This year’s edition of the Sundance Film Festival, the premier showcase for independent cinema, marked a major departure from festivals past. In a watershed moment for female cinéastes, half of the 16 films competing in the Sundance Dramatic Competition were directed by women.

But the biggest story at the festival, running from Jan. 17 to 27 in Park City, Utah, centered on the crossing of a far racier threshold. While Sundance has a history of playing host to kinky fare, ranging from X-rated documentary Inside Deep Throat to the pornographic short-film compilation Destricted, sex in its myriad forms has never been as prevalent as it was at the 2013 festival. And boy, oh boy, was there sex. From bondage porn to orgies, here is the cream of the lascivious crop.

BDSM
BDSM, for the uninitiated, is short for: bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, and sadomasochism. The racy practice is captured in two X-rated, James Franco–shepherded documentaries at this year’s festival. Kink, a documentary produced by Franco and directed by his pal Christina Voros, explores the BDSM website Kink.com and includes scene after scene of penetration footage. Meanwhile, Interior. Leather Bar., directed by Franco and Travis Matthews, re-creates the 40 lost minutes of leather-bound gay-sex scenes in William Friedkin’s 1980 cult classic, Cruising. Both films feature raw, unsimulated sex scenes and are not for the sheepish.
 

“Art is not a mirror to reflect the world, but a hammer with which to shape it.”

The documentary Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer opens with this quote by the futurist Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. It couldn’t be more fitting. Directed by Mike Lerner and Maxim Pozdorovkin, the film traces the history of the feminist punk-rock collective Pussy Riot. Formed in August 2011, on the day Vladimir Putin returned to Russian presidential politics, the group is comprised of 11 rotating female members who don colorful balaclavas and stage guerrilla-style protest performances in very public sites around their native Moscow and post videos of them to YouTube. The balaclavas are an ode to the punk group Guerrilla Girls, but also from the paintings of Kazimir Malevich, whose later Suprematist works are in colorful shapes. The ladies’ frenetic, lo-fi, riot grrrl punk anthems touch on feminism, gay rights, and anti-Putin obloquies. The chorus to their tune “Kill All Sexists” goes: KILL ALL SEXISTS! KILL ALL EXTREMISTS! KILL ALL PUTINITES!

On Feb. 21, 2012, five Pussy Riot members staged an unauthorized performance on the soleas of Cathedral of Christ the Savior, an Orthodox church in Moscow. The gig, which consisted of the women mock-praying and taking swipes at Putin, lasted all of 40 seconds before it was broken up by security officers. A music video of the performance was uploaded to YouTube with the title, “Punk Prayer—Mother of God, Chase Putin Away!"

In an early scene from Who Is Dayani Cristal?, I am sitting on a bus speaking with a man who is making his journey north to the border. He is older, a gardener by trade, and intends to cross into Texas. He is resigned to the fact that he may well get apprehended and deported, but he is also optimistic that whatever happens, he will make it to the “promised land.” He says that final part with a little irony.

This man is under no illusions about what he will go through to get there and what his life will be like on the other side. Yet his knowledge that this is the path toward a better life for himself and those he loves is the force that drives him. During this scene, you hear me say in the voice-over a line that came to me that day: “This is the oldest story, the very first book. The one that begins with an adventure. In it, we all play the main characters. We carry our hopes and virtues as our baggage ... while never forgetting what we left behind. Always longing for the place we came from.” This was the story I wanted to tell.

Right now across the Americas and around the world, we are discussing the issues of immigration and migration. We have come to view these issues as simply policy discussions, debates, and problems of globalization. But the urge to move, tied to the desire to survive, to prosper, and to seek a better future, has always existed. It is rooted in what makes us human. It is “the oldest story.”

Dakota Fanning and Elizabeth Olsen are no strangers to Sundance.

Fanning was the talk of the fest back in 2007, when her film Hounddog, which contained a rape scene featuring the then-12-year-old actress, premiered. She returned in 2010, starring as Cherie Currie in the underrated rock biopic The Runaways. Olsen, meanwhile, burst onto the scene in 2011, starring in Martha Marcy May Marlene, earning numerous critical accolades for playing a young woman indoctrinated into a cult, and the horror flick Silent House.

Despite their age difference—Olsen is 23; Fanning 18—the two are real-life pals, and both graduated from Campbell Hall School in North Hollywood, California. They’ve returned to Sundance in Very Good Girls. Marking the directorial debut of screenwriter Naomi Foner (also known as the mother of Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal), the film follows Lilly (Fanning) and Gerry (Olsen), two N.Y.C. teens who hope to lose their virginity during the last summer before they head off to college. Things get messy when they fall for the same guy—dreamy photographer David (Boyd Holbrook).

Fanning and Olsen sat down with The Daily Beast at a Fresh-hosted brunch during the Sundance Film Festival for a lively chat about their film, their real-life “crew,” first times, and more.

Live in the now. This is the modus vivendi of Sutter Keely (Miles Teller), a gregarious high-school senior whose infectious, life-of-the-party mentality offsets any shortcomings in the looks department. He is beloved by all and, when he’s holding court with his sexy girlfriend (Brie Larson), feels indestructible.

Sutter’s whole world comes crashing down when his partner-in-crime unexpectedly dumps him, sending the boozy teen on an all-night bender. He’s awakened the following morning—lying face down in a neighbor’s yard—by Aimee Finicky (Shailene Woodley), a bookish, sci-fi loving classmate whose name he can’t quite recall. Aimee is a breath of fresh, unsullied air for Sutter; someone who, instead of living in the moment without a care for the future, is working diligently to make her dreams become a reality.

The two soon bond over their overbearing mothers and nonexistent fathers—hers died a few years ago and his has long been out of the picture, and eventually fall for one another. Being with Aimee doesn’t make Miles feel invincible, but it makes him feel like a person of substance. She even convinces him to open up the communication lines with his long-lost father (Kyle Chandler), despite his mother’s (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and older sister’s (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) protestations.

Alex Gibney is, without question, the most prolific documentary filmmaker working today. And his diverse oeuvre has targeted everything from financial corruption, in the Oscar-nominated Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, to the Oscar-winning Taxi to the Dark Side, which examined U.S. war crimes abroad.

His latest subject is WikiLeaks, the controversial nonprofit publishing organization that, thanks to U.S. Army Pvt. Bradley Manning, released several caches of classified documents, including the Afghan War Diary, chronicling the war in Afghanistan; the Iraq War logs; and the U.S. State department diplomatic cables. The organization was created by Julian Assange—a suave, Australian ex-hacker who currently is seeking asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London in connection with an arrest warrant in Sweden related to a sexual-assault investigation. We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks follows the history of the organization, as well as its outspoken figurehead, Assange, and the troubled Army private who put them on the map.

Universal Pictures, under its Focus World banner, commissioned Gibney to make the documentary, and spent about a year and a half working on it. There also is a feature-film version dramatizing the WikiLeaks saga that began filming on Jan. 23. Distributed by Dreamworks, the film is directed by Bill Condon (Dreamgirls), and stars Benedict Cumberbatch (Sherlock) as Assange.

Linda Boreman spent only 17 days in the pornography business. She emerged a legend.

Her 1972 porn film Deep Throat, which featured her as Linda Lovelace performing the eponymous sex act in the film’s climactic scene, became the highest-grossing porno of all time. Deep Throat netted $600 million and was so mainstream it even scored a review in The New York Times. However, Lovelace entered the porn biz while under the control of her husband-manager, Chuck Traynor, whom she alleges coerced her into porn, got her hooked on drugs, and even pimped her out. She eventually split from Traynor, quit the porn biz, and became an anti-pornography and women’s-rights activist.

Lovelace, directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, stars the typically chaste Amanda Seyfried (Les Misérables) as the embattled starlet alongside Peter Sarsgaard as Traynor. Following its premiere at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, the Weinstein Co. immediately acquired the movie for a cool $3 million.

They were Oscar-winning documentarians, celebrity filmmakers, and some, just amateurs, and they were all given the same directive: create a film about innovation and keep it down to three minutes. So was the Focus Forward project born.

Touted with the tagline “Short Films, Big Ideas,” Focus Forward is an endeavor from short-film publisher Cinelan that’s backed by General Electric, with the goal of generating a series of brief documentaries about innovative ideas and people that are, quite simply, changing the world. Cinelan cofounding director Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me, The Greatest Movie Ever Sold) was a driving force behind the project, which drafted renowned, Oscar-minted filmmakers like Lucy Walker (Waste Land), Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room), and Albert Maysles (Grey Gardens) onto the unprecedented roster of directors who contributed the 30 three-minute films.

The final five shorts in the series premiered this week at the Sundance Film Festival, and two will compete in the festival’s Shorts Competition. Extending the reach of the project beyond just the filmmaking elite, Cinelan and GE also launched the Focus Forward Filmmaking Challenge in conjunction with the 30-film series. More than 600 films were submitted from more than 69 countries, and 20 were named finalists for the $100,000 Grand Jury Prize that was awarded Tuesday to Rafel Duran Torrent’s Cyborg Foundation, about the world’s first officially recognized cyborg.

Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal’s compendious, riveting film chronicling the CIA’s decade-long hunt for Osama bin Laden, has received harsh criticism from officials over its veracity.

It’s just a movie, people.

The real investigation into Osama bin Laden began all the way back in 1993, just prior to the first World Trade Center attack. A team of female CIA analysts known as “The Sisterhood” was the first to identify evidence that a terrorist group known as al Qaeda was spreading, and that bin Laden was its leader. In 1995 the CIA formed a small group called Alec Station with the express mission of focusing on al Qaeda. However, as terrorist attacks against the U.S. interests abroad became more frequent in the years leading up to 9/11, “The Sisterhood” became convinced that bin Laden was for real, and that his threats against the U.S. should be taken very seriously. They fell on deaf ears, however. And, in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, clueless congressmen blamed the CIA for not being vocal enough.

While many of the highly anticipated films at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival came in with distributors—including Fox Searchlight’s duo of eco-terrorism thriller The East, co-written by and starring Brit Marling; filmmaker Park Chan-wook’s (Oldboy) stylistic horror film Stoker, featuring Mia Wasikowska and Nicole Kidman; and Alex Gibney’s documentary We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks, which will be released by Focus World—a wide variety came to Park City seeking distribution.

Acquisitions had been relatively quiet for the first few days of the fest, but now that everyone’s adjusted to the altitude, the deals are starting to roll in.

Don Jon’s Addiction, about a caddish, porn-obsessed douchebag (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) who falls for a romantic comedy-obsessed Joisey girl (Scarlett Johansson), marks the feature filmmaking debut of Gordon-Levitt. It was acquired by Relativity Media for a fest high $4 million after a serious bidding war that reportedly included a nice bid by the Weinstein Company.

In The World According to Dick Cheney, filmmaker R.J. Cutler chronicles Cheney’s rise from a two-time Yale dropout popped for two DUIs to the youngest White House chief of staff in history under President Gerald Ford, and then, the most influential vice president in history under George W. Bush. The documentary includes hours of exclusive sit-down interviews with Cheney, where the unapologetic, irascible politician shares his thoughts on everything from CIA torture to the Iraq War.

After the film made its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, director R.J. Cutler spoke to The Daily Beast about what it’s like spending time with one of the scariest men in politics.

Who’s the more imposing subject: Anna Wintour or Dick Cheney?

We’re 40 years after Roe v. Wade, and the women in America are in worse shape than they were 40 years ago. Their rights are being trampled in the street.

These are the words of Dr. LeRoy Carhart. A former lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force, Carhart is one of only four doctors in the entire country who publicly perform late-term abortions, loosely defined as those in the third trimester of pregnancy (25 weeks) and beyond.

Carhart, along with Dr. Susan Robinson and Dr. Shelley Sella, were protégés of Dr. George Tiller—a late-term abortion provider who was shot in the head and killed by an anti-abortion activist in 2009 while serving as an usher during Sunday morning mass in Wichita, Kansas. He was the eighth abortion provider to be murdered in the wake of Roe v. Wade. This trio, along with Dr. Warren Hern, a contemporary of Tiller’s who has been performing abortions since 1973 and was even present during the arguing of Roe v. Wade before the U.S. Supreme Court, are the subjects of Martha Shane and Lana Wilson’s After Tiller, a controversial documentary that premiered at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival.