Playlist
<p>Intimate recollections by the filmmaker's father, a religious leader within the Celestial Church of Christ, and the filmmaker's mother, his once devoted wife.</p>
<p>Amber is one of the many agents working for the Bhutanese government to measure people’s happiness levels among the remote Himalayan mountains. But will he find his own along the way?</p> <p><em>Agent of Happiness,</em> directed by Arun Bhattarai and Dorottya Zurbó, offers a unique take on the notoriously exoticized Bhutan and its unusual happiness policy. We follow Amber as he investigates various expressions of contentment across different households and lifestyles while navigating his own struggle as a Nepali minority. The holistic philosophy at the heart of the survey he conducts challenges the conventional metrics of fulfillment and success, often provoking some deeper soul-searching. The filmmakers elegantly capture many tender moments between Amber and his interlocutors, as well as some very revealing conversations filled with unflinching honesty and quiet wisdom.</p> <p>Through its carefully crafted narrative, the film resonates as a heartfelt exploration of happiness in the face of adversity. As Amber grapples with societal disparities and personal roadblocks while searching for love, this story becomes a beautifully realized reminder to count our blessings.—AT</p>
<p>When does a democracy end and a theocracy begin? Apocalypse in the Tropics investigates Brazil’s descent into religious fundamentalism during the Covid-19 pandemic and president Bolsonaro’s leadership.</p>
<p>Stones are at once the most foundational and the most overlooked parts of our lifeworld. When a retired nature documentary narrator passes a kidney stone, she decides to tell one more story about this forgotten world of stone . A hypnotic essay film asking urgent ecological questions, Apple Cider Vinegar takes the viewer on a journey meeting Palestinian quarry workers, passionate Britisch Geologist and People living on the lava fields of Fogo.</p>
<p>Bisagras is a film that triangulates the journey of African slaves to America and draws a line that goes through my brown skin.</p>
<p>Faced with their children's impending blindness, the Pelletier family embarks on a global adventure to create lasting memories. As they explore Earth's wonders, from riding horses in Mongolia to ziplining in Zimbabwe, deeper bonds emerge amidst travel challenges. The film captures the intertwining joy and uncertainty as the family races against time. Blink is a poignant testament to resilience, celebrating our world's marvels and the enduring power of shared experiences in the face of life-altering circumstances.</p>
<p>A self-isolated young human known as "James" delves into the hidden world of microscopic organisms, forging a tender connection with these nearly invisible creatures and developing a massive online following, as he seeks to understand his own place in the cosmos and accept the scars of his past.<br /> <br /> “A Body Called Life” is a film made in collaboration with James, with a screenplay adapted from the verbatim Instagram posts of James, and starring James as James. It is an experiment in storytelling, about a life spent observing other little lives, with a charming score by Dan Deacon.</p>
<p>In Maine, where paper mills have long been central to communities, an architect and chemist embark on a multimillion-dollar project to repurpose a closed paper mill in Madison, transforming it into a wood fiber insulation manufacturing facility over four years.</p>
<p>In 2022, the Supreme Court of the United States ended a woman’s right to a safe and legal abortion. 'Contractions' takes us to Memphis, Tennessee where we contemplate the discontinuation of abortion services at a women’s health clinic. We listen to an obstetrician-gynecologist and a reproductive justice activist. We watch 14 women who witness and perform with their backs to the camera. In a place where a woman can no longer make decisions about her own body, they speak with the full force of their collective presence.</p>
<p>November, 2021. Twenty-six royal treasures of the Kingdom of Dahomey are about to leave Paris to return to their country of origin, the present-day Republic of Benin. Along with thousands of others, these artifacts were plundered by French colonial troops in 1892. But what attitude to adopt to these ancestors’ homecoming in a country that had to forge ahead in their absence? While the soul of the artifacts is freed, debate rages among students of the University of Abomey-Calavi.</p>
<p>The COVID pandemic brought air traffic in Lebanon to a standstill. Despite this, the noise caused by planes over Beirut increased dramatically. At the peak of the lockdown Israeli fighter jets and drones overflew the city up to 50 times a day. Their altitude would suggest that they were not there for surveillance or reconnaissance purposes, but with the aim of producing noise. However, the city’s countless diesel generators, reconstruction work following the explosion and the numerous civil protests relegated these noises to a hum in the background whose threatening origins could almost be forgotten. The artist and Turner Prize-winner Lawrence Abu Hamdan calls himself a “private ear”, an independent audio investigator. In the course of the last year, he has collected over 800 recordings of Israeli aircraft which he places at the centre of his new audio-visual essay that explores the link between territoriality and atmospheric violence.</p>
<p>DRIVER is a soulful exploration of resolute female long-haul truck drivers pursuing validation for their hard-earned work as they navigate the oppressive forces in their industry. Employing an intimate lens, Nesa Azimi’s first feature brings the audience into a community of solidarity and self-determination.</p>
<p>In this immersive sonic and visual experience, centered around the return of the American Great Eastern Brood X cicadas, a long distance conversation between two friends becomes the lifeline of an unfinished film. Measuring time through the cicadas' return provides a pulse for a post-pandemic moment in US history and invokes a reflection of our collective futures. A cacophony of human and non-human voices builds, highlighting the power of nature as it interweaves socio-political narratives and ecological cycles. Caution: Film contains strobing lights.</p>
<p>Visionary musician and artist Brian Eno — known for producing David Bowie, U2, Talking Heads, among many others; pioneering the genre of ambient music; and releasing over 40 solo and collaboration albums — reveals his creative processes in this groundbreaking generative documentary: a film that’s different every time it’s shown.</p> <p>Filmmaker Gary Hustwit brings to the Sundance Film Festival the first career-spanning documentary about visionary musician and artist Brian Eno. This innovative bio-doc also elevates the documentary form to become an evergreen, algorithmic performance.</p> <p>Hustwit and creative technologist Brendan Dawes have developed a bespoke generative software designed to sequence scenes and create transitions out of Hustwit’s original interviews with Eno, and Eno’s rich archive of hundreds of hours of never-before-seen footage, and unreleased music. Each screening of <em>Eno</em> is unique, presenting different scenes, order, music, and meant to be experienced live.</p> <p>The generative and infinitely iterative quality of <em>Eno</em> poetically resonates with the artist's own creative practice, his methods of using technology to compose music, and his endless deep dive into the mercurial essence of creativity.—SF</p>
<p>For anyone who yearns for a human connection to music, this is the story of a quirky radio station in Maine and its eccentric DJs. The 32-minute documentary showcases the people behind the microphone, taking the audience into the heart of the station and its community-first ethos.</p>
<p>With the help of his friends, Picho coordinates through WhatsApp to get a profile picture that represents him. Meanwhile, there’s a crisis on the family WhatsApp chat: the demand to be present during the dizzying loss of autonomy of his grandfather, the patriarch of the family. Between missed calls, bombardment of images, emojis and stickers, we access the digital intimacy of a young man conflicted with the expectations of others and his own.</p>
<p>In the summer of 1982, the Israeli army invaded Beirut and took advantage of the opportunity to seize the archives of the Palestinian Research Center. These archives contained many historical documents on Palestine, including a rich collection of photographs and films. These images have since been renamed and re-indexed according to the vision of their new custodians, the Israeli Ministry of Defense. Against these acts of dispossession and appropriation (one sequence shows the quiet violence of their authors), A Fidai Film offers a counter-narrative based on this loss, in order to restore the traces of the plundered Palestinian history. Kamal Aljafari re-examines these images, here exclusively cinematographic or televisual, and points out the complexity of their status as well as their mode of existence as a political object. A double movement unfolds, that of making these images resurface, sometimes precious testimonies restoring the life, the struggles of the Palestinian people, but also that of rethinking the implicit gaze of those who produced them (the colonial gesture). Kamal Aljafari kneads them, sometimes mistreats them, in order to bring out the underlying ideology, the exoticizing gaze as well as the gestures of dispossession: crossing out the comments of the victors and occupiers (from the British mandate to today), adding, colorizing, removing superimposed texts, modifying sounds, recombining, editing. A gesture of anger and struggle in action as much as a restitution of a distorted or erased memory, A Fidai Film claims to be a form of cinematographic sabotage, a combative film as the title unequivocally indicates. Nicolas Feodoroff</p>
<p>Mary Phillips is a 60-year-old divorcee exploring her pleasure, freedom, and power. Her avenue of exploration: the bondage, discipline, dominance and submission, and sadomasochism community. This observational portrait of her life unfolds through intimate vignettes and glimpses into the community that whipped Mary’s life back into shape. (ch)</p>
<p>A dryly humorous portrait of Pepe, whose project after his retirement is to build his own golf course. It’s somewhere on the outskirts of Madrid, in a lackluster, rather noisy place.</p> <p>During the making of Four Holes, the equipment and circumstances were not exactly optimal. On top of that, Pepe and director Daniela Muñoz Barroso are both hard of hearing, causing occasional misunderstandings between the two. Those moments, like the stage directions she gives and he cooperatively follows, are all part of the film.</p> <p>It’s disarming how the two are absorbed in the creative process together. “You say the most interesting things off-screen,” she laughs, and indeed this happens a few times. Material that wouldn’t usually make it into the final cut has nevertheless found a place in this playful narrative form. And rightly so.</p>
<p>Chase Overland interviews artists in Portland, Maine.</p>
<p>Heritable uses satirical play and stylized, musical set pieces to undermine the reproduction of nativist/eugenicist rhetoric in Maine, to unsettle perceptions of "Americana" signifiers, and to suggest an alternate space that can reckon with and transcend historical harm.</p>
<p>Blackouts across Cuba set the stage for this eerie plunge into darkness.</p>
<p>Libuše has been capturing her “rock-n-roll” life full of twists and turns in thousands of pictures and autoportraits. Yet the sudden photographic success after 53 years of work has not helped her to see her real self in the mirror. She is still searching for herself, the place where she belongs, as she goes through piles of negatives and diaries while working on a new book.</p>
<p>Explores a search for an illegal rave, over one night in Coventry in 1989. From poster-strewn bedrooms and pirate-radio stations to a police headquarters and empty warehouse events.</p>
<p>Sprawling and visceral, KIX captures 10 years of the chaotic street life of a Hungarian child as he grows from rowdy kid to public enemy. Through a lens both personal and political, we witness a rarely-seen portrait of an impoverished working class in modern day Budapest.</p>
<p>A fan of Hot Tub Time Machine, Republican Congressman Adam Kinzinger invites the left-wing Hollywood director Steve Pink to follow his efforts to hold Donald Trump accountable for the January 6 insurrection.</p>
<p>A Sensorial Essay that depicts the dismissed case of torture perpetrated in Baquedano Metro Station in 2019. Merging original material with found footage, the film strains the textures of history and reality with a dynamic flux of images and sounds.</p>
<p>Desperate to save her marriage, a woman in China hires a professional to go undercover and break up her husband’s affair. MISTRESS DISPELLER follows this process from all corners of a love triangle in an intimate meditation on love and family.<br /> <br /> In China, rampant adultery has given rise to a new industry devoted to helping couples stay married in the face of infidelity. Wang Zhenxi is part of this growing profession, a “mistress dispeller” who is hired to maintain the bounds of marriage — and break up affairs — by any means necessary. MISTRESS DISPELLER follows a real, unfolding case of infidelity as Teacher Wang attempts to bring a couple back from the edge of crisis, offering strikingly intimate access to private lives usually hidden behind closed doors. Their story shifts our sympathies between husband, wife and mistress to explore the ways emotion, pragmatism, and cultural norms collide to shape romantic relationships in contemporary China.</p>
<p>Mary McGee became the first American woman to race motorcycles. Mary’s pioneering journey of conquering sexism and her own fears paved the way for the next chapter in motorsports.</p>
<p>This film made by a Palestinian-Israeli collective shows the destruction of the West Bank’s Masafer Yatta by Israeli authorities and the unlikely alliance which develops between the Palestinian activist Basel and Israeli journalist Yuval.</p>
<p>In 2019, a nationwide movement forms in Chile to create a new constitution. For three years, the film accompanies Indigenous, feminist, militant, legalistic, anarchist and conservative activists. A timely large-scale canvas of democratic protest.</p>
<p>Two worlds collide gloriously in Angelo Madsen Minax’s collective portrait of a small-town dive bar in rural Vermont. When the dilapidated local bar ‘Babes’ is taken over by queer out-of-towners, there is nervousness among the regulars. But as cribbage tournaments overlap with afternoons of karaoke and lead into wild, sweaty nights of dancing, we are witness to a joyfully unexpected vision of community-building.</p>
<p>Patrice: The Movie shines a light on a remarkable crusader for disability rights, confronting systemic failures while foregrounding joy through the energy of Patrice Jetter and her friends.</p>
<p>In the dazzling incandescence of an unknown desert, three donkeys discover an abandoned astronomical observatory and the universe. A sensorial, cinematic exploration of what a story can be.</p> <p><em>The film received the Theme-Sensitive Award at the Science New Wave Festival XVII in 2024. This distinction honors a work that most vividly embodies the year’s festival theme — SIGNAL — bringing it to the screen in a singular and resonant way. The award includes a cash prize of $500. Learn more about our <a href="https://www.sciencenewwave.com/awards">SNW Luminary Awards</a>.</em></p>
<p>Gentle or rough, blonde or shaved, cis or trans, long term inmates or those newly admitted: women re-enact their lives in a Buenos Aires prison, in trance and balance, voguing and singing. A hybrid musical and charming piece of collective empowerment.</p>
<p>Darkness falls over Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and its 17 million inhabitants. It is just before Christmas and people are struggling to gain access to electric light. Kudi is mobilising the residents of his Kisenso neighbourhood to collect money for a new power cable. On Mount Mangengenge, a holy place overlooking the city, Pastor Gédéon delivers a sermon about the light of Christ as the path to life and truth. Davido is searching for a place to stay after his house was flooded by the Congo River. Together with other young men, he kills time by working out and dreams of a better future.<br /> <em>Tongo Saa</em> is a sensitive portrait of the residents of Kinshasa as they face the challenges of life in an environment plagued by violence and coloured by the uncertainty of tomorrow.</p>
<p>Launched in the late '80s, educational software <em>Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing</em> taught millions globally, but the program's Haitian-born cover model vanished decades ago. Two DIY investigators search for the unsung cultural icon, while questioning notions of digital security, AI, and Black representation in the digital realm.</p> <p>Jazmin Jones’ inventive directorial debut boldly embraces outspoken questioning. Jones turns the camera onto herself and co-investigator Olivia McKayla Ross, foregrounding their investigatory process and supportive friendship. While unraveling the complex narrative of Mavis Beacon, they uplift the pioneering of Black women in technology, and self-reflect on their own methodologies in the process. Jones celebrates diverse ways of embodying knowledge by creatively connecting various sources of information. Observational footage of herself and Ross sit alongside interviews, memes, and insights from activists and artists. The meaning of each clip is made richer by Jones’ astute and witty layering, often incorporating the digital interface of a desktop. The dynamic investigation also reveals questions about documentary practice, the incompleteness of archives, and the right to exist on one’s own terms. Jones’ vision is vibrant, full of curiosity, and refreshingly openhearted. —SO</p>
<p>In 1960, United Nations: the Global South ignites a political earthquake, musicians Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach crash the Security Council, Nikita Khrushchev bangs his shoe denouncing America’s color bar, while the U.S. dispatches jazz ambassador Louis Armstrong to the Congo to deflect attention from its first African post-colonial coup.</p> <p>Director Johan Grimonprez (<em>Double Take</em>, 2009) returns to Sundance with this magnificent essay film that vibrantly embodies the historic and continually evolving colonial machinations that underpin what author and Congolese writer In Koli Jean Bofane refers to as an ever-evolving “algorithm of <em>Congo Inc</em>.”</p>
<p>Two years ago, IDFA on Stage featured Spectral Transmissions, a multimedia piece by performer-filmmakers Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher in which ghost stories offered solace in the anxious days of COVID. Now they are back with a new edition. Rather than focusing on fear and horror, this time they explore the unfathomable and sometimes uncanny power of love. In many ghost stories it is the power of love—for childhood friends, for family members, for animals—that bends time.</p> <p>Mosher and Palmieri have invited musicians, filmmakers and visual artists to contribute work around this theme. Multimedia artist Chloe Abrahams explores the strange world she enters when sleepwalking. Film theorist Dorota Lech tells an intimate tale about an heirloom that embodies family traditions, Polish folklore, an epidemic and a war.</p> <p>Documentary filmmaker Jeanie Finlay and author and filmmaker Steven Sheil bring a tale of lost siblings connected by an uncanny tape recorder. While watching a 1950’s werewolf film two boys explore sexuality, violence, and the shifting moral positions of fantasy. These stories and more make up this year’s program.</p>
<p>Created by a collective of neurodivergent filmmakers in an attempt to provide an alternative and artistic take on what it's like to live with neurodivergence in a chaotic world not made for those who are different.</p>
<p>A STORY OF HEALING THROUGH COLD OCEAN WATERS OF THE MAINE COAST</p>
<p>The Tengu Club, the oldest salmon fishing club in the US meets in the dead of winter in Seattle's Elliott Bay, when the conditions are horrible, the weather is coldest, and there are hardly any fish to be caught. Almost 100 years later, the club continues this tradition. Why?</p>
<p>Through The Storm follows the 2023 season of the Red Lake Nation (Ojibwe) high school football team. Despite dwindling interest and a two-decade-long losing record, a determined coach and group of young athletes fight to keep their football program alive.</p>
<p>This feature documentary centers around an artist couple, renowned photographer Joel Meyerowitz (85) and painter / pianist / writer Maggie Barrett (75) as they grapple with mortality, love, legacy and making meaning.</p>
<p><em>Two Refusals </em>is a feature-length experimental essay film that looks to sites of refusal, rejection, and revolt across India and Africa. Weaving together personal reflections on the artist’s family history as freedom fighters against the occupying Portuguese forces in Goa with stories of liberation and resistance across the Goan diaspora, such as the story of Sita Valles—the fierce Angolan-born Goan revolutionary—the film focuses on the bonds of solidarity that developed across the two continents against the Portuguese Empire. A personal journey through ancestry, anti-colonialism, and harbingers of dissent across India and Africa, inspired from the myths of Portugal’s “oldest work of epic poetry,” <em>The Lusiads</em>, the work repositions key mythological figures to ask how one can refuse an empire.</p>
<p>The Amazon Labor Union (ALU) — a group of current and former Amazon workers in New York City’s Staten Island — takes on one of the world’s largest and most powerful companies in the fight to unionize.</p> <p>Chronicling the historic efforts of the ALU, <em>Union</em> is an intimate and surprising story of dogged determination, unorthodox tactics, and speaking up despite David vs. Goliath odds. Capturing up-close, in-the-trenches moments with the upstart labor union leaders — including the charismatic Chris Smalls — as they try to build support for their movement on their own terms, filmmakers Brett Story and Stephen Maing bear witness to the realities of labor organizing in the United States — challenging at best; near-impossible when facing the unlimited resources and influence of a corporate giant. They track exhilarating victories and demoralizing setbacks along the way, but foremost spotlight the far-reaching ability of collective action to inspire hope and bring self-determination to workers who’ve long felt disenfranchised and powerless.—BT</p>
<p>The Waldo County Woodshed offers a vital source of heat to Mainers who need it.</p>
<p>It is about a country, Colombia, held in the background of the history of the conquest of space. A literal background, since NASA set up there in the early 1960s, in the jungle on the border with Panama, the Tropic Survival School, a training camp to teach American astronauts how to survive in the event of a forced landing in a so-called hostile environment. A background, which Andrés Jurado, filmmaker of exhumation (see El Renacer Del Carare , FID 2020), transforms here into a center: that of a counter-history of this conquest, written from the Colombian point of view. The director uses (staged) images of the meeting between astronauts and an Emberá shaman in the jungle as a springboard to launch the material of his film into orbit and propel us into an anachronistic and ghostly space. A constellation of archival images, documents, and sound recordings, testifying to the fascination with the race to the Moon and imperialist extractivism, compose this unusual and delirious journey, which follows a double trajectory. Orbital, and mnemonic. The arrangement of these fragments of reality, on which the director intervenes meticulously – by reframing, animation, reconstitution of synthetic voices – suggests in fact the presence of ghosts and the traces of an unconscious memory. Survivals, recalled by the palpitating echoes of Jacqueline Nova's electroacoustic compositions, and which break into the present of the images. Their connection is an act of revelation. And this spectral journey, a powerful political tool. It reveals the fictions at work in the official narrative, and highlights a decentered narrative, which Andrés Jurado offers us to look at in all its complexity, through the telescope of cinema. Louise Martin Papasian</p>
<p>When George H.W. Bush won the presidency in 1988, scientists had already been warning for years of the dangers of global warming. Bush promised to counter the “greenhouse effect” with the “White House Effect,” but his administration’s ties to the fossil fuel industry soon undermined efforts to environmentalist intentions. This sobering yet humorous all-archival film offers captivating flashbacks to the early days of the climate crisis, raising questions about what might have been if our government was accountable to the will of its people and the health of our planet.</p>
<p>Seamlessly moving between earth and stars, past and present, Wilfred Buck is a hybrid feature documentary that looks to one man’s life to tell a story that spans generations. Our guide is the charismatic and irreverent Wilfred Buck, a Cree elder and ceremonial leader who came to his calling through a harrowing history of displacement, racism, and addiction in 1960s Canada. Adapted from his memoir, and blending verité, archive and stylized re-enactments, the film charts colonization’s attempts to extinguish Indigenous ways of knowing – and what it means to reconnect with and regain ancient teachings that are as relevant today as ever.</p>
<p>When Will Ferrell finds out his close friend of 30 years is coming out as a trans woman, the two decide to embark on a cross-country road trip to process this new stage of their relationship in an intimate portrait of friendship, transition, and America. Will Ferrell and Harper Steele are humorously and lovingly vulnerable in director Josh Greenbaum’s latest documentary, <em>Will & Harper</em>. Through the frame of a decadeslong friendship (and the windshield of Harper’s Jeep), the pair reconnect in emotional and unexpected ways as they journey across middle America.</p> <p>Layers of friendship are laid bare as Harper reenters once-safe spaces as her authentic self, reintroducing the eccentric yet earnest Will to the woman he’s always known. Their levity is reinforced and challenged: Harper embraces her newfound identity amid adversity, as Will is invited to stand by her, negotiating his celebrity in the process. What emerges is an exploration of both silliness and strife, a sincere facet of the trans experience audiences rarely witness, and an affirmation of the unbreakable bonds of friendship.—CA</p>
<p>Following members of the Wet’suwet’en nation along with Hereditary Chiefs and their communities of land defenders, Yintah, meaning land, tells the story of the Wet’suwet’en people resisting the construction of multiple pipelines across their territory.</p>
<p>A series of photos and screenshots tell the story of how the directors, two transmasculine artists, fall madly in love with each other. We witness their first meeting, the start of a long-distance relationship, the meeting of the families, Z’s top surgery – all milestones are recorded in a uniquely intimate and moving way. A portrait of queer/trans love that we don’t get to see often enough.</p>
<p>After two decades in a Belarusian Orthodox monastery, Vera reflects on her unexpected path to nunhood, rooted in a history of addiction. Facing her lingering guilt, she finds herself at a crossroads between her monastic sanctuary and an uncertain future. Directors Cécile Embleton and Alys Tomlinson’s stark black and white observational approach reveal Vera's quiet journey of self-examination, offering an intimate glimpse into the complexities of faith, recovery, and personal transformation within cloistered walls.</p>
<p>Three Trump supporters from different backgrounds unite to campaign across America in 2020, advocating for his re-election while laying foundations for what they hope will be a long-lasting political movement.</p>