EDITOR’S NOTE: Part II summarizes the films and programs from Sundance 2026 that are part of The Utah Review coverage. For Part I which is an overview of the state of the film industry in Utah, see here.
About this year’s Sundance festival, Geralyn Dreyfous, the principal cofounder of the Utah Film Center as well as Impact Partners and Gamechanger Films, said the 2026 theme is “surprisingly, comedies, hilarity and absurdity inviting us to embrace levity and the lighter side of life.”
One of the films on the slate is Hot Water, a Sundance feature narrative debut which is directed and written by Ramzi Bashour, with some scenes filmed in San Juan County in Utah, including Goosenecks State Park.Twin Rocks Cafe and Recapture Lodge. In this unconventional road comedy, a Lebanese mother and her American son embark on an odyssey across the U.S. Layal is a Type A Arabic professor whose troubled teenage son Daniel is expelled from high school, which prompts her to escort him from Indiana to California to live with his estranged father. As the pair move westward, they have a series of encounters with unlikely people and places—including a memorable stop with an eccentric friend that reveals the fractures and growing bonds between them.
There is also a penetrating inquiry into AI’s origin story in Sundance’s NEXT program (Ghost in the Machine) and a personal reflection of what it means for a new child to be born in the AI era (The AI Doc: Or I How Became an Apocaloptimist) by Daniel Roher (Navalny) and Charlie Tyrell (My Dead Dad’s Porno Tapes), Dreyfous noted. Ghost in the Machine is directed by Valerie Veatch, whose Sundance-premiering films Me @ The Zoo (HBO) and Love Child 사이버 사랑 (HBO) examined how new technologies reshape our conceptions and perceptions identity, power and culture. Veatch gathered more than 100 hours of conversations with 35 AI experts, historians, philosophers, sociologists, journalists and thinkers as the basis for the film. The title comes from a phrase coined by Oxford Professor Gilbert Ryle in his 1949 book Theory of Mind as a critique of Cartesian Dualism, setting the stage for the fantasy of a thinking machine. Ryle published Alan Turing’s essay The Thinking Machine, as the editor of the Oxford Journal of Mind, where Turing pondered the question about whether or not machines can think.
Documentaries about music and biopics about famous figures are well represented this year, including Billie Jean King, Maria Bamford, Luis Valdez and Courtney Love, Brittney Griner, Nelson Mandela and Salman Rushdie.
Of great interest to Utahns is The Lake, in the U.S. Documentary Competition, which is one of the three films fiscally sponsored by the Utah Film Center. Directed by Abby Ellis and produced with Fletcher Keyes, the film documents the Great Salt Lake’s existential crisis The film highlights Brian Steed, Great Salt Lake Commissioner, and scientists Ben Abbott and Bonni Baxter as part of the balance of perspectives that also include politicians and agricultural industry representatives Dreyfous said The Lake shows that despite tremendous odds, the Great Salt Lake’s existential crisis is a solvable problem. Dreyfous explained that the documentary is a good case study of evolving leadership, as Governor Spencer Cox has not only acknowledged what solutions could be most efficacious but he also is listening earnestly to the counsel of Steed and his scientific colleagues. “These are really smart people,” she said, adding that the film can provide the impetus for viewers to press the urgency with state legislators.
The Lake is the latest project in Utah’s creative industry that has focused on the lake’s crisis. In 2025, Plan-B Theatre produced The Great Salt Lake Plays, part of Wake the Great Salt Lake, a temporary art project supported by Salt Lake City Arts Council, Salt Lake City’s Mayor’s Office, and Bloomberg Philanthropies Public Art Challenge. One was Just Add Water by Matthew Ivan Bennett and Elaine Jarvik, and the other is Eb and Flo by Elaine Jarvik, which is the current Plan-B Theatre’s 13th Free Elementary School Tour (FEST) production.
Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by László Polgár
The Lake epitomizes the gist of a 2024 social media post Darren Parry, a local Shoshone Nation elder. He wrote, “Saving the Great Salt Lake is not a science problem, but a values problem.” The premise is embedded in the theme of the Great Salt Lake as our “nonhuman kinfolk,” which Parry recalled how his grandmother referred to it. In recent years, a good number of creative programs in the visual and performing arts areas have been effective for engaging a constructive, welcoming atmosphere that primes the ground for transcending partisan stubbornness, political identity and, hopefully, a good chunk of the recalcitrance we use in balking at our responsibilities as stewards of nature. The Lake promises to ramp up that visibility significantly during and after Sundance.
The two other Utah Film Center fiscally sponsored documentaries will delight audiences of locals and international visitors. Queen of Chess, directed by Rory Kennedy, one of Sundance’s most familiar documentary filmmakers, is a cinematic portrait about Judit Polgár, considered by many as the all-time greatest woman chess player of all time. Raised in Hungary during the Soviet era, where chess has always been an iconic cultural pursuit, Polgár became the youngest grandmaster in history and challenged the deeply patriarchal culture of international chess. In addition to outstanding archival footage, the film percolates with a rousing girl-power soundtrack.
Utah’s place in the international chess world is anchored deeply. At Brigham Young University freshmen in 1995, Erik Allebest and Jay Severson played chess but it soon became serious enough for them to create Chess.com, the world’s most popular website for the name, which, by 2023, was worth more than $500 million at the time and currently has more than 230 million members. Its popularity surged especially after the premiere of Netflix’s chess-drama The Queen’s Gambit. According to a 2023 Deseret News feature, “As the company has grown to dominate the chess world — consistently hosting the top chess players and the game’s most prestigious events — Allebest, CEO of Chess.com, said he feels responsibility to steward the game into the future, even as recent cheating scandals threaten to undermine the website’s credibility in its newfound role.”
Michael Dweck and Greg Kershaw (Truffle Hunters and Gaucho Gaucho) produce what surely will be an audience favorite during the Festival with Cookie Queens, directed by Alysa Nahmias. The documentary is an SLC opener at the Rose Wagner Center for the Performing Arts, as part of the Family Matinee category which the Utah Film Center helped create. Four Girl Scouts embark on the annual cookie selling season and the quartet — Ara, Olive, Nikki, and Shannon Elizabeth — are charming and tenacious young entrepreneurs and leaders in the making.
Calling the film her most personal to date, Nahmias said Cookie Queens naturally follows the broader thematic arc she has explored in her prior films, including Art & Krimes by Krimes, The New Bauhaus and Unfinished Spaces. In her director’s statement, Nahmias wrote, “As a mother, and as a granddaughter of immigrants who worked in sales, I want to understand what aspects of ambition, acumen, community, and compassion are valuable for girls in today’s economy, especially as gender inequities and the wealth gap are widening. I also want to see children and families represented with nuance on screen in a nonfiction film that kids can enjoy just as much as adults will.”
One In A Million (directed by Itab Azzam and Jack MacInnes) promises to be an exceptional film. The documentary chronicles the experiences of Isra’a from her preteen years in Aleppo during the Syrian Civil War to their escape and eventual settlement in Cologne, Germany and most recently as a married woman and mother who is able to visit Aleppo once again after the Assad regime fell. The stories are told entirely by Isra’a and her family members. In their directors’ statement, Azzam and MacInnes wrote, “When the war started in Syria in 2011 we were a new couple living in Damascus, Syria, the country of Itab’s birth. We left for London in August of that year planning to return a few months later, but that day never came. They added, “Four years later in 2015, we met Israa selling cigarettes on a street corner in Turkey, as she and her family had just arrived from the devastation of Aleppo. Defiant and brimming with joy, despite the horror around her, we instantly fell in love with her – and felt that her story demanded telling.”
The film follows through exquisitely on its creative brief, as Azzam and MacInnes explained, “The media was, and remains, full of speculation as to the probable success of large scale immigration in the long term, with public opinion divided predictably on political lines. But we felt we were witnessing the truth first hand and that the answers would only start to reveal themselves after a considerable period of time. We were Israa’s only constant presence beyond her family from her time in Turkey and we knew we wanted to stay in her life. That was when the idea for One in a Million was born.
Kikuyu Land (directors and Producers: Andrew H. Brown, Bea Wangondu, producers: Moses Bwayo, Mike Morrisroe, Joseph Njenga) also promises to be a riveting documentary. Wangondu is a journalist based in Nairobi, who is investigating not only the newly elected Kenyan president’s moves to undercut the legitimacy of the National Land Commission’s efforts to secure land tenure for Kenyans but also the abuses of workers on tea plantations owned and operated by Western corporate interests. Along the way, she discovers a shocking secret about her grandfather and the impact it has on comprehending the significance of land for individual legacy and cultural identity. In their directors’ statement, Brown and Wangondu noted, “For generations, the Kikuyu people have fought to protect their land, culture, and future. Much of this history has been told through outside perspectives. Kikuyu Land reclaims voice and agency, centering those directly affected by colonial policies and ongoing structures of power. By amplifying these lived experiences, the film is both historically rigorous and emotionally resonant while highlighting how similar systems of exploitation impact communities worldwide.”
Other documentaries also are darker and more sobering. American Doctor (directed by Poh Si Teng) is about treating casualties in the Gaza war and genocide and Sentient (director and screenwriter: Tony Jones, screenwriter: Rachel Grierson-Johns, producer: Ivan O’Mahoney) an investigation into laboratory research on animals exposes a hidden world in which it’s not just the animals getting hurt. The story of Dr. Lisa Jones Engel, a primatologist turned animal welfare advocate, asks whether harming animals and ourselves in science’s name is justified.
Among other documentaries is Seized (director and producer: Sharon Liese, with producers Sasha Alpert, Paul Matyasovsky). The small town of Marion, Kansas became famous internationally after a police raid on the Marion County Record newspaper and the death of its 98-year-old co-owner. The August 11, 2023 raid was carried out after news stories were published about a restaurant owner who kicked reporters out of a meeting with U.S. Rep. Jake LaTurner, and revelations about the restaurant owner’s lack of a driver’s license and conviction for drunken driving. Last November, the county agreed to pay a cumulative $3 million to three journalists and a city councilor. As reported in the Kansas Reflector, “The county was a secondary player in the raids… but the agreements could play a part in the paper’s ongoing cases against the city.”
Another is Soul Patrol (director and producer: J.M. Harper, producers: Sam Bisbee, Danielle Massie, Nasir Jones, Peter Bittenbender) which uncovers the hidden history of the Vietnam War’s first Black special operations team who reunite to tell their story.
Cultural documentaries are consistent gems at Sundance and the promise of American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez / (director, screenwriter, and producerDavid Alvarado, with producers Lauren DeFilippo, Everett Katigbak, Amanda Pollak) is robust. Against political resistance and industry skepticism, Luis Valdez pushes Chicano storytelling from the fields to the film screen with Zoot Suit and La Bamba, crafting iconic works that challenge, celebrate, and expand America’s story.
The Utah Review also is covering the seven episodic projects, which were selected from 470 submissions. Also, the program of 54 short films, which was curated from 11,480 submissions. Of these submissions, 4,914 were from the U.S. and 6,566 were international. Works from 22 countries and territories are represented in the short film lineup.
As for Sundance tickets and more information, see the Sundance website.