The Lake, courtesy of Sundance Institute.

For me, the enjoyable of Sundance—and all festivals—is seeing not the movies that everybody is buzzing about pre-fest (I can look ahead to the streaming launch), however discovering the quieter gems that US distributors would do properly to take an opportunity on. Whereas this 12 months’s nonfiction crop was weaker total than 2025’s distinctive slate—which noticed such cinematic revelations as Life After, The Good Neighbor and Seeds all competing within the US Documentary Competitors—the docs that rose to the highest, most notably the handful under, have continued to stick with me lengthy after the ultimate credit rolled in Park Metropolis.

Barbara Without end (undistributed)
Jonathan Oppenheim Enhancing Award: US Documentary

“I wish to have one thing to offer. And I wish to exist without end,” the indomitable Barbara Hammer tells us in Brydie O’Connor’s compelling archival dive into the pioneering lesbian/avant-garde filmmaker’s life and work. Whereas the movie serves as an intricately crafted portrait of maybe the primary lady to place lesbian intercourse on display, it’s extra far-reaching than that area of interest theme may suggest. Hammer fought for queer artwork (“if we’re experimenting with our lives and the way we’re gonna dwell, then our artwork type must also be experimental”) to obtain wider recognition and, as a filmmaker, needed audiences to “really feel” her photographs. In different phrases, O’Connor introduces us to a revolutionary director on a lifelong mission to rework cinema itself.

The Lake (acquisition title)
US Documentary Particular Jury Award: Influence for Change

Abby Ellis’s suspenseful movie is a character-driven have a look at how one spiritual group, on this case Mormons, mix science and religion to attempt to defuse a ticking “environmental nuclear bomb” in Salt Lake Metropolis. By following two scientists as devoted to their chosen professions as they’re to biblical teachings—together with the Nice Salt Lake Commissioner tasked with bringing numerous stakeholders, from farmers to the governor, collectively—an image as weighty because the titular physique of water emerges. It’s a clock-ticking story, held collectively by haunting cinematography and a nail-biting rating, that convinces us to root for 3 mere mortals as they wrestle to make visceral a fast-moving ecological disaster—one which’s maddeningly invisible to everybody else of their midst.

Jane Elliott Towards the World (acquisition title)

“Most individuals consider me as that depressing previous bitch.” These are are the primary phrases we hear from the titular, almost 90-year-old protagonist of Judd Ehrlich’s participating doc about an indefatigable anti-racist educator from rural Iowa who made nationwide headlines in 1968. Jane Elliott was a third-grade teacher when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, spurring her to develop the controversial “Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes” social experiment, which she deployed in her all-white classroom.

Deftly alternating between archival TV footage of the media satan/darling (together with a 1970 documentary catchily titled The Eye of the Storm), together with modern scenes of Elliott’s persevering with outspoken battle towards these decided to ban books and abolish DEI. The movie additionally sprinkles in notable speaking heads (Killer Mike and Ibram X. Kendi make appearances) to offer historic context. But the doc rises above typical social difficulty fare by providing up yet one more thread—Elliott’s personal loving, however typically exasperated, daughters who simply want she’d decelerate for her personal sake and theirs. Whereas undeniably pleased with their liberal movie star mother, these two gray-haired girls nonetheless bear the scars from an upbringing in an unduly harsh glare, which induced them to be bullied and ostracized of their conservative city.

All people to Kenmure Road (undistributed)
World Cinema Documentary Particular Jury Award for Civil Resistance

An immigration enforcement company despatched from tons of of miles away invades a significant liberal metropolis, triggering a tense standoff that makes headlines all over the world. However this isn’t a real-time have a look at ICE in Minneapolis—although the parallels are equal elements uncanny, nerve-wracking, and counterintuitively heartwarming. Again in Might 2021, the UK Residence Workplace determined to launch a daybreak raid within the numerous neighborhood of Pollokshields in Glasgow, and arrested two Sikh males for immigration violations at their properties on Kenmure Road. Inside minutes, due to group message networks, residents dashed out their doorways in response, quickly numbering within the tons of as people canceled work, faculty and breakfast plans to bodily block the IE van with the 2 strangers inside from leaving. (One quick-thinking samaritan even threw himself underneath the car and stayed there all through your entire occasion.)

Chilean-Belgian filmmaker Felipe Bustos Sierra artfully reconstructs that suspenseful day in minute-by-minute trend by piecing collectively footage shot from a number of POVs (by 30-plus contributors together with the media) as 1000’s ultimately rallied all through the eight-hour drama. He additionally incorporates sit-down interviews (and two staged recreations) with the common residents and group leaders who got here collectively to help, feed and look after each other—and in the end pressured Westminster to again down.

Closure (undistributed)

From Polish director Michał Marczak, who received the directing prize within the World Cinema Documentary class at Sundance 2016 for All These Sleepless Nights, comes a moody, tightly-wound existential drama about unfathomable grief and relentless obsession. The movie follows Daniel, a middle-aged father on a Sisyphean quest to be taught the destiny of his son Krzysztof, final caught on CCTV digital camera on a bridge excessive above the Vistula River. Did {the teenager} leap? Did he merely stroll away and assume a brand new id? With no physique or suicide observe ever discovered (nor even any inkling that the boy may need been depressed), Daniel is left in an everlasting state of limbo, condemned to bodily scour the river by boat and mentally scour Krzysztof’s social media accounts seeking clues.

What makes this tragic story so extraordinary is the uncommon care and endurance with which it’s informed. Because the years go by, Marczak captures each nuance of Daniel’s heart-wrenching journey. From the chaotic murky backside of the Vistula to Daniel’s quiet interactions with the remainder of the household Krzysztof left behind, we’re swept proper alongside on this unsolved thriller—without end hoping  that the subsequent bend within the river of life may lastly unearth internal peace.