What to Watch: The Witches of Sundance Films for the Winter Solstice

By Layla Halfhill

It's December 21, which means that, for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, the Winter Solstice is upon us! This is the day when the North pole is at its furthest point away from the Sun, leading to the shortest day and longest night of the year. In Germanic culture, the Winter Solstice also correlates to Yule, a festival that has historically celebrated this day as one of paganistic significance and rebirth, thus making it an important date in the realm of wiccans and witches.

The idea of a witch - a woman with darkly supernatural powers - has been around since the early days of religion, embedded into folklore and religious texts, and having horrifying real-life implications for women who were hanged and burned at the stake for their pagan (read: non-Christian) ways. Stories through the ages have conjured up images of witches as both seductive temptresses and frightening hags, a dichotomy which nevertheless springs from a central core: the notion of female power as a threat to the patriarchy and thus to society as a whole.

Cinematically, this idea has manifested in films of all genres, from the hysterical witches of 1922's silent classic H xan, to the good and bad witches of The Wizard of Oz, through the fairy tale-inspired evil witches favored by Disney, to the more earthy witches of the folk horror heyday of the '60s and '70s, and up to a more recent folk horror revival of sorts.

In the modern sense, according to Merriam Webster, Being a witch in the world today can entail anything from being a practitioner of Wicca, a religion founded in the 20th century, to practicing any number of neo-pagan traditions. But for our purposes, the Winter Solstice seems the perfect time to celebrate and explore the mystique of witches and their role as a long-favored cinematic device that filmmakers and audiences alike can't seem to get enough of. Which brings us back to Sundance Institute and the Sundance Film Festival, which has featured its share of witch-centric films over the years, and where the role of the witch has served as both a device of terror and fantasy, and as a reclamation of female power against the patriarchy.

LINK:	https://www.sundance.org/blogs/what-to-watch-the-witches-of-sundance-f...
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