2000 Meters to Andriivka. Courtesy of Sundance Institute
In recent years, Sundance created buzz for documentaries that either go on to broker successful deals (in 2024, Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui’s Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story was bought by Warner Bros. Discovery for $15 million post its premiere at the festival) or ricochet to Oscar wins (20 Days in Mariupol in 2024 and Navalny in 2023). For me, attending for the first time in person with the help of Sundance’s Press Inclusion Initiative (aimed at lending assistance to critics from underrepresented groups), the festival has been responsible for continuously spotlighting Indian films—Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh’s Writing With Fire in 2021, Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes in 2022, Sarvnik Kaur’s Against The Tide in 2023, and Anirban Dutta and Anupama Srinivasan’s Nocturnes in 2024—even when the country’s distribution circuit for documentaries continues to be broken.
Although there were no documentaries from India this year, the lineup of the World Documentary section was more expansive in its geopolitical interest than last year’s, which leaned on crowd pleasers (Arun Bhattarai and Dorottya Zurbó’s Agent of Happiness) and biographies (Lucy Lawless’s Never Look Away) with political undertones. This year the dissenting subtext assumed functional pointedness, with each work making a broader statement against hostile governments. The theaters went packed and audiences cheered as the snow-clad Park City lent an otherworldly, almost mythical safe space to the independent makers and their works. Although there is speculation of the festival moving out of state in 2027, it is difficult to imagine a setting more suited to Sundance than Utah. The inconveniences, like the high altitude and the extreme dry weather, somehow added to the charm and made me feel, albeit perversely, like I had earned the right to be an attendee.
The overarching theme of resistance is palpably evident in Maia Lekow and Christopher King’s How to Build a Library, which tracks the long, arduous journey of two Kenyan women taking a stab at decolonization. Situated in downtown Nairobi, the McMillan Memorial Library is the second oldest in Kenya and was restricted to be accessed by only Europeans for three decades till it opened its doors to the general public around 1962. The film begins in 2017, when writer Shiro and publisher Wachuka take it upon themselves to transform and modernize the space to reflect their own culture and embark on constant negotiation with bureaucratic hierarchies—presently the Kenyan government owns the library—and face opposition from people who originally worked there. In the midst, their friendship gets strained.
Lekow and King, who previously directed The Letter (2019), display genuine interest in following the protagonists around as they undertake the humongous task of arranging for funding to make the derelict library into a community center for the locals. Both Shiro and Wachuka are excellent in front of the camera. They grant access to their thoughts and growing reservations about each other, while acknowledging the need to put up a collective front. Their evolving relationship is pitted against the larger structural mandates that demand compliance of them. The filmmakers capture the interactions with sensitivity and grace, making space even for the eye-rolls they reserve for the government officials. But they also offset the daunting task with a neatness that feels reductive. How to Build a Library keeps its gaze fixed on Shiro and Wachuka and by doing so lessens the contributions of other staff around them. The film makes us privy to the task of building a library without understanding the relationship between the building and its historical community. In that absence, Lekow and King craft a crowd-pleaser with little nuance.
Standing against establishment finds a more realized rendition in Amber Fares’s Coexistence, My Ass! a compelling film on the murky conflict between Israel and Palestine conveyed through the observations of Jewish Israeli comedian Noam Shuster Eliassi. Fares’s nonfiction feature debut Speed Sisters (2015) looked at gender in Palestine through the country’s all-female racing team; her new film probes deeper into geopolitical skirmishes and takes sides by proffering the prospect of peace as a copout. Fares and Eliassi don’t ridicule harmony itself but acknowledge the genocide committed by Israel in Palestine, upholding the desire for coexistence between the two countries as a sham—a political tool to cover war crimes. It is a daring task that aligns with the pluckiness of the woman at the film’s center.
Eliassi, a captivating presence on camera, had an unusual childhood. Descended from Holocaust survivors, she grew up in Neve Shalom, a village where Israelis and Palestinian families co-exist with the intent of peace. Growing up she was attuned to the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine and recollects her parents’ refusal to barbecue on the Israeli Independence Day out of respect for their Palestinian friends. She did her bit for peace by working for the United Nations (UN) and later leaned on comedy to spread her message after being inspired by a comedian who went on to become a president—Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Fares recognizes the vitality of the protagonist and preserves it. The film borrows its title from a comedy show that Eliassi worked on at Harvard (she was invited by the university to develop her own comedy show) and by following her journey through the years—her time at Harvard, contracting Covid in 2020—Coexistence, My Ass! draws out a broad but intimate picture of dissent and peppers it with humor.
The third act overlaps with the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel and, in turn, the latter leading to the killing of thousands and thousands of Palestinians. Eliassi watches the TV reports in horror as we watch her face in horror. Her hitherto progressive relatives start changing sides; she joins rallies and is called a traitor by other Israelis for supporting Palestine. Fares, who is more brisk in her filmmaking in the initial stretches, opts for longer shots as we see Eliassi standing her ground amidst an altercation with middle-aged men going out of their way to confront her. She refuses to budge and, by continuing to train its lens on her, so does the film.
War and its aftermath form the centerpiece of Ukrainian filmmaker Mstyslav Chernov’s 2000 Meters to Andriivka, a devastatingly immersive documentary that follows a group of Ukrainian soldiers as they make their way through an army-infiltrated forest to free Andriivka, a Russian-occupied village. Chernov returns to Sundance two years after his Oscar-winning 20 Days in Mariupol, a haunting documentary on the first weeks of Russian invasion in 2022.
2000 Meters to Andriivka unravels as a chronological extension but it is laced with an undeniable sense of exhaustion that strengthens the filmmaker’s stance on the futility of war. Shot with AP journalist Alex Babenko, the documentary is made up of bodycam footage from the 2023 Ukrainian counteroffensive. We see bloodied hands and legs, and pained pleas by the injured soldiers to be left behind. The soldiers are young. There is a 24-year-old unit leader, Fedya who sees war in his dreams. The line between reality and nightmare has blurred. Even as 2000 Meters to Andriivka follows the men in their mission to free the village (nothing remains of it by the time they arrive), it culminates as an exceedingly humane portrait of those fighting in the frontline, aided by the little details that Chernov remains attuned to. A soldier tells him in good faith not to frame him as a hero. “I haven’t done anything yet”; another shares a cigarette and wistfully confides that he worries for his wife.
These confessions counterbalance their aggression, which is further reinforced by Chernov’s poignant English-language voice overs informing us, in hindsight, that most of the men did not survive. The underlying hopelessness comes full circle as dead bodies keep piling up and Chernov moves away from the battlefield to a soldier’s funeral. The anguished visuals pierce through the screen, reiterating how commonplace such incidents have become and how distressing they continue to be. In one scene, the mother of a dead soldier says, “Heroes die. Those who don’t fight, live.” When the film moves back to the war front, her words hang as a premonition. A cat emerges from the rubble in Andriivka, scared and alive.
The personal is political in Shoshannah Stern’s Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore, a crushing documentary on the Oscar-winning actress that bypasses the easy trappings of biopics. Stern, a Deaf actor and writer, makes her directorial debut and exudes unmatched gentility in her handling of Matlin, all without deifying her. The result is an insightful portrait of a person and a time that speaks volumes about the way Deaf people have been treated while also unfolding as a deeply personal experience. The balance is a marvel and Stern achieves much through the presence of Matlin, who for decades was the only Deaf actress to have won the Oscar. Instead of propping this up as an achievement, Stern gently probes its undersides and outlines the unpalatable remarks the actress had to face (she was constantly asked if the decision was driven by sympathy) and the burden she had to carry by being touted as the spokesperson of Deaf people.
There is an easy candor in the way Matlin relays her life, and possesses enough humility to look back and admit she always didn't know before. The actor talks about her activism for closed captioning on screen, as well as her struggle with drug abuse and stint at rehab. She extends the same openness while talking about her tumultuous relationship with William Hurt, her co-star in Children of a Lesser God (1986), and the abuse she faced in that relationship. When Matlin talks about the time it took for her to come out of the relationship, she shares that Deaf people are at a perpetual disadvantage because they don’t have the crutch of overhearing other people’s language to recognize their experience. In a world designed for hearing people, they are always playing catch up.
Stern ensures that in her work at least, Matlin leads from the front. Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore moves from open captioning and American sign language, the written word and talking heads (it’s never not funny when the talkiest of writers Aaron Sorkin makes an appearance), evoking a mixture of a sonic experience that mimics the way a Deaf person might move through life. The film opens and closes on the night of the Academy Awards when Matlin’s most recent hit film CODA (2021) won the top honors. Before the credits roll, we see Troy Kotsur getting the Oscar for best supporting actor. He goes up on stage and Matlin bursts with emotion. It took 34 years but the mantle was finally passed. Marlee Matlin is not alone anymore.
Ishita Sengupta is an independent film critic and culture writer from India. Her writing is informed by gender and pop culture and has appeared in The Indian Express, Hyperallergic, and New Lines Magazine. She was part of the Berlinale Talents cohort in 2025.