The two features in the Episodic Nonfiction Pilot Showcase and the seven offerings in the Documentary Short Film Program comprise two of the most consistently outstanding program blocks this year at Sundance.
Episodic Nonfiction Pilot Showcase
If viewers are anticipating the conventional true crime fare, a genre that already is fatigued and or saturated, the pilot episode of Murder 101, directed by Stacey Lee, produces a huge gust of fresh air that recalibrates how we should approach and appreciate cold murder cases. The proposed series takes us to Elizabethton High School, nested in the Appalachian foothills in the eastern portions of Tennessee, where since 2018, students in Alex Campbell’s sociology class have gradually pieced together many missing pieces in a string of unsolved murders that occurred between late 1984 and 1985. In each school year, they have not only developed a profile of the serial killer but also have confirmed the identities of previously unidentified victims.
For the students the case of the Redhead Murders has produced an incredible volume of edifying lessons, especially from the perspective of those who were victims, that focus on the breadth and depth of sociological perspective about a criminal justice system that rises on the values of compassion, dignity and empathy instead of the usual sensationalizing of such murder cases. It is precisely because of Campbell’s impressive handling of the Socratic method and how he engages students in project-based learning that the class participants have been able to fill in critical gaps that have befuddled and stymied career criminal investigators for decades.
The episode ends, just as students have accomplished one of the most formidable milestones in the investigation, as one woman who was able to escape from the killer has agreed to be interviewed by them.
With a fine sense of the follies that lead to Shakespearean tragedy, Andreas Dalsgaard rivets the viewer’s attention in the first episode of The Oligarch and the Art Dealer. In this nonfiction which bristles with the energy worthy of great theater, Dalsgaard delves into one of the greatest art dealing scandals ever, with utmost clarity. At the center are two men with profoundly flawed egos at war with each other: Yves Bouvier, Yves Bouvier, and Dmitry Rybolovlev, an enigmatic Russian oligarch. While Bouvier offers himself on the screen, Rybolovlev, who ironically detests the label of oligarch, refused all requests for interviews.
Any viewer who has ever detested billionaires and oligarchs will feel that such harbored feelings are vindicated after watching this pilot. This is corruption on an unexaggerated scale. Bouvier is accused of cheating Rybolovlev of more than a billion dollars, and the incriminations reach to Sotheby’s, one of the world’s most powerful institutions when it comes to pinning the unprecedented, mind boggling price tags on artworks considered among the greatest ever produced by humans. The pernicious undercurrents that make a contrived Moneyland nation of freeports possible so that these enormously wealthy people can hold hostage such great artworks away from the public eye are laid bare.
There is no question that after viewing this episode, one cannot determine who is in the right here, with any semblance of confidence. Rybolovlev alleges that Bouvier acted as his agent/adviser and fraudulently overcharged him by some 1.1 billion euros through inflated purchase prices. Bouvier maintains he acted as an independent dealer (seller) free to set his own margins, not as an agent of Rybolovlev. This is where the implications of Sotheby’s knowledge of what was happening raises a host of separate questions.
As Dalsgaard noted in his director’s statement, “What emerges is a bigger question: Who gets to define truth when money and power distort reality? And what happens to everyone caught between those forces — our protagonists, their friends and employees, corporations, lawyers, journalists, witnesses, and the public?” Just as disturbing is that these are severely damaged men, who are wholly incapable of connecting spiritually as humans to the emotional awe of a great painting or to the noble cause of sharing such beauty with their fellow human beings.
Both pilots excelled for how they absorbed the viewers.
Documentary Short Film Program
A blockbuster of nonfiction shorts, this offering includes the Short Film Grand Jury Prize (The Baddest Speechwriter of All) and the Short Film Jury Award for Non-Fiction (The Boys and the Bees).
Directed by Joey Izzo, Going Sane: The Rise and Fall of the Center For Feeling Therapy, brings the viewer back to a generation, beginning in the 1960s and climaxing in the 1970s), when yearnings for utopian communities, self-help books and therapy became the rage. Izzo does a solid job in the space of 15 minutes, taking us through the timeline of collective therapy group based in Los Angeles that eventually metastasized into a cult of abusive manipulation, collapsed because of an internal coup and led to the largest litigation of malpractice in California history.
Arielle Knight’s award-winning The Boys and the Bees, is about a Black family in rural Georgia who is guiding their sons to appreciate nature and cultivate their connections to land, as they operate as beekeepers. The intimate scope in this short is brilliant, most particularly in the moments when the sons are learning to not fear being stung by a bee.
In a tight format, Liza Mandelup’s Luigi effectively encapsulates the pop culture cottage industry that continues to percolate around Luigi Mangione, whom some call a hero while the Trump Administration’s Department of Justice is requesting that he should be executed if convicted of killing Brian Thompson, the CEO of United Healthcare. In several examples, Mandelup shows just how diverse the spectrum of tragicomic response has become in lionizing Mangione.
An experimental concept piece, Tuktuit : Caribou by Lindsay Aksarniq McIntyre, is a great example of documentary as a cinematic art installation. The film features emulsions, crafted by hand as well as those manufactured, to portray the ties between Inuit people and the land, the lichens and caribou (for example, the hide from caribou is processed into a gelatinous substance to make emulsions by hand. The documentary was made in Nunavut where caribou populations have declined significantly since the 1980s and have led to stricter conservation measures to bring the numbers upward.
Jack Raese’s delightful short The Chimney Sweeper, introduces us to Markus, whose great-great-great-grandfather, Wilhelm Füchtner, created the first nutcracker doll which would become one of the world’s most iconic Christmas season decorations. Füchtner’s main business was carpentry and it was Markus’s grandfather who became the first family member to make a living from making the nutcrackers.
STILL STANDING, by Victor Tadashi Suárez, joins several other Sundance films in recent years that have been based on wildfires in California, including Lucy Walker’s Bring Your Own Brigade (2021), which examined the 2018 Camp and Woolsey fires and Ron Howard’s Rebuilding Paradise (2020), about Paradise, California, which was nearly destroyed during the Camp Fire. On January 7, 2025, the Eaton fire destroyed more than 9,000 structures in Altadena, California. However, for those whose homes were not affected by the fire, the residents returned to conditions associated with toxic ash contamination that left them in the difficult dilemma of deciding if it was worth the risk to their health to follow through. A recent report by NPR’s Michael Copley highlighted the ongoing hurdles for recovery and rebuilding. “For homeowners, the battle to collect insurance money after the Eaton and Palisades fires has exacerbated a grueling recovery that’s far from over,” Copley wreported. “The struggle Los Angeles residents have faced with insurers mirrors what’s happening in communities around the United States. Years of rising premiums, due in part to threats from climate change, have added to the frustration with insurance companies.”
It is really no surprise that The Baddest Speechwriter of All, directed by two-time Academy Award winner Ben Proudfoot and NBA All-Star Stephen Curry, merited the grand jury prize for short film at Sundance. The film’s message and theme are most acutely symbolic for the current moment.
The longevity of inconvertible and indestructible legacy resides in the heart of this stirring short, with Clarence Benjamin Jones, who is now 95, and his age-defying fervor. Jones, a musician-turned-lawyer who would become a key player in the iconic 1963 I Have A Dream speech by Martin Luther King Jr.
It is an extraordinary gift that instead of relying on archival interviews and recorded oral histories to capture the historic nature of that day in 1963, we have the resounding voice of first-hand testimony to bring us to the stage in that speech.
The film chronicles the lead-up, including the moment when Jones walked out of a New York City bank with $100,000 to satisfy the bail amount for Dr. King and other demonstrators who were in jail in Birmingham, Alabama. In fact, the money came from Nelson and David Rockefeller. Before he left, Jones signed a demand promissory note, an event that irritated him so much that he called singer-actor-activist Harry Belafonte, who had arranged for the money transfer, about it. Belafonte essentially told Jones, “Better you than me.”
A reference to the metaphor of a promissory note ended up in the text that Jones drafted for King’s speech at the March on Washington. Indeed, King spoke exactly the text of the first seven paragraphs of the speech that Jones had drafted. It was from that point, as Jones described it in a way that jazz musicians knew what was happening, when King took a cue from the legendary gospel singer Mahalia Jackson who urged him to ‘talk about the dream’ and went off script.
To hear Jones in his own words recollect one of the greatest moments of American history in the 20th century emboldens the spirit and soul. One of the most touching moments is when he sheds tears, as he recalls his mother’s battle with terminal cancer. The elucidating value of history must always thrive in the mindset of the immediate current moment. There is eminent grace in longevity.