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Barbara Forever, The Lake, Closure and Other Sundance Docs Still Seeking Distribution
The Lake, courtesy of Sundance Institute. For me, the fun of Sundance—and all festivals—is seeing not the films that everyone is buzzing about pre-fest (I can wait for the streaming release), but discovering the quieter gems that US distributors would do well to take a chance on. While this year’s nonfiction crop was weaker overall than 2025’s exceptional slate—which saw such cinematic revelations as Life After, The Perfect Neighbor and Seeds all competing in the US Documentary Competition—the docs that rose to the top, most notably the handful below, have continued to stay with me long after the final credits rolled in Park City.
Barbara Forever (undistributed)
Jonathan Oppenheim Editing Award: US Documentary
“I want to have something to give. And I want to exist forever,” 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. While the film serves as an intricately crafted portrait of perhaps the first woman to put lesbian sex on screen, it’s more far-reaching than that niche theme might imply. Hammer fought for queer art (“if we’re experimenting with our lives and how we’re gonna live, then our art form should also be experimental”) to receive wider recognition and, as a filmmaker, wanted audiences to “feel” her images. In other words, O’Connor introduces us to a revolutionary director on a lifelong mission to transform cinema itself.
The Lake (acquisition title)
US Documentary Special Jury Award: Impact for Change
Abby Ellis’s suspenseful film is a character-driven look at how one religious community, in this case Mormons, combine science and faith to try to defuse a ticking “environmental nuclear bomb” in Salt Lake City. By following two scientists as dedicated to their chosen professions as they are to biblical teachings—along with the Great Salt Lake Commissioner tasked with bringing various stakeholders, from farmers to the governor, together—a picture as weighty as the titular body of water emerges. It’s a clock-ticking tale, held together by haunting cinematography and a nail-biting score, that convinces us to root for three mere mortals as they struggle to make visceral a fast-moving ecological catastrophe—one that’s maddeningly invisible to everyone else in their midst.
Jane Elliott Against the World (acquisition title)
“Most people think of me as that miserable old bitch.” These are are the first words we hear from the titular, nearly 90-year-old protagonist of Judd Ehrlich’s engaging doc about an indefatigable anti-racist educator from rural Iowa who made national headlines in 1968. Jane Elliott was a third-grade instructor 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 devil/darling (including a 1970 documentary catchily titled The Eye of the Storm), along with contemporary scenes of Elliott’s continuing outspoken fight against those determined to ban books and abolish DEI. The film also sprinkles in notable talking heads (Killer Mike and Ibram X. Kendi make appearances) to provide historical context. Yet the doc rises above typical social issue fare by offering up one more thread—Elliott’s own loving, but often exasperated, daughters who just wish she’d slow down for her own sake and theirs. While undeniably proud of their liberal celebrity mom, these two gray-haired ladies still bear the scars from an upbringing in an unduly harsh glare, which caused them to be bullied and ostracized in their conservative town.
Everybody to Kenmure Street (undistributed)
World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award for Civil Resistance
An immigration enforcement agency sent from hundreds of miles away invades a major liberal city, triggering a tense standoff that makes headlines around the world. But this isn’t a real-time look at ICE in Minneapolis—though the parallels are equal parts uncanny, nerve-wracking, and counterintuitively heartwarming. Back in May 2021, the UK Home Office decided to launch a dawn raid in the diverse neighborhood of Pollokshields in Glasgow, and arrested two Sikh men for immigration violations at their homes on Kenmure Street. Within minutes, thanks to community message networks, residents dashed out their doors in response, soon numbering in the hundreds as folks canceled work, school and breakfast plans to physically block the IE van with the two strangers inside from leaving. (One quick-thinking samaritan even threw himself under the vehicle and stayed there throughout the entire event.)
Chilean-Belgian filmmaker Felipe Bustos Sierra artfully reconstructs that suspenseful day in minute-by-minute fashion by piecing together footage shot from multiple POVs (by 30-plus participants along with the media) as thousands eventually rallied throughout the eight-hour drama. He also incorporates sit-down interviews (and two staged recreations) with the average citizens and community leaders who came together to support, feed and care for one another—and ultimately forced Westminster to back down.
Closure (undistributed)
From Polish director Michał Marczak, who won the directing prize in the World Cinema Documentary category at Sundance 2016 for All These Sleepless Nights, comes a moody, tightly-wound existential drama about unfathomable grief and relentless obsession. The film follows Daniel, a middle-aged father on a Sisyphean quest to learn the fate of his son Krzysztof, last caught on CCTV camera on a bridge high above the Vistula River. Did the teenager jump? Did he simply walk away and assume a new identity? With no body or suicide note ever found (nor even any inkling that the boy might have been depressed), Daniel is left in an eternal state of limbo, condemned to physically scour the river by boat and mentally scour Krzysztof’s social media accounts in search of clues.
What makes this tragic tale so extraordinary is the rare care and patience with which it’s told. As the years go by, Marczak captures every nuance of Daniel’s heart-wrenching journey. From the chaotic murky bottom of the Vistula to Daniel’s quiet interactions with the rest of the family Krzysztof left behind, we’re swept right along on this unsolved mystery—forever hoping that the next bend in the river of life might finally unearth inner peace.
