A conflicted mood has lingered over Utah’s long-running film festival with premieres and parties continuing but stars speaking out against government cruelty
The news began to spread through the Sundance film festival on Saturday morning, as people emerged from early screenings or long nights out at the bars on Main Street.
“If you all have not heard what’s going on in Minnesota this morning, someone else was murdered by ICE,” director Ava DuVernay told the audience at a panel on freedom of expression, referring to the shooting that morning of Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, by Immigration and Customs Enforcements (ICE) agents in Minneapolis.
By afternoon, many attendees of the independent film festival in Park City, Utah, had seen the footage of Pretti’s murder, the contradictory statements from federal officials and the protests sweeping Minneapolis, the midwestern city roiled by the Trump administration’s deployment of 3,000 federal agents as part of its crackdown on immigration. Some had seen the tweet from Florida congressman Maxwell Alejandro Frost, the first Afro-Cuban and first gen Zer to be elected to Congress, revealing that he was the person punched in the face on Friday evening at a Main Street industry party, by a white man who said Donald Trump would deport him.
