Documentaries

It was while shooting the documentary Last Men in Aleppo in Syria, that Feras Fayyad came across Dr. Amani Ballour.

Actress, producer, activist and living film legend Jane Fonda was a panelist at our first Summit in 2019. That’s where the idea was born to restore FTA, the documentary on the anti-war movement in the US military, with and produced by Fonda and Donald Sutherland in 1971.

Every year, the Sundance Film Festival has one big controversial documentary on their schedule. Just remember Alex Gibney’s anti-Scientology film Going Clear, and last year’s Leaving Neverland, a multiple-part HBO doc about Michael Jackson’s pedophilia.

 In August 2017, Swedish journalist Kim Wall was brutally murdered and dismembered by self-proclaimed Danish inventor Peter Madsen in his homemade submarine. At the time Australian documentarian Emma Sullivan was following Madsen in order to tell a completely different story about the eccentric self-made inventor’s Rocket-Madsen’s Space Laboratory.

In the early 1990s, children’s cable network Nickelodeon, seeking animated programming different from the medium’s traditional powerhouse providers, opened itself up to outside pitches and turned to a hyperactive, highly imaginative upstart, John Kricfalusi, giving him a shot with a six-episode order for Ren & Stimpy, a TV show about an emotionally imbalanced chihuahua and his good-natured but dimwitted feline best friend. When the series premiered in August 1991, it was an out-of-the-gate smash hit, breaking rating records, immediately challenging The Simpsons (then just entering its third season) for domination among animation fans, and eventually raking in, at its peak, several billion dollars in merchandising per year.

Since the onset of the Arab Spring, the Sundance Film Festival has been a platform for in-depth documentaries. From Egypt, Libya, Syria, Iraq, and the Yemen, audiences have been taken behind the news headlines and introduced to the people who risk their lives facing brutal regimes for freedom and democracy.

In recent years, Sundance has drawn quite a few politicians and activists to the snow-capped mountains of Park City, most notably Al Gore and Ruth Bader Ginsberg, the former a two-time producer of environmental documentaries, the latter the subject of a doc on her life. This year it was none lesser than the former First Lady, New York Senator, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who flew in from New York (on a commercial flight, not private), to promote Hillary, a four-part, four-hour documentary that will start airing on Hulu in March.

The crowd that packed the Sundance screening of Summertime at the MARC Theater in Park City was one of the most stoked in memory. Mostly because at least half the audience seemed to be made up by either cast, crew or friends of Carlos Lopez Estrada’s exuberant and experiential poetry-driven film.

Its provocative, politically incorrect title serving as advance notice of the myth-smashing yet to unfold, Crip Camp, which just enjoyed its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, tells an emotionally affecting civil rights story that illustrates how barriers — despite the pat presentations history books generally give us — are broken through less with single moments of radical, raised-fist norm-toppling, and more often eroded, overcome and defended over and over again with the hard work and dogged determination of marginalized sub-groups, which then manifests in social awakening and broader societal buy-in. Executive produced by Barack and Michelle Obama as the first effort out of the gate in their slate of programming for Netflix, this documentary takes as its titular focus Camp Jened, a teenage summer retreat first founded in the 1950s and eventually taken over in the 1970s by hippies with no formal training in special-needs care, but who provided an environment in which the disabled were empowered and given a platform to discuss their feelings and dream about a more equitable future.

Standing ovations of the magnitude of the one that shook the cavernous Eccles Theater for the premiere of Miss Americana are rare at the Sundance Festival. Then again, you already knew the screening of the much-awaited Taylor Swift documentary was going to be a special event from the spontaneous choirs of Swift lyrics which had been erupting from the ticket line.