Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore. Courtesy of Sundance Institute
Another year, another Sundance. This second edition under festival director Eugene Hernandez doesn’t portend many changes from last year’s. The big news is that the day before the festival’s opening night, Participant Media pulled Khalil Joseph’s BLCKNWS: Terms & Conditions from the lineup due to Joseph’s alleged additional edits after the film was delivered to its financier in fall 2024. In Variety, sources say the changes were “a minute” long, and a “Sundance spokesperson said the festival was ‘deeply disappointed to have been informed this evening by Participant that they are pulling BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions,’” but the festival has no legal recourse to defend its selection. This action from Participant is possible due to the lack of moral rights afforded to film directors in the U.S., and is especially galling since Participant folded last April. It exists now as a holding company for Participant’s assets.
Participant’s withdrawal of the film leaves the NEXT section far poorer in terms of quality of films, especially since the recent folding of Sundance’s New Frontier section for experimental fare limits the slots for those work to the NEXT section. This year, those few hybrid works miscalculate the real-world stakes of casting family and friends. Elsewhere, documentary sales at Sundance picked up last year, and the inclusion of prominent bio docs on Jacinda Ardern, Marlee Matlin, and Selena in this edition’s competition slots indicates that programmers are aiming to keep that trend alive. Because it’s Sundance, where coverage of sales amounts and Oscar predictions attract more readers than film reviews (including for Documentary magazine—last year, thousands more of you read Anthony Kaufman’s sales report than our festival dispatches or director interviews), we are once again kicking off our coverage with a curtain raiser of promising sales titles. Don’t worry. Anthony’s industry recap is also coming.
The Dating Game
The second feature from Violet Du Feng, The Dating Game centers on a week-long boot camp for working-class Chinese men to better their online dating profiles and pick-up game, run by charismatic dating coach Hao. His techniques borrow liberally from a “fake it ’til you make it” ethos, sprinkled with some emotional manipulation in communication styles, and aren’t received passively by the dating camp attendees, so the dialogue is insightful into social, political, and gendered norms. A contrasting style from Hao’s wife, who is also a dating coach but for women, literalizes the gender gap in today’s image-heavy world. Sometimes the film veers into the twee, and a heavy-handed score doesn’t help matters. But this is one of the few vérité documentaries that is edited like one, and with beautiful cinematography from Wei Gao to provide ample coverage of telling moments. Context is well-assembled and never feels gratuitous. In a market glutted with documentaries that use wall-to-wall voiceover to scaffold the lack of observational material, this pic is a real accomplishment.
Life After
Though Reid Davenport’s first feature I Didn’t See You There was beloved by documentarians, initial reviews after its Sundance premiere were unfairly confused by the film’s essayistic and perspectival approach, and I’ve had a sense that the film never was shown as widely as it should have been as a result. With his second feature, Life After, Davenport chooses a much more conventional, interview-based investigatory approach, but retains his signature intellectual brilliance. This doc starts with the historical legal case of Elizabeth Bouvia, a woman in her 20s with cerebral palsy who fought for her own assisted suicide in 1983, which the court denied. Tangling contemporary assisted dying legislation, interviews with disability advocates, and observational footage of Davenport and producer Coleen Cassingham tracking down Bouvia’s family, Life After convincingly argues that the “right to die” is in fact, barely disguised fear of disability. This feature is an Enterprise grantee, and due to its ITVS production support, we can expect it on public broadcast in the coming years.
Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore
The appearance of a biographical interview documentary, a genre I’m known to disdain, about an Oscar-winning actress on this list indicates the quality and uniqueness of this one, which doesn’t hesitate to delve into tough subjects of drug addiction, domestic violence, and the politics of Deaf activism. That ease and authority comes from Shoshannah Stern, a Deaf actor making her directorial debut with Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore, produced by Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk’s Actual Films.
The formal approach of a sit-down interview that forms of the spine of the film, with evidentiary archival b-roll, is fascinatingly upended here. It is clear that this film is made for an audience to experience in ASL as well as spoken English, rendering clear the privileging of a hearing world that Matlin has navigated through her professional and personal life. Stern conducts her interviews in ASL, and Deaf interviewees respond accordingly—their interviews, when paired with archival, are split-screened. The film is also open-captioned. A middle section that covers student activism at Gallaudet University, the only liberal arts college for Deaf students in the U.S. (the subject of another Sundance doc, Deaf President Now!), is the best example of the film’s deft handling of big concepts like communication, representational politics, and bodily autonomy. This biodoc should bring Matlin’s advocacy accomplishments and artistry to even broader audiences.
Predators
One of several docs in this edition of Sundance to address the implications of how crime and punishment are conveyed—and profited from—in popular media today, David Osit’s Predators is the most promisingly rigorous and formally inventive. Starting with NBC’s hit reality show To Catch a Predator (2004-2007), which lured alleged child molesters to set to stage their arrest, this competition title also addresses the show’s modern-day impact on vigilante Youtubers and news investigations. This Vanity Fair feature holds many more fascinating details. Osit’s previous films as a director were handsome observational docs, with a fair bit of self-referential knowingness. Here, his other career as an in-demand editor of true crime (The Vow) and archival media investigations (Hostages) should bring additional depth.
Seeds
This long-gestating project from the Ohio-based Brittany Shyne assembles the spiritual, labor, social, and familial lives of Black farmers in the U.S. South into a poetic testimony. Presented in handsome b&w and without the distraction of explanatory title cards, this feature drops us into the daily rhythms of cultivating pecans, cotton, and land that gets ever more difficult to pass on through the generations. The political implications of farm subsidies, inheritance taxes, and the multinational corporations taking over agriculture peek through at the edges, but Seeds’ focus is on conversational rhythms and telling gestures between friends and neighbors, producers and sellers, grandparents and grandchildren. Produced by Danielle Varga, who has a roster of critically acclaimed documentaries that reject heavy-handed narrative structures (The Hottest August, Cameraperson), Shyne, and Sabrina Schmidt Gordon (Flint, Quest), and edited by Malika Zouhali-Worrall, this feature was also supported by IDA’s Enterprise Fund. The two-hour runtime could be an issue, but appreciative viewers will settle into the film’s surehanded flow.
Abby Sun is IDA’s Director of Artist Programs and Editor of Documentary.