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Some of the biggest talents in documentary film will be unveiling new work at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, including Oscar winners Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, Davis Guggenheim, and Mstyslav Chernov.
The marquee names in the nonfiction slate extend to the subjects of films – musical great Sly Stone examined in Questlove’s SLY LIVES! (aka The Burden of Black Genius); the late Selena Quintanilla’s story told in a film by Isabel Castro; Actress Marlee Matlin’s trailblazing career explored in Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore, from director Shoshannah Stern; astronaut Sally Ride’s gravity-defying journey and personal life revealed in Sally, directed by Cristina Costantini.
No Sundance premiere documentary may attract more attention than Pee-wee as Himself, “A chronicle of the life of artist and performer Paul Reubens and his alter ego Pee-wee Herman.” Prior to his death last year at the age of 70, Reubens spoke in-depth with director Matt Wolf “about his creative influences, and the personal struggles he faced to persevere as an artist,” according to a description from the festival.
The collaboration between filmmaker and protagonist proved contentious at times, notes senior documentary programmer Basil Tsiokos. “You are watching the film and you’re also watching the relationship play out between Matt and Paul, where they’re not necessarily always on the same page. It’s not always necessarily the friendliest,” Tsiokos observes. “There’s tension and that’s in the film as well, and you can see it. But together with that, you are seeing the full breadth of what Paul Reubens brought to his career — not just Pee-wee Herman, but just some really fascinating early stuff that you probably do not know about his early acting career and how Pee-wee emerged.”
“You learn so much about his career and him as a person,” adds documentary programmer Sudeep Sharma, noting that Reubens didn’t inform the director that he was suffering from cancer – a rather significant omission. “They’re struggling over what the film is, but behind it all he’s sick, but he doesn’t tell Matt that. So that’s like another layer of the film where they’re making the film and Paul Reubens knows something that Matt doesn’t.”
Reubens never came out publicly during his lifetime, but the film delves into “his own identity as being gay and how that plays out in his story and his career and how different that is from now, I would think, in terms of how open he could be about himself,” says Sharma, “and the way the [Pee-wee] persona plays with that type of hiding and performance and stuff like that. It’s a really fascinating film.”
The two-part Pee-wee as Himself bows in Sundance’s Episodics section. Premiering in U.S. Documentary Competition is Selena y Los Dinos, about the “Queen of Tejano Music” who was murdered in 1995 by the former president of her fan club. Isabel Castro’s film is built around “never-before-seen footage from the family’s personal archive.”
Several other documentaries premiering at Sundance touch on true crime in direct or indirect ways:
Regarding The Perfect Neighbor, Sharma notes, “The entire film is from body cam footage, some [police] interrogation footage. So, it is a pretty incredible work of filmmaking… just in the best tradition of documentary filmmaking where it’s capturing reality, but it’s not necessarily always driving you towards a conclusion. You come to a conclusion yourself watching the film… It’s totally compelling the whole time.”
Mystslav Chernov, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Ukrainian journalist and filmmaker, who won the Oscar for his 2023 documentary 20 Days in Mariupol, returns to Sundance with his new film, 2000 Meters to Andriivka. The film, premiering in World Cinema Documentary Competition, “follows a Ukrainian platoon on their mission to traverse one mile of heavily fortified forest and liberate a strategic village from Russian occupation,” according to the festival.
“20 Days was the attack” by Russia on Ukraine, Sharma comments. “I feel like [2000 Meters to Andriivka] is the actual fighting… the real ground level battle that’s happening… These are still civilians fighting for their country, but instead of just being bombarded by the Russians, this is them actually defending and attacking within their territory… It’s a pretty amazing film. I don’t think I’ve seen anything like this, especially about Ukraine.”
Among other notable Sundance premieres: Rachel Fleit (Introducing, Selma Blair) directs Sugar Babies, premiering in U.S. Documentary Competition. Description: “Autumn is an enterprising college scholarship recipient and burgeoning TikTok influencer. Part of a close circle of friends growing up poor in rural Louisiana, she is determined to overcome the struggles and barriers defining them. Faced with limited minimum wage job options, Autumn devises an online sugar baby operation.”
Speak could generate talk at Sundance, the film directed by Jennifer Tiexiera and Guy Mossman that also premieres in U.S. Documentary Competition. It’s the story of “five top-ranked high school oratory students who spend a year crafting spellbinding spoken word performances with the dream of winning the world’s largest and most intense public speaking competition.”
Two documentaries set to premiere at Sundance explore the Deaf experience. Shoshannah Stern’s Marlee Matlin film documents “the first Deaf actor to win an Academy Award and was thrust into the spotlight at 21 years old. Reflecting on her life in her primary language of American Sign Language, Marlee explores the complexities of what it means to be a trailblazer.”
Nyle DiMarco, the Deaf model, activist, and filmmaker (you may remember him as the winner of America’s Next Top Model, season 22), brings Deaf President Now! to Sundance, a film he directed with Oscar winner Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth, Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie). The documentary examines an enormous controversy that erupted more than 30 years ago at DiMarco’s alma mater, Gallaudet University, which serves Deaf and hearing-impaired students. After the university named a hearing person as college president in 1988, the student body expressed its outrage in public demonstrations.
“I think it’s a film that speaks to our present moment in the sense that it is looking at the power of collective action,” says Tsiokos. “That’s what I really love about this film is that it’s not just valorizing one ‘hero who’s going to save the day,’ but it shows what a group of people, in this case the students of Gallaudet University, can do when they combine forces and really advocate for change as a unified group.”
Tsiokos continues, “It’s a really fascinating film, fantastic archive, really, really interesting subjects. And the way the film is also shot, you can tell it’s from a Deaf filmmaker in Nyle in the way it uses ASL for the interviews… And the way that it uses space and sound and silence is really fascinating as well… Also, you see enough of Davis’s type of filmmaking in it as well. There’s elements to it that really feel like Still in certain ways, the way that that film used really creative reenactments is similar in this film as well, but you can definitely also see Nyle’s mark on it.”
Renowned documentarian David France pairs with Jesse Short Bull on Free Leonard Peltier, a re-examination of the Native American activist who has been imprisoned for almost 50 years after his conviction in the shooting deaths of two FBI agents (Sundance founder Robert Redford served as executive producer and narrator on an earlier film about Peltier, 1992’s Incident at Oglala).
There is speculation Pres. Biden may pardon Peltier before he leaves the White House.
“I think it’s going to be a film that people are going to really talk about and want to see because there’s a whole generation of people, too, who know nothing about Leonard Peltier,” says Sharma. “He’s a preeminent political prisoner currently in the United States.”
Several films examine aspects of the trans experience – particularly timely given how trans rights become a significant issue in the recent presidential election.
Sam Feder directs Heightened Scrutiny, a film centering on ACLU attorney Chase Strangio who last week became the first openly trans person to argue a case before the U.S. Supreme Court.
“That [film] is incredibly political in the sense that it is really delving into these issues, the assault on trans rights that has been taking place over the last several years and has ramped up,” Tsiokos observes. “And it is a portrait of what goes into [arguing before] the Supreme Court, which is kind of fascinating on its own, but also around the individual people that are affected by these laws. In particular, it’s about adolescents and the impact that these laws restricting access to hormonal therapies are having on their lives.”
Tsiokos and Sharma also point to GEN_, a documentary set at a hospital in Milan, Italy, where “the unconventional Dr. Bini leads a bold mission overseeing aspiring parents undergoing in vitro fertilization and the journeys of individuals reconciling their bodies with their gender identities.”
Zackary Drucker directs April & Amanda, about two legends who, the festival program writes, “contested their identities as women in the court of public opinion: April Ashley, who was immortalized as a trailblazer by embracing her transgender history; and Amanda Lear, who has consciously denied and obfuscated her history for decades.”
“It is a subtler film, in certain ways, around questions of identity and questions of disclosure,” says Tsiokos. “It comes from Zackary Drucker who’s the perfect person to investigate these questions in a sensitive and sort of a provocative way… a thoughtful way, in a caring way, I should say.”
Questlove, who won an Oscar for Summer of Soul, comes to Sundance with his Sly Stone documentary, subtitled aka The Burden of Black Genius.
“Yes, it’s a portrait of Sly Stone, which is, sure, you want that, you get it. But it also asks larger questions,” Tsiokos says. “It’s looking not just at Sly Stone, but what do artists, individuals, creative, thoughtful people like Sly, what burden is put on them, what pressures are put on them to be not just fantastic artists, but the artist that represents Black excellence or the artist that is doing the crossover into white music as well as Black music. So, there’s these larger questions that are not just about Sly, but just about what happens to Black artists, Black creatives and the sort of burden and the questions that are asked of them that are not necessarily asked of white artists.”
The Sundance Film Festival runs from January 23 to February 2 in Park City and Salt Lake City, Utah.
