Insider's Diary: Sundance Film Festival: Day Four, My Final Day

The morning of my last day at Sundance Film Festival is more forgiving than the day prior. I wake up at a leisurely 7:45 AM (sleeping in here) and slowly make my way to the Stacked Sandwich Co near the festival’s headquarters. I sit down for a meal. It’s luxurious. I take the liberty to order a cortado instead of a black coffee. It’s delicious.

My first screening of the day is Jay Duplass’s See When I See You, the film’s premiere. It’s beautiful and heavy, centered on a family navigating the grief of losing a daughter and sister to suicide. It’s an intimate meditation on how we meet grief, how we live alongside it, and how we hold onto the right memories of the people we’ve loved and lost. Cooper Raiff was a standout—so authentic and grounded it feels less like watching a performance and more like being in a real conversation with a real human.

The film was music supervised by Danielle Soury, and I caught three APM tracks as the credits rolled up the screen.

In between that and my final screening, I was able to see Shira Rockowitz, Sundance’s Producing and Artist Support Director. She’s been our main point of contact with Sundance at APM and was the one who invited me to the Producers Celebration earlier that week. I was grateful that she found time during what must be the busiest time of year to sit down and catch up. She brimmed with pride as she discussed the incredible work and accomplishments of the artists that Sundance is supporting.

My final screening of the festival was The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist. The documentary examines the paradox of AI—its peril and its promise—through a deeply personal lens. The co-director, Daniel Roher, who narrates the film, is about to become a father, and his fear and hope for his child’s future frame the entire inquiry. It asks the same questions many of us are asking right now: what kind of world are we building, and who gets to shape it?

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Watch Bailey Rapidly Review The Films She Saw on This Day

The takeaway is clear: this conversation demands our attention. No matter who we are or where we live, it’s naïve to think AI won’t affect us. It poses real existential risks to our humanity, but it also opens the door to a future defined not by scarcity or violence, but by abundance, possibility, and radical shifts in how we live together. The editing was terrific, completely engrossing from start to finish.

After the Q&A, I grabbed a quick bite at High West, then—full circle—my phone finally gave out. For the first time all week, I headed back to the hotel early to decompress, closing out Sundance a little quieter than it began.