Features

If you’re a filmmaker, film student, or simply an avid fan of cinema, you likely cherish January more than most because you know the year’s frostiest (and busiest) time is right around the corner, with the arrival of the Sundance Film Festival. Every year, filmmakers from all over the globe travel to the snowy peaks of Park City, Utah to celebrate the best and brightest in independent filmmaking. Sundance provides an array of diverse content, from feature films to indies, documentaries, shorts and animated films, and it has even recently expanded into episodic television showcases. This year, members of the SVA community are well represented, showing up in full force with many of their related projects. 

Sundance runs January 18–28, and the MFA Social Documentary Film department leads the charge with a big group of talented faculty and alumni who have work debuting at the festival.

One of the biggest draws at the festival is the Special Screening section, and among the lineup is The Greatest Night in Pop, which already has Netflix distribution scheduled to start on January 28. Directed by Bao Nguyen (MFA 2011 Social Documentary Film), the acclaimed filmmaker behind the Bruce Lee documentary Be Water, the documentarian’s latest centers on the creation of the legendary global pop song “We Are the World” for USA for Africa—one of music history’s most star-studded recording sessions. The doc explores the untold story of the song, written by Michael Jackson and Lionel Ritchie, produced by Quincy Jones and featuring the voices of 46 musical icons, including Bruce Springsteen, Cyndi Lauper, Diana Ross, Stevie Wonder and others.

Premiering in the World Cinema Documentary Competition is alumnus Daniela Alatorre′s (MFA 2015 Social Documentary) film Igualada, which follows Francia Márquez, a Black Colombian rural activist who challenges the status quo with a presidential campaign that inspires the country to dream. Alatorre was last seen in competition at Sundance in 2021 with Users, which she co-produced.

Another film in the World Cinema Documentary section is Soundtrack to a Coup D’Etat, directed by alumnus and former faculty Johan Grimonprez (MFA 1992 Fine Arts). Described as an essayistic doc, the film centers on a flashpoint moment in history at the United Nations in 1960 when musicians Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach crashed the Security Council to protest U.S. policies; Nikita Khrushchev denounced America’s color bar and the U.S. sent jazz ambassador Louis Armstrong to the Congo to deflect attention from its first African post-colonial coup.

Debuting in the Short Film Program, the film Winding Path was directed by MFA Social Documentary faculty Ross Kauffman and Alexandra Lazarowich. The short centers on an Eastern Shoshone medical student who summers on the Wind River Indian Reservation helping her grandfather, who suddenly dies. In her grief, the student must find a way to heal before realizing her dream of a life in medicine. You can hear Kauffman talk more about the short in this Sundance clip.

The narrative Premieres section presents Look Into My Eyes, a feature doc offering an intimate view of psychics in New York City. Alumnus David Osit (MFA 2011 Social Documentary) is an additional editor on the picture. 

Directed by Oscar nominee Debra Granik, Conbody Vs Everybody premieres in the Episodic section of the festival. The series is about a group of men and women piecing their lives together after the harsh experience of incarceration. MFA Social Documentary faculty member Richard Hankin is a consulting editor on the project. Another series in the Episodic field, Penelope—about a 16-year-old drawn into the unknown wilderness, where she begins forming a new life for herself—features production design by alumnus John Lavin (MFA 1994 Fine Arts).

The Story Of Dustin Maynard, a Pepsi-branded content short documentary screening as a part of the Sundance-sanctioned Brand Storytelling event, features two 2016 MFA Social Documentary alumni, Lizzie Minges, an editor on the doc and Aom Prapaporn Pinyopusarerk, who was the producer. 

In the U.S. Dramatic Competition, alumnus Laurent Rejto (BFA 1984 Film) has an acting role alongside Jason Schwartzman and Carol Kane in Between the Temples, a comedy about a cantor facing a crisis in faith whose world is turned upside down when his grade school music teacher reenters his life as his new adult bat mitzvah student.

Additionally, Bella Randle Racklin (MFA 2017 Social Documentary) is attending Sundance as a part of the Pure NonFiction podcast press team. Pure NonFiction is a highly successful weekly audio series interviewing contemporary documentary filmmakers, led by faculty Thom Powers, also attending the festival.

Meanwhile, at Slamdance, the festival that runs adjacent to Sundance from January 19-28, will feature director Bill Plympton (1969 Cartooning) and his new animated feature Slide, the tale of a mythical cowboy who appears in a corrupt logging town. The Sundance Film Festival runs January 18–28. More details can be found on the festival’s official website.