Category Archives: Recommendations

IRON BUTTERFLIES
In summer 2014, sunflower fields and coal mines in eastern Ukraine turned into a 12 square kilometer crime scene. A multi-layered investigation into the downing of flight MH17, in which a butterfly-shaped shrapnel was found in the pilot’s body, implicated the state responsible for a war crime that remains unpunished.

Director:
Roman Liubyi

Producers:
Andrii Kotliar, Volodymyr Tykhyy, David Armati Lechner, Isabelle Bertolone, Trini Götze

Festival Section:
World Cinema Documentary Competition

More Info:
Check out the Sundance website for more details, including screening info, by clicking on the film title above.

FANTASTIC MACHINE
From the first camera to 45 billion cameras worldwide today, the visual sociologist filmmakers widen their lens to expose both humanity’s unique obsession with the camera’s image and the social consequences that lay ahead.

Directors/Producers:
Axel Danielson, Maximilien Van Aertryck

Festival Section:
World Cinema Documentary Competition

More Info:
Check out the Sundance website for more details, including screening info, by clicking on the film title above.

THE ETERNAL MEMORY
Augusto and Paulina have been together for 25 years. Eight years ago, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Both fear the day he no longer recognizes her.

Director/Producer:
Maite Alberdi

Producers:
Juan de Dios Larraín, Pablo Larraín, Rocío Jadue

Festival Section:
World Cinema Documentary Competition

More Info:
Check out the Sundance website for more details, including screening info, by clicking on the film title above.

AGAINST THE TIDE
Two friends, both Indigenous fishermen, are driven to desperation by a dying sea. Their friendship begins to fracture as they take very different paths to provide for their struggling families.

Director/Producer:
Sarvnik Kaur

Producer:
Koval Bhatia

Festival Section:
World Cinema Documentary Competition

More Info:
Check out the Sundance website for more details, including screening info, by clicking on the film title above.

20 DAYS IN MARIUPOL
As the Russian invasion begins, a team of Ukrainian journalists trapped in the besieged city of Mariupol struggle to continue their work documenting the war’s atrocities.

Director/Producer:
Mstyslav Chernov

Producers:
Michelle Mizner, Raney Aronson-Rath, Derl McCrudden

Festival Section:
World Cinema Documentary Competition

More Info:
Check out the Sundance website for more details, including screening info, by clicking on the film title above.

5 SEASONS OF REVOLUTION
An aspiring video journalist in her 20s finds herself already facing self-reckoning. Born in Damascus, Syria, Lina starts to report on the events around her until she is compelled to become a war reporter and, later, the unexpected narrator of her own destiny.

Director:
Lina

Producers:
Diana El Jeiroudi

Festival Section:
World Cinema Documentary Competition

More Info:
Check out the Sundance website for more details, including screening info, by clicking on the film title above.

BEYOND UTOPIA
Hidden camera footage augments this perilous, high-stakes journey as we embed with families attempting to escape oppression, ultimate revealing a world most of us have never seen.

Director:
Madeleine Gavin

Producers:
Jana Edelbaum, Rachel Cohen, Sue Mi Terry

Festival Section:
US Documentary Competition

More Info:
Check out the Sundance website for more details, including screening info, by clicking on the film title above.

VICTIM/SUSPECT
Investigative journalist Rae de Leon travels nationwide to uncover and examine a shocking pattern: Young women tell the police they’ve been sexually assaulted, but instead of finding justice, they’re charged with the crime of making a false report, arrested, and even imprisoned by the system they believed would protect them.

Director/Producer:
Nancy Schwartzman

Producers:
Julie Goldman, Christopher Clements, Alice Henty, Amanda Pike, Rachel de Leon

Festival Section:
US Documentary Competition

More Info:
Check out the Sundance website for more details, including screening info, by clicking on the film title above.

THE STROLL
The history of New York’s Meatpacking District, told from the perspective of transgender sex workers who lived and worked there. Filmmaker Kristen Lovell, who walked “The Stroll” for a decade, reunites her community to recount the violence, policing, homelessness, and gentrification they overcame to build a movement for transgender rights.

Directors:
Kristen Lovell, Zackary Drucker

Producer:
Matt Wolf

Festival Section:
US Documentary Competition

More Info:
Check out the Sundance website for more details, including screening info, by clicking on the film title above.

A STILL SMALL VOICE
An aspiring hospital chaplain begins a yearlong residency in spiritual care, only to discover that to successfully tend to her patients, she must look deep within herself.

Director/Producer:
Luke Lorentzen

Producer:
Kellen Quinn

Festival Section:
US Documentary Competition

More Info:
Check out the Sundance website for more details, including screening info, by clicking on the film title above.