Sundance 2025- The Documentaries
by Eric McClanahan
The Sundance Film Festival has been the staple of quality independent cinema in America since 1978. This year’s festival screened 94 feature-length films and 57 short films. While Sundance selects its program based on quality, a theme has seemed to emerge since I’ve been covering the festival. Last year it was youth — films like Didi, In the Summers, and Sujo featured stories of young people finding their way in life.
This year it is the other end of the journey — death. Whether it’s thousands from war, millions from cancer, or one, so many of this year’s selections dealt with the inevitable conclusion that comes for us all. Rather than somber, most of the selections celebrate the dichotomy — a death sentence is seen as little more than a calendar by which one can plot the days they’re actively living. Here’s a brief look at four documentaries that stood out this year…
COEXISTENCE, MY ASS!
Part stand-up comedy film, part memoir, Noam Shuster Eliassi’s journey through her heritage and political hopes is funny and heartbreaking. Told over the course of her life, we encounter recent history with a sharpened lens of personal experience. Raised in the Oasis of Peace, or Neve Shalom to the Israelis and Whahat Al-Salam to the Arabs — a community where Israelis and Arabs lived among one another in peace as a bastion to the wider world. From this upbringing Noam went to the United Nations as a Peace Ambassador but was inspired to spread her observations through comedy by none other than future Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. She grapples with her comedic voice, trying to decide if she will be topical, personal, or political, before discovering they’re all part of her distinctly human experience.
One of the few Israelis who can speak Arabic, Noam is able to communicate with her people, trying to convince them that the Palestinians they’ve been taught to oppress and hate and drive out are actually people themselves. Through her story we see the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from a unique and personal perspective, when she realizes “Coexistence doesn’t happen between the oppressor and the oppressed.” This film won the Grand Jury prize at Sundance for World Cinema, Documentary, for director Amber Fares.
MR. NOBODY AGAINST PUTIN
Classroom teacher and videographer Pasha Talankin spent two and a half years documenting Parabash Primary School #1, casting a damning light on the mandates of the New Federal Patriotic Education Policy enacted in Russia on February 22, 2022. Following the invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin pushed a policy of indoctrination to schools nationwide, replacing lessons with propaganda and political spin. Laws were enacted that made support, dissent, and even sympathy and arrestable offense. Patriotic displays told the children “Maybe one day you can be a dead soldier, too.”
When Pasha expresses his disheartenment at the new policy, amidst plummeting grades and other learning metrics, his mother calmly says “People love to shoot each other. And our people have been in all the wars, always. It’s always been that way.” Pasha was able to smuggle this footage and himself out of the country, now living as an expatriate in a country that now looks so dissimilar to that in which he was raised. This film won the Special Jury Award for World Cinema, Documentary for Talankin and coordinating director David Borenstein.
ANDRE IS AN IDIOT
André Ricciardi didn’t get a colonoscopy at 45, 50, or 51; when he finally did at 52, they found Stage 4 Cancer. As a creative spirit who worked in advertising most of his life, André decides he should catalog his fight against cancer to serve as a cautionary tale for other idiots. This film is such a journey, beginning with an energetic irreverence — it opens with André telling a story about putting his penis where it literally doesn’t belong. It tells the story of meeting his wife Janice, a Canadian bartender married as a favor so she could get a green card before genuinely falling in love, winning The Newlywed Game, and having two daughters. He explores ideas accompanied by stop motion animation and even reconvenes with his old ad firm to create a campaign on Colonoscopy Reminders.
He has such an exuberant personality and lively energy throughout, creating a joyous viewing experience for those who like their catharsis served loud and off-color. However, André discovers that “Dying is surprisingly boring,”and three months and two months after his diagnosis, he succumbs to his symptoms and passes away. As viewers, we watch his body wither away right before our eyes, and it is very affecting. As a film with a call to action, it is very effective, as I am currently making a plan to get my colonoscopy this year. The film won the Jonathan Oppenheim Editing Award and the Audience Award for US Documentary.
COME SEE ME IN THE GOOD LIGHT
If you thought we were done with cancer, you couldn’t be more wrong. This documentary by Ryan White, which won the Audience-voted Festival Favorite Award, follows Colorado Poet Laureate Andrea Gibson and their partner Megan Falley as Andrea battles for as many days as they can against an ovarian cancer diagnosis. Originally given a 2 year expectancy, Andrea fights with tenacity for every moment in the only life we’ll ever get. A thoroughly impactful and expressive slam poet from the rock star days of the nineties, Andrea has a undimmable spirit and a great humor as they navigate their diminishing time. Megan struggles with her own work while taking care of Andrea, putting her book on the back burner, saying “My partner has cancer, and I’m writing a book about my pant size?”
This sort of pragmatic understanding of the finite nature of time and life is the overarching theme of the film, which culminates in a live show at the Paramount Theater with opener Tig Notaro. The snippets of Andrea’s poetry performance inspired me to seek out their work and learn more, and it made me appreciate the time we have on earth with the people we love. In good news, as of this writing, Andrea Gibson is still with us, almost four years after being diagnosed.
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Originally published at http://behindtherabbitproductions.wordpress.com on February 4, 2025.
