Sundance Features
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“I Made Sure My Presence and Camerawork Reflected the Difficult Position They Were Put In”: DP Amy Bench on Shooting The Librarians
The Librarians, courtesy of Sundance Institute.
With a style influenced by her work with documentary director Albert Maysles as well as shadowing DP Emmanuel Lubezki on The Tree of Life, Amy Bench wanted her work on Kim Snyder’s Sundance-premiering doc The Librarians, about a group of… Read more
“Only Four Weeks for Prep — Including Casting — and 16 Days to Shoot the Entire Film”: Paolo Maria Pedullà on Producing Mad Bills to Pay (or Destiny, dile que no soy malo)
Mad Bills to Pay (or Destiny, dile que no soy malo)
Director Joel Alfonso Vargas made Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces list in 2024 on the basis of his short film, Mad Bills to Pay, which is now a debut feature selected for both the 2025 Sundance and Berlin Film Festivals. “A… Read more
“Compassion Should Rule the Day, Not Punishment”: Director Cole Webley on His Sundance-Premiering Drama, Omaha
Still from Omaha. Courtesy of Sundance Institute.
A family of four—an unnamed Dad (John Magaro), his children Ella and Charlie (Molly Belle Wright and Wyatt Solis), and their Golden Retriever—hit the road at the start of Omaha, towards Nebraska. We don’t get to know too much about… Read more
“There Are No Good Harnesses, Clips and Clamps That Keep a GoPro on a Dog”: Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady on Their Sundance Doc Premiere, Folktales
Still from Folktales. Courtesy of Sundance Institute.
For Jesus Camp and Detropia directors Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, a film can be born from the most inconspicuous of things, like something they have overheard, or a phrase that stayed with them. Folktales, their stunning documentary set in… Read more
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“The Story Is Like a Lot of My Peers, Friends and Family”: Director Rashad Frett On His Sundance Competition Drama, Ricky
Rashad Frett arrives at Sundance with his debut feature, Ricky, following work as a combat medic, a stint in business school, and directing an independent TV pilot he called “a Connecticut version of The Wire.” Along the way, he heard the stories of peers who cycled in and out of the criminal justice system system. So, when enrolled at NYU Tisch Graduate Film School, he used those stories as inspiration for his thesis short, Ricky. “We had ex-offenders, police officers, parole officers, judges and family members of the incarcerated all involved and consulting on the script,” Frett told Filmmaker when […]
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“Making Films in Iran Is Not an Easy Task at All”: Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni on their Sundance-debuting Cutting Through Rocks
Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni’s Cutting Through Rocks follows Sara Shahverdi, a middle-aged divorcee in a remote and extremely conservative region of the Islamic Republic of Iran. What makes the scenario rather remarkable that Shahverdi is neither pariah nor wallflower in her tiny town. On the contrary, the onetime midwife, who quite literally brought an entire generation of her village into the world, is also a loud motorcycle-riding rebel who ran for a seat at the government table and won. And now, as the first elected councilwoman, a woman who finds herself at the center of an incompetent bureaucracy, one […]
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“It Was More Pointedly a Satirical Look at …’The Peace-Building Industry'”: Amber Fares on her Sundance-Premiering Coexistence, My Ass!
Amber Fares’s Sundance-premiering Coexistence, My Ass! takes its fabulous title from a one-woman show of the same name, a piece developed (at Harvard of all places) by the doc’s star, “activist-comedian” Noam Shuster Eliassi. The daughter of an Iranian Jewish mother and a Romanian Jewish father, Shuster Eliassi grew up in “Oasis of Peace” (Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam), a utopian community purposely comprised equally of Jews and Palestinians, where she would become “the literal poster child for the Israeli-Palestinian peace process” and eventually a co-director of the UN’s Interpeace organization by the time she was in her early 20s. But then […]
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“You’d Be Surprised How Happy People Are to Talk About the Best Times in Their Lives”: Elegance Bratton on His Sundance-Debuting Doc, Move Ya Body: The Birth of House
“A good party knows no fucking sexual orientation, no race, no socioeconomic background,” notes Vince Lawrence, the very first person to record a house song and the main protagonist in Elegance Bratton’s Sundance-debuting Move Ya Body: The Birth of House. That a global movement could be traced back to a rather nerdy Black youngster raised in the segregated world of Mayor Daley’s Chicago is just one surprising element in this lovingly crafted music history lesson. (Less surprising is the number of white folks who would also like to take credit.) But perhaps most remarkable is that through a combination of […]
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“Editorially It Was Similar to Quilt-Making”: Brittany Shyne on her Sundance-Debuting Seeds
While “stunning directorial debut” is an overused description that seldom lives up to the Sundance hype, in the case of Brittany Shyne’s Seeds it’s also quite precise. The lush, B&W-shot doc is a gorgeous portrait of what may very well be the last in a long line of generational Black farmers in rural Georgia, one in which Shyne’s camera serves as both portal and means of preservation. By quietly and patiently embedding with two extended families in the small town of Thomasville, Shyne is able to capture everything from the languid rhythm of daily work, from harvesting cotton to repairing […]
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“I Filmed It, and I Posted It. Now, Watch”: David Borenstein on His Sundance-Debuting Mr. Nobody Against Putin
David Borenstein’s Sundance-premiering Mr. Nobody Against Putin stars Pavel “Pasha” Talankin (also credited as co-director), an “unlikely hero” in an even more unlikely collaboration. A jokey primary school teacher in his Ural Mountains hometown of Karabash (which has the dubious distinction of being one of the most polluted cities on the planet), Pasha spends many days mentoring the kids who use the thirty-something’s open door office as a hangout/safe haven. That is, when he’s not documenting their young lives as the school’s videographer. Which is why things get rather complicated for this pro-democracy, but non-activist, educator. For once Putin decides […]
