidence for potential war crimes. Chernov is keenly aware that the war is not even history yet. It is a painful reality that is ongoing.

At Sundance he’s been able to watch the film, edited by “Frontline’s” Michelle Mizner, with an audience two times. The film got a standing ovation at the premiere. And a subsequent screening he met several audience members who said they were from Mariupol and that their relatives were escaping the sieged city at the same time he was. The theaters had counselors on standby in case anyone needed support.

“I hoped they will have emotional responses and they did. But at the same time to watch people crying, it’s hard,” he said. “When you place an audience for 90 minutes into this chaos and this mess and this violence, there is a risk of people getting too overwhelmed or even pushed back by the amount of this violence.

“You just really want to show how it really was,” he added. “That was the main challenge of making choices while assembling the film. How do you show the gravity but at the same time not push the audience away? … We had already two screenings and audience responses are very strong. People are crying, people are depressed and they express a wide range of feelings, from anger, to sadness, to grief. That is what I as a filmmaker intended to do. But at the same time, I realize that probably that’s not easy for everyone”

Now Chernov just wants to get back to work.

“I just want to go back,” he said. “After Sundance we will go back and go to the front line.”

Follow AP Film Writer Lindsey Bahr: www.twitter.com/ldbahr.

For a longer interview with Chernov about the film, watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kf0EnlPlv8

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Randall Park was a struggling actor when he first encountered Adrian Tomine’s graphic novel “Shortcomings” in 2007. The story focused on a twentysomething Japanese American man named Ben, who is trying to find himself in the Bay Area along with his girlfriend Miko and best friend Alice, who is a lesbian. They are all flawed, complex and figuring things out, sometimes inelegantly. Park was obsessed.

“I remember thinking, gosh this would make an amazing movie,” Park said in an interview. “And in my dreams it was like, ‘Oh I’d love to play Ben.’ ”

It would take about 15 years for “Shortcomings” to become a feature. By then Park had, in his words, aged out of the role. But he got a cooler gig out of it: Feature film director. “Shortcomings” had its world premiere Sunday at the Sundance Film Festival, where it is playing in competition, with Sherry Cola as Alice, Ally Maki as Miko and Justin H. Min as Ben.

“I love the overlap between me and Alice, the queerness, the Asianness and just like the loudness, the kind of recklessness almost, you know? The obnoxiousness and also the unapologetic ness,” Cola said Sunday in Park City, Utah. “Of course she’s flawed, she’s imperfect. But she kind of owns it, and she wants to do better for herself.”

Park had known Cola and Maki prior to casting the movie. Casting Ben was a bigger challenge, he said, because he is a difficult, sometimes unlikeable character.

“There’s are all the shiny things about him, the opinions and the tirades and and the snarky comments. But there has to be a deep vulnerability about him and a sadness and a humanity that people could identify with,” Park said. “We saw a lot of great actors, and a lot of those actors were my friends and people who I really wanted to work with. But Justin just gave the most interesting performance. There’s a very human quality about him that made him really watchable.”

For Min, it felt like a revelation to play a three-dimensional character with nuances and contradictions.

“It’s not a type of role that I’ve often seen for myself or got to play,” Min said. “It feels like for most of my career, they wanted us to play one thing. “

Park, who has directed episodes of “Fresh Off the Boat,” was influenced by some of Noah Baumbach’s films like “Frances Ha,” and Alexander Payne’s “Sideways” for “Shortcomings.”

“I always wanted to see a movie like that where Asian American characters are just kind of hanging out in diners, walking in the city and talking about complex things and going through, you know, life stuff,” Park said. “One of the reasons why (“Shorcomings”) resonated with me so much was because I saw a little bit of myself in all of the characters. It felt just so real to me.”

He also has a brief cameo in the film, as a waiter. But that was less a product of him wanting to be in the movie than the nature of an independent film made during COVID-19. For Min, getting to act against Park, and seeing him get Cola to break character and laugh, was one of the most fun days on set.

The film, which is up for acquisition at the festival, begins with Ben and Miko watching a film on the big screen that is a not-so-subtle reference to “Crazy Rich Asians.” Afterwards they get into a debate about its merits. Miko loves it. Ben, who considers himself a cinephile, doesn’t. And they discuss the idea of representation for representation’s sake.

“We were so excited to have that scene because we’ve all had those conversations,” Min said. “There are Asian-Americans who loved Crazy Rich Asians and a lot of Asian-Americans who hated it. But at the time when it came out, because it was such an important, significant moment for us, a lot of people who might not have vibed to it weren’t really able to talk about it openly.”

It also perfectly sets the stage for what’s to come in “Shortcomings,” as the characters grapple with their identities.

“It’s more of a symbolic thing versus a pointed reference,” Cola said. “It’s not just about that film. It’s about all the big films that have succeeded in the mainstream that have allowed us to tell this kind of story. Starting the movie with that kind of like big-picture thing and then going microscopically into this slice of life, opinionated dynamic I think is really fun.”

Park, who loves “Crazy Rich Asians,” empathizes with the burden to represent everybody.

“A movie like ours, it’s about the margins of the margins in some ways,” Park said. “It’s a complex community. Nothing is monolithic. We all have different opinions, different tastes and different ways of seeing the world. And I think that’s what excites me so much about this story is that there’s an authenticity to it and a specificity to it that makes it different.”

Follow AP Film Writer Lindsey Bahr: www.twitter.com/ldbahr.

Watch an extended interview with the “Shortcomings” cast here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2DlbdEsbKE

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Brooke Shields reveals that she was the victim of a sexual assault in a new documentary about her life that premiered Friday afternoon at the Sundance Film Festival. She doesn’t name the man who she said raped her, but she described the circumstances: It took place soon after she graduated college with someone she knew professionally and had met for dinner to discuss work. The assault happened when she went to his hotel room to call a cab.

“I didn’t fight that much. I just absolutely froze,” she says in the film. “I thought my one ‘no’ should have been enough.” Later, when she told her friend, security specialist Gavin de Becker, about what happened, he said, “That’s rape.” At the time she wasn’t ready to believe it.

It is just one of many revelations in “Pretty Baby,” a nuanced look at Shields’ life up until now including her rise to fame, her complicated relationship with her mother Teri Shields, who was an alcoholic, and how the media, from the entertainment industry to the journalists interviewing her, commodified her sexualization at a young age while shaming her at the same time. The film will be on Hulu later this year.

Directed by Lana Wilson, the documentary takes its name from Louis Malle’s 1978 film “Pretty Baby,” a drama about a young sex worker, played by an 11-year-old Shields, in New Orleans in 1917. In the film, written by Polly Platt, she kisses a 29-year-old Keith Carradine and also appears nude.

It wasn’t the first, nor would it be the last time she was sexualized by the media. At 15 she shot “Blue Lagoon,” then came “Endless Love.” Both had sex and nudity. And then there were those Calvin Klein denim ads. When she was 16 and a global star, a family friend and photographer tried to sell nude photos he took of her when she was only 9. Her mother sued. They went to court. The photographer won.

Shields, who has written two memoirs, has been approached about documentaries before and always said no. But now 57, with a kid going off to college, the encouragement of her friend Ali Wentworth and a generally good feeling about where she is in life after years of therapy, Shields felt the time was right.

As Wilson said, “She was ready to go there,” including speaking about her time at Princeton, her friendship with Michael Jackson, her turbulent relationship with Andre Agassi and the time her old “Endless Love” co-star Tom Cruise went on a publicity tour to criticize her use of antidepressants for post-partum depression. He’d later apologize.

Wilson was fresh off the Taylor Swift documentary “Miss Americana” when she got a call from her agent asking if she wanted to meet Shields about the potential project.

“I wasn’t certain at first because I had just come off another project about a celebrity,” Wilson said. “But I was curious at the same time.”

After the meeting, Shields handed her a hard drive. It was an archive of clips and interviews she’d done over decades that her mother had assembled. There was over 1,000 hours of material, organized by year. Wilson started opening up random files: There’s Shields at the Reagan White House, there she is dancing with 12 poodles on “Circus of the Stars,” or in a prairie dress singing about loving men. Then she got to the “Pretty Baby” press tour.

“She’s sitting there with a series of male talk show hosts being complimented on her beauty and her body and her sensuality, but at the same time being criticized for being an exhibitionist, for going too far, for appearing in what some said was child pornography,” Wilson said. “I started to think about Brooke at age 12 in that situation and about how all girls start to form their own identity. How can you form your identity in a society that defines you exclusively by your status as a sexual object? It’s something a lot of women and girls navigate privately and Brooke was having to do it in public.”

The Associated Press does not typically name victims of sexual assault, unless they come forward publicly.

It’s a story that is neither new in Hollywood, nor is it ancient history. Wilson pointed to Shirley Temple, Jodie Foster, Penelope Cruz, Natalie Portman and Kirsten Dunst as some of the many examples of actors who were sexualized to various degrees in early roles.

One of Shields’ biggest concerns in starting the project was that her late mother would be vilified all over again. But Wilson saw something new in looking back, something she thought was worth exploring.

“It was way of distracting from these much bigger questions about the people who are actually in charge of the movies, of the ads, of the entertainment system,” Wilson said. “Teri became the scapegoat when much bigger questions should have been asked of the people who really had power and of everyone watching it.”

Wilson spent four very long days interviewing Shields for “Pretty Baby.”

“I’m very lucky she was game for it,” Wilson said.

“Pretty Baby,” she said, is not comprehensive by any means. There are things in the memoirs that aren’t in the film. But there is a cultural context that she helps craft in the film that is not in the memoirs. And, the throughline is Brooke’s journey to gaining agency, over her mind, her career, her identity.

Choosing to speak about the sexual assault and is just one part of that.

“She is so honest and candid about how hard she was on herself, about the experience, how she blamed herself in so many ways that I think are heartbreaking to hear, but also very relatable,” Wilson said. “It’s something she’s grappled with for a long time and is grappling with still. Getting a window into that experience that isn’t neatly resolved is powerful.”

Follow AP Film Writer Lindsey Bahr on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ldbahr.

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The fire emoji was a common sight in tweets about the new corporate thriller “Fair Play,” which debuted Friday at the Sundance Film Festival.

The movie follows two ambitious analysts at a cutthroat hedge fund, played by “Bridgerton’s” Phoebe Dynevor and “Solo’s” Alden Ehrenreich, who are also in a passionate and secret relationship. Several steamy scenes had some declaring the return of the erotic thriller.

Film historian Karina Longworth, whose podcast “You Must Remember This” recently delved into the erotic thriller moment of the 1980s, tweeted that “It does for the 2020s what ‘Fatal Attraction’ did for the late 80s.”

Chloe Domont, who wrote and directed the film, said she didn’t set out to make an erotic thriller, per se.

But “I did set out to make a thriller about gender power dynamics within a relationship that happens to be highly sexual,” Domont told The Associated Press on Saturday in Park City. “I think the execution of that intention ended up flipping the erotic thriller genre on its head.”

Dynevor, in only her second film role, said that when she read Domont’s script, she saw herself and a lot of women she knows in her character, Emily, who seems to be the sole female at the company. She’s made even more aware of this when she gets promoted over Ehrenreich’s Luke.

“How she navigates work life in a very male-dominated industry and how she navigates her relationship and, you know, in many ways has to make herself smaller in order to make other people feel comfortable, I could relate to that,” Dynevor said.

Ehrenreich’s character comes from a more privileged background than Emily. He’s Ivy League-educated and expects a certain amount of success. But he also rolls his eyes at the casual misogyny of his co-workers and, at least at first, is supportive of Emily’s ascent.

“I think he’s a little at a remove from the rest of the office. He’s not quite in that boy’s club,” Ehrenreich said.

“One of the things that I really liked about the movie that I think sometimes is lacking from stories that take on issues like this is understanding the background and the system and the culture that all of that is taking place in,” he continued. “It’s not on one individual being a good person or a bad person. We’re all highly influenced by our environment and the ambitions that we have within that environment.”

The film has already stirred up a gender debate among those who have seen it as Domont makes sure to never go the cliche route with her characters. Audience sympathies may even shift between Luke and Emily from scene to scene. Dynevor was firmly on Emily’s side in reading the script and during filming, but when she watched the finished product, something changed.

“I kind of saw it more as him and her being a culprit of the society and a victim of the society, as opposed to, like anyone was a baddie or a goodie,” she said.

“Fair Play,” which is up for acquisition at the festival, is Domont’s directorial debut on the large screen. But high-finance drama is not new for her: She’s helmed episodes of Showtime’s “Billions” too.

“My interest in that world starts from, you know, ‘Wall Street’ and ‘Working Girl’ and like those movies,” Domont said. “But for me it’s the stakes. You have high stakes, you have drama.”

“You make money one day, you lose money the next day. … You’re either living on a high high and you think you’re the (expletive), or the next day you think you’re a worthless piece of (expletive),” Domont added. “What that does to a person, the fluctuating between those highs and lows, I relate to that in the film industry. … I related to what that environment does to a person.”

Serbia plays New York in the film, which came together rather quickly, but the three key players made sure to carve out time to establish an authentic intimacy between Ehrenreich and Dynevor.

“We did a few days of rehearsal that I thought were really valuable, and it’s so rare you get to do that,” Ehrenreich said. “It makes such a huge, huge difference, especially in a movie like this, if two people have been together and so much of the movie is their relationship and the details of that.”

That involved improvisations of Emily’s first day at the office and the first time Luke tells her he loves her.

“It really felt like it really kind of locked something in,” Ehrenreich said. “That’s a magical thing that is worth fighting for on almost every movie, especially any movie that deals with, you know, a relationship of any kind.”

They also worked with an intimacy coordinator to stage the sex scenes.

“Chloe is such a phenomenal director and was always pushing us to go farther and farther, which was such a thrill as an actor,” Dynevor said. “And we both felt really safe to do so.”

The Sundance Film Festival runs through Jan. 29.

Follow AP Film Writer Lindsey Bahr on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ldbahr.

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Eileen, the title character of Ottessa Moshfegh’s debut novel, is a strange young woman with a vivid, sensual, and sometimes dangerous imagination.

Her actual life, however, is anything but: She works a mind-numbing desk job as a secretary at a boy’s prison in Massachusetts in 1964 and goes home to a depressed, cruel father who seems content to drink himself to death. She is hopelessly lonely and a little bitter — that is until the arrival of a glamourous new employee, Rebecca Saint John, a Hitchcock blonde with a doctorate from Harvard, a taste for martinis and a breezy Mae West confidence.

The moody, noirish film adaptation of “Eileen” debuted on Saturday at the Sundance Film Festival with New Zealand actor Thomasin McKenzie playing Eileen and Anne Hathaway taking on the role of the enigmatic Rebecca.

As Moshfegh said in an interview Saturday in Park City, “Rebecca sort of sweeps and carries Eileen and the viewer away into something that is really kind of sticky.”

Moshfegh helped adapt her novel for the screen. Before work even began on the script, she, her husband Luke Goebel and director William Oldroyd, behind the terrific “Lady Macbeth” with Florence Pugh, settled on an “eerily perfect shared vision” steeped in genre but subverted with a contemporary character lens.

Though she knew the story and the characters by heart, when she and Goebel began writing the script, suddenly new dimensions opened up in characters like Eileen’s father Jimmy, who is played by Shea Wigham. The actors then added their own dimensions.

“I knew that were it to be made into a film, it would attract great actors because they would love to play these roles,” Oldroyd said. “And I haven’t met an actor who is as emotionally available and honest as Thomasin.”

As Eileen, McKenzie had to do a lot of heavy lifting in translating the largely first-person novel into a performance that wasn’t aided by an inner monologue or exposition.

“It’s such a masterful first person in the novel. That’s what makes adaptations of novels so difficult. But she just has it in her face,” Goebel said. “There were a lot of great actors who auditioned for the part. But she just had the gravity of this character in her bones. It would be a hard call for me to say if there was anything lost between the novel and her expressions, which is incredible.”

McKenzie came in as a fan of Moshfegh, having already read “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” and then “Eileen” and empathized deeply with the character’s longing and loneliness. She dreams of a bigger life, the possibility of which seems to open up to her in the form of Rebecca.

“I was very, very lucky that I had the book available to me to work with,” said McKenzie. “Her writing goes so deeply into that and the character’s inner monologue. And that was just gold for me because it gave me so much material to work with to really understand what it was like being in Eileen’s head. I think I’ve always been a bit of a stiller actor and I’m trying to feel more comfortable to be a bit more fluid and a little bit bigger these days. But in this situation playing Eileen it really worked because she is such an observer and I think she’s a bit too scared to make any big movements.”

Hathaway, on the other hand, needed to go big to play Rebecca, whose name is a nod to Alfred Hitchcock’s adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s book. Moshfegh wanted her to be larger than life in the film, too.

“Rebecca to me represents someone, a woman who is undeniably brilliant, living during a moment in history where it’s quite dangerous to be a brilliant woman openly,” Hathaway said. “What we all kind of were going for was how would a brilliant woman both protect and empower herself in that time? That’s where a lot of the glamour comes in because she’s able to allow people to think what they want while keeping her private, fairly intense self, private.”

“For me, this is a film about triggers,” Hathaway added. “Throughout the course of the movie, that inner life balloons, it gets triggered and it comes out with some pretty extreme results.”

Due to COVID-19 protocols, Moshfegh and Goebel weren’t able to be on set during the filming, but they did get to tour Eileen’s house the day prior. It was a transportive experience.

“It was like walking into my imagination,” Moshfegh said.

“Eileen,” which is currently seeking a distributor, proved to be a bit of a freeing experience for all — for the actors to stretch and play, for Moshfegh to let go of the novel and let it be something else, for Oldroyd to have the freedom to make exactly what he wanted without intervention. It was, he said, true independence.

During a climactic scene, Hathaway even had an out-of-body experience.

“I had a moment where in from within the scene, I left my body and observed it as an audience member and went, I have never seen this movie before,” Hathaway said. “Like, this is something completely new.”

Follow AP Film Writer Lindsey Bahr on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ldbahr.

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A new documentary looks into the sexual misconduct allegations against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and raises questions about the depth of the FBI investigation in 2018.

“Justice,” from filmmaker Doug Liman, debuted Friday night at the Sundance Film Festival to a sold-out theater surrounded by armed guards.

The film, made under intense secrecy, focuses on allegations made by Kavanaugh’s Yale classmate Deborah Ramirez that were detailed in a New Yorker article in 2018. Ramirez alleged that at a gathering with friends when she was a freshman in 1983, Kavanaugh pulled down his pants and thrust his penis at her. Kavanaugh has denied those claims. “Justice” also plays a taped recording of a tip given to the FBI from another Yale classmate, Max Stier, that describes a similar incident that the FBI never investigated.

The Stier report was previously detailed in 2019 by New York Times reporters Robin Pogebrin and Kate Kelly as part of their book “The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation.” But the details of it came under scrutiny. After the story was posted online but before it was in the print edition, the Times revised the story to add that the book reported that the woman supposedly involved in the incident declined to be interviewed, and that her friends say she doesn’t recall the incident.

Stier was not directly interviewed for the film and declined the filmmakers’ request to comment on the contents. An unnamed person whose voice was manipulated for anonymity provided the Stier tape to the filmmakers.

Kavanaugh was sworn in as the 114th justice of the U.S. Supreme Court in October of 2018 after a narrow 50-48 roll call following a wrenching debate over sexual misconduct. He strenuously denied the allegations of Christine Blasey Ford, who says he sexually assaulted her when they were teens.

Many people referenced in the film, from Kavanaugh himself to several of Ramirez’s friends who were allegedly there, similarly declined to speak or never responded.

“Justice” is especially critical of the FBI investigation that took place after the hearings. Through FOIA requests the filmmakers found that there were some 4,500 tips sent to the tipline that went uninvestigated.

One of Ramirez’s friends from Yale who was interviewed for the film provided text messages in which a mutual friend admits to being contacted by “Kavanaugh’s people” and participated in the narrative that Ramirez didn’t remember things correctly.

Blasey Ford appears in new footage only in the first several moments of “Justice,” asking Liman, a filmmaker known for “Swingers” and “The Bourne Identity,” why he’s making this film — a question that he doesn’t quite answer.

In a Q&A after the film, Liman said he was simply outraged after watching her testimony in 2018. The making of the film, which they self-financed, was shrouded in secrecy. Everyone signed nondisclosure agreements, Liman said, and they even had code names for those who agreed to participate. He said that people are “terrified” and that those who came forward are “heroes.”

Most of the focus is on telling Ramirez’s story — where she came from, how she ended up at Yale and what kind of person she is and was. Several academics specializing in trauma, as well as lawyers, help explain why memory of traumatic events is reliably fractured and how those gaps can be weaponized by prosecutors.

“Justice’s” surprise inclusion in the festival was announced on Thursday, the first day of the festival, but it quickly became one of the most anticipated films in a slate of over 100. At least part of the reason for something like “Justice” to debut at Sundance is to drum up buzz and secure a distributor. As many of the lawyers in the film say, the stakes are whether or not Kavanaugh perjured himself under oath.

Asked what he wants to happen when audiences see “Justice,” Liman said, “I kind of feel like the job ends with the film and what happens afterwards in beyond my control.”

Standing beside him, his producer Amy Hardy said she disagreed. Hardy said she hopes it triggers outrage and leads to “a real investigation with subpoena powers.”

Follow AP Film Writer Lindsey Bahr: www.twitter.com/ldbahr.

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There is quite a bit of history between the team behind “Theater Camp,” a loving satire of musical theater kids and their teachers that premieres Saturday at the Sundance Film Festival.

Molly Gordon, Ben Platt, Noah Galvin and Nick Lieberman are all, first and foremost, theater kids themselves. They’re also longtime friends. Lieberman has been making things with Platt since they were in high school. Galvin and Gordon are best friends and did a play together about a decade ago. And Galvin and Platt are currently engaged.

It’s Platt and Gordon’s relationship that stretches back the furthest, though. Both children of parents in the entertainment industry, they’ve been friends since they were 3 years old.

“I was deeply in love with him,” Gordon laughed in a recent interview with her collaborators. “He came out to me and didn’t want to be with me, but I still tried for years,”

The ins and outs of all of their collaborations, musical workshops, web series, comedy videos and hours improvising would require a flow chart to process fully. But what it boils down to is when the four found each other, they didn’t want to let go.

About five years ago, they found themselves with a moment between projects and decided that they would finally do something together. So they “stole” some kids from Galvin’s old performing arts high school in Manhattan and put together a short film about a musical theater camp.

“It seemed like the most natural world for us to jump off the ledge into together as this comedy collective for the first time,” Platt said. “We all felt like it really suited us tonally and emotionally. It was exactly the kind of thing we wanted to make. (The short) was a quite a janky, very fast, very, very, very cheap, quick little moment. But it definitely set off an alarm in all of us.”

A few years would go by before they got the greenlight for the feature, helped by Picturestart and Topic Studios, as well as Jessica Elbaum, of Will Ferrell’s Gloria Sanchez Productions, who’d gotten to know Gordon and Galvin during “Booksmart.”

“I’m such a nerd, so I knew who Jessica was,” Gordon said. “We got lunch one day and she said ‘I feel like you want more than this. I feel like you want to write things.’ She’s done that to Noah too. She’s really good at spotting people who want more.”

“Theater Camp” is the feature debut for Gordon and Lieberman. They all wrote the screenplay, and everyone but Lieberman acts in the film. The premise is that a documentary crew has come to make a film about a crumbling but beloved upstate New York camp, AdirondACTS, run by Amy Sedaris’s character. In the first few minutes she has a seizure, and her son, a finance bro (Jimmy Tatro), steps in to try to run the camp. Gordon and Platt are camp teachers and former students, while Galvin is a techie with unsung talents.

“We don’t often give a voice to the tech people,” Galvin said.

Nearly all of the scenarios in the film are based on things that have happened to them or stories they’ve heard from friends.

“Theater is a world of people who are so absurd and in their own worlds. You can get away with them doing things that are ridiculous,” Lieberman said. “But you also want to find a way to ground it.”

“The Bear” breakout Ayo Edebiri plays a new hire, who tries to hide the fact that she has no experience teaching musical theater.

“We all have moments with teachers who are so formative and meaningful and also, like, wildly absurd,” Platt said.

Though all the 20-somethings have been in the business for most of their lives, making “Theater Camp” was still a baptism by fire in some ways. They only had 19 days to shoot, which they did this past summer at a defunct camp in upstate New York, and then had to feverishly edit the film to get a cut to Sundance in time for this year’s festival. This was made more complicated by the fact that “Theater Camp” was also largely improvised.

“There’s about 47 different versions of this movie. Some of them are bad, some of them are good,” Gordon said. “But, like, Christopher Guest edits for a year!”

Still the set was a joyous place and all took care to make sure it was a fun experience, especially for their young co-stars. Some of their favorite moments ever were at school performances and theater camps and they wanted to recreate that.

“It felt like being in a real theater program,” Gordon said. “Even if they messed up, that could be turned into a beautiful moment. I think everyone was scared when we were pitching this movie. How are the kids going to improvise? And they improvised around all of us. They were amazing.”

The truth and history in “Theater Camp” runs deep, from real footage of Platt and Gordon performing together as kids, up through some more dramatic elements in which the co-dependent friends have a fight.

“I just felt totally, completely free to be intense and unlikable and funny and weird and all of the things necessary in a way that I don’t think I’ve ever experienced,” Platt said. “We’ve all been part of things where the making of it just really didn’t live up to what the project was. And even if it came out beautifully, there was something either challenging or difficult about the making of it. The fact that people can look back on this experience separate from the product and be like, ‘this was so fun and I’m going to remember this positively’ is the best thing.”

For the moment, the “Theater Camp” team is just looking to get the movie out to audiences (it’s up for sale at the festival). And whatever happens, it’s an experience they’ll cherish.

“There will never be another quite like it,” Platt said.

Follow AP Film Writer Lindsey Bahr on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ldbahr.

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The Sundance Film Festival met the moment by going virtual for the past two years because of the coronavirus pandemic. But on Thursday, there was a palpable sense of relief from the festival’s leadership team at being in-person again.

Sundance Institute CEO Joana Vicente, director of programming Kim Yutani, senior programmer John Nein and incoming Sundance Film Festival director Eugene Hernandez gathered Thursday afternoon in Park City, Utah, to discuss what’s to come. Just outside, on a snowy Main Street, finishing touches were being put on storefronts and restaurants that sponsors have taken over for the week.

“It feels so good to be back in person,” Vicente said. “There’s nothing like the magic of being together in Park City.”

Yutani also announced the last-minute addition of “Justice,” a documentary from filmmaker Doug Liman about allegations against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, that will debut Friday.

“It was a powerful documentary that we felt was important to add,” Yutani said. “We saw it, like, yesterday.”

Eleven films have their world premieres Thursday night, including the documentary “Little Richard: I Am Everything” and the Frankenstein-inspired psychological horror “birth/rebirth,” about a morgue technician who reanimates a little girl. Also on Thursday, “Shayda,” about an Iranian mother and her 6-year-old daughter who go to a women’s shelter in Australia, “The Longest Goodbye,” a documentary about a NASA psychologist preparing Mars-bound astronauts for social isolation, the Daisy Ridley film “Sometimes I Think About Dying” and “Kim’s Video,” a documentary about a hunt for a lost video collection of 55,000 movies.

Programmers watched 16,000 films to determine this year’s slate of 111 films and say that there is something for everyone. Biographical documentaries, films about world issues and diasporic filmmaking are especially popular this year.

Nein said that he expects audiences to be buzzing about the performances of both known stars like Jonathan Majors, in “Magazine Dreams,” Cynthia Erivo, in “Drift,” and Eugenio Derbez in “Radical” and newcomers like Lío Mehiel in “Mutt” and Priya Kansara in “Polite Society.”

The Sundance Institute is also hosting a dinner Thursday night honoring filmmaker Luca Guadagnino, Ryan Coogler, Nikyatu Jusu and W. Kamau Bell. There will also be a fundraising component to support the Institute’s work. Vicente said that it has been a challenging few years for the Institute, financially.

Sundance is not just a festival, after all. The non-profit institute, founded by Robert Redford in 1981, provides year-round support to emerging filmmakers with labs, fellowships and mentorship.

“The festival is this amazing platform to celebrate and share with audiences,” Vicente said. “But really, as Robert Redford says, the engine, the most important work we do happens year-round.”

Filmmaker Sophie Barthes, whose film “The Pod Generation” is among the opening night selections, attributes her career to the Sundance Institute. Her first short film debuted at the festival almost 20 years ago, marking the beginning of a relationship that continues to this day. Over the years, she participated in the director’s lab, the composers’ lab and the writers’ lab. It’s also where she debuted her first feature, “Cold Souls,” with Paul Giamatti, in 2009.

“I wouldn’t be here without Sundance,” Barthes said in a recent interview. “They helped my career so much. I had like 50 advisers, the best of the best in the industry. It was like a film school on steroids. For filmmakers it’s the best thing that can happen to you because once you enter the family, they help and support you.”

Her film “The Pod Generation” is a futuristic satire about a New York couple (played by Emilia Clarke and Chiwetel Ejiofor) who use an “artificial womb” to get pregnant. She wanted to explore not-so-far-off advancements like artificial gestation and AI therapy and poke at ideas like detachment parenting.

“It’s a satire about the fact that we’ve lost so many of our instincts because of this modern life, we’re trying to reinvent the wheel and it becomes very comical,” Barthes said. “I think it’s very funny to explore the psychology of parents, especially in New York.”

She hopes the film raises a debate about our relationship to technology. It will also be part of the “beyond film” conversations taking place in Park City outside of the cinemas throughout the week. Subjects range from how to cross-over from television to film, with “Flight Attendant” director Susanna Fogel whose “Cat Person” is premiering at the festival, to representation, with Randall Park and Marlee Matlin. There will be conversations about making your first feature and even burnout, with Majors, food writer Ruth Reichl and graphic novelist Adrian Tomine. Many of the sponsors, from Acura to Adobe, are also hosting timely conversations as well about climate change in movies, reclaiming trans narratives, building inclusive productions and even getting into Sundance.

The festival has continued to evolve over the past few years. Though in-person was the priority, they also committed to a hybrid format. This year some 80 films will be available to watch online for ticketholders. The digital package, Vicente said, sold out very quickly.

“The last two years have been successful, but there’s nothing that can replace the in-person experience of watching films on the big screen,” Yutani said.

The Sundance Film Festival runs through Jan. 29.

Follow AP Film Writer Lindsey Bahr on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ldbahr.

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Randall Park made a pact with himself some years ago that he wouldn’t attend the Sundance Film Festival if he didn’t have a project there. But the “Fresh Off the Boat” star never imagined that his first time would be as a director and not as an actor.

His adaptation of “Shortcomings,” Adrian Tomine’s graphic novel about three young-ish Asian Americans finding themselves in the Bay Area, is among the films debuting in competition at the festival, which begins Thursday night.

“Sundance is the pinnacle to me,” Park said in a recent interview. “I still can’t believe we’re going.”

Park is just one of hundreds of filmmakers putting finishing touches on passion projects and making the sojourn to Park City this week, looking to make a splash at the first in-person edition of the storied independent film festival in two years.

Festivalgoers will see some unexpected turns from stars, like Jonathan Majors as an amateur bodybuilder in “Magazine Dreams,” Emilia Clarke as a futuristic parent in “Pod Generation,” Daisy Ridley as a cubicle worker in “Sometimes I Think About Dying” and Anne Hathaway as a glamorous counselor working at a youth prison in 1960s Massachusetts in “Eileen.”

“Bridgerton” star Phoebe Dynevor also breaks out of her corset leading the contemporary adult thriller “Fair Play” as an ambitious woman working at a high stakes hedge fund with a boyfriend played by Alden Ehrenreich. Sundance will be her first film festival ever and she’s especially excited that it’s with one of the best scripts she’s ever read.

“It’s quite a polarizing one,” Dynevor said. “I can’t wait to see how everyone responds to it.”

The slate of over 100 films premiering around the clock (from 8 a.m. to midnight) over 10 daysise as diverse as ever. There are three films about Iranian women (“The Persian Version,” “Joonam” and “Shayda”), stories about transgender sex workers (“The Stroll,” “KOKOMO CITY”), indigenous people (“Twice Colonoized,” “Bad Press”), women’s rights and sexuality (“The Disappearance of Shere Hite”) and the war in Ukraine (“20 Days in Mariupol,” a joint project between The Associated Press and PBS “Frontline.”)

And, as always, there are intimate portraits of famous faces, like Michael J. Fox, Little Richard, Stephen Curry, Judy Blume, the Indigo Girls and Brooke Shields.

Lana Wilson (“ Miss Americana ”) directed the much-anticipated Shields documentary “Pretty Baby,” in which Shields reflects on her experiences from child model to teen superstar and beyond, including her complex relationship with her mother, with Andre Agassi, and the time Tom Cruise publicly criticized her for taking antidepressants.

“I kept coming back to this idea of agency and of her slowly gaining agency first over her mind, then over her career and then over her identity,” Wilson said.

If the past two years have proved anything, it’s that Sundance doesn’t need its picturesque mountainside location to thrive. After all, it was at a virtual edition that the festival hosted the premiere of “ CODA,” which would become the first Sundance movie to win best picture at the Oscars. “Summer of Soul,” another virtual Sundance premiere, also won best documentary last year, and both are getting encore, in-person screenings this year.

But even so, the independent film community — from the newcomers to the veterans — has felt the lack of the real thing. There is, after all, a certain magic about seeing a new film from an unknown in the dead of winter at 7,000 feet elevation wondering, as the lights go down in a cinema overflowing with puffy coats, if you might just be among the first to witness the debut of the next Ryan Coogler or Kelly Reichardt.

The festival is embracing a different kind of hybrid approach after the success of previous years. Starting on Jan. 24, five days in, many of the films will be available to watch online for people who bought that now sold-out package.

With COVID-19 outbreaks still happening, some events and gatherings are requiring tests and proof of vaccination. People like Luis Miranda Jr., coming with a documentary he helped produce, “Going Varsity in Mariachi,” is planning to mask up while celebrating the movie.

“We’re bringing real mariachis to Utah and will have a party with real mariachi music,” Miranda said excitedly.

Some films already have distributors in place but many do not and onlookers are interested to see how those acquisitions play out. After several years of deep pocketed streaming services making big plays, the market may have stabilized. Streamers are more cautious and traditional studios have learned how to compete.

Producer Tommy Oliver, the CEO and founder of Confluential Films, has four movies at the festival up for sale: “Fancy Dance,” “Young. Wild. Free,” “To Live and Die and Live” and “Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project.” He knows as well as any that Sundance isn’t just a place for celebration and discovery, but for connections too.

His advice for any first timers is simple: “Talk to everyone. Talk to the people who haven’t made stuff yet. Talk to the people who are hustling,” he said. “And be patient, because you’re going to look up in five, 10 years and they’ll have made ‘Fruitvale Station,’ they’ll have made ‘Beale Street.’”

The Sundance Film Festival runs from Jan. 19 through the 29.

Follow AP Film Writer Lindsey Bahr on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ldbahr.

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