Thirty-three independent documentary films have been selected for 2015 Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program support.
The
Sundance Documentary Fund moved to a limited rolling open call in 2015, encouraging filmmakers to submit applications only when they feel their film is ready to share. Rahdi Taylor, Film Fund Director, said, “This past year was one of experimentation and change. We eliminated deadlines, embraced risk taking in form, filmmaker and subject matter, but we stayed true to our core purpose of discovering contemporary stories of meaning and moral purpose. Overall the selections are characterized by risk, inclusion and innovation as well as addressing the most vital conversations of our time.”
DEVELOPMENT
The Acali Experiment (Sweden) (pictured above)
Director: Marcus Lindeen
Producer: Erik Gandini
In 1973 five men and six women went on a dramatic raft expedition across the Atlantic Ocean for 101 days to study human aggression and sexuality. This documentary reunites them forty years later to reveal what actually happened during one of history’s strangest group experiments.
Afterglow (Hungary)
Director: Noémi Veronika Szakonyi
Producer: Julianna Ugrin
The filmmaker found her missing brother, who was kidnapped at age six by his father, a man with extraordinary connections in communist Hungary.
Casting JonBenet (Australia/U.S.)
Director: Kitty Green
Producer: Scott Macaulay and Kitty Green
An artful exploration of the legacy of the world’s most sensational child-murder case, the unsolved death of six-year-old American beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey.
Shirkers (U.S.-Singapore)
Writer-Director-Producer: Sandi Tan
In 1992, an enigmatic American named Georges shot Singapore’s first indie film with a group of female teenage film-buffs, then absconded with all the footage. Nearly twenty years later, his widow uncovers the 16mm cans in New Orleans—and ships them to the film’s screenwriter-actress, who embarks on a new voyage to Singapore, Cambridge, New Orleans, and into the past.
Three Identical Strangers (U.K.)
Director: Tim Wardle
Producer: Grace Hughes-Hallett
There’s no-one else on Earth quite like you. Or is there…?
Untitled Kronos Project (U.S.)
Director: Sam Green
Untitled Kronos Project is an experimental, live documentary that will tell the story of legendary classical group the Kronos Quartet and its 40 year career.
Untitled Prison Project (U.S.)
Director: Roger Ross Williams
Producer: Femke Wolting, Bruno Felix, Roger Ross Williams
Filmmaker Roger Ross Williams sets out on a deeply personal journey to understand why so many friends from his childhood town of Easton, Pennsylvania are in prison.
Yoghurt Utopia (U.K./Spain)
Directors: Anna Thomson, David Baksh
Producer: Adrian Pennink
Christopher Columbus gives 200 mental patients an opportunity to live, work and lead productive lives producing La Fageda, a top yogurt brand from Catalonia, Spain. Can this Yoghurt Utopia survive the mounting internal and external pressures?
Young Men and Fire (US)
Director: Kahlil Hudson and Alex Jablonski
Producer: Kyle Dickman
Young Men and Fire tells the story of working class men in a single wildland firefighting crew as they struggle with fear, loyalty, love, and defeat all over the course of a single fire season.
When God Sleeps
Director: Till Schauder (U.S/ Germany)
Producer: Sara Nodjoumi & Till Schauder (U.S./Germany)
When God Sleeps depicts the journey of an Iranian musician who is forced into hiding after hardline clerics offer a $100,000 reward for his murder
Whose Streets? (U.S.)
Director: Sabaah Jordan and Damon Davis
Producer: Flannery Miller
The murder of a teenage boy became the last straw for a community under siege. Whose Streets? follows the journey of everyday people turned freedom fighters, whose lives intertwine with a burgeoning national movement for black liberation.
PRODUCTION
All These Sleepless Nights (Poland/UK)
Director: Michal Marczak
Producer: Marta Golba, Michal Marczak, Julia Nottingham, Thomas Benski and Lucas Ochoa
A new era is coming, and Warsaw stands uncomfortably at its edge. Christopher and Michal, on the precipice of their own coming of age, restlessly roam their city’s streets in search of living forever inside the beautiful moment. Never content with answers, they push each experience to its breaking point, testing what it might mean to be truly awake in a world that seems satisfied to be asleep.
Audrie & Daisy (U.S.)
Director: Bonni Cohen, Jon Shenk
Producers: Richard Berge and Sara Dosa
Two teenage girls are sexually assaulted while unconscious by boys who they thought were their friends. Each girl is harassed relentlessly online, both attempt suicide, and tragically, one girl dies. High school assault in the age of social media is explored from the perspective of the girls –and the boys –involved in the assaults.
Cecilia (India)
Director/Producer: Pankaj Johar
When Cecilia Hasda’s 14 year old daughter is trafficked and found dead in Delhi, the filmmaker and his wife decide to help her seek justice. As they battle a web of corruption at all levels, they find themselves navigating a complex network of cops, traffickers, judges, lawyers, villagers and family members.
Eagle Huntress (UK/Mongolia)
Director: Otto Bell
Producer: Stacey Reiss and Sharon Chang
This spellbinding documentary follows Aisholpan, a 13-year-old nomadic Mongolian girl as she battles a culture of misogyny to become the first female Eagle Hunter in 2,000 years of male-dominated history.
Forgiveness (U.K.)
Director: Elizabeth Stopford
Producer: Nicole Stott
A modern American ghost story and a house that vanished. In the wake of two seemingly inexplicable shooting sprees, can a community forgive the teenage boy at the heart of its tragic past? .
Greywater (U.S.)
Director: Jeff Unay
Greywater is the story of Joe, a blue-collar family man who breaks the promise he made years ago to never fight again. Now forty years old, with a wife and four children who depend on him, he risks everything—his marriage, his family, his financial security— to go back into the fighting cage for one last time and come to terms with his past.
The Keepers (U.S.)
Director: Ryan White
Producer: Jessica Lawson
A documentary thriller unraveling a longstanding mystery in Baltimore.
Untitled Newtown Documentary (U.S.)
Director: Kim A. Snyder
Producer: Maria Cuomo Cole, Kim A. Snyder
We witness residents of Newtown, CT navigate the aftermath of the deadliest mass shooting of schoolchildren in American history.
Untitled Reef Project (U.S.)
Director: Jeff Orlowski
Producer: Larissa Rhodes
Richard Vevers quit his job at a top London ad agency and sets out to become an underwater photographer. Face-to-face with stunning evidence of the human caused destruction of vibrant underwater ecosystems, Richard races the clock to save the oceans.
POST-PRODUCTION
Almost Sunrise (U.S.)
Director: Michael Collins
Producer: Marty Syjuco
Two friends, ex-soldiers, embark on an epic journey to heal from their time in combat. Filled with hope for veterans who’ve left the battlefield behind and are now seeking peace on the home front, Almost Sunrise follows Tom and Anthony as they walk 2,700 miles across America.
The Event (Ukraine/Russia)
Director: Sergei Loznitsa
Producers: Sergei Loznitsa & Maria Choustova
Three days that shook the world or much ado about nothing?
Holy Cow (Azerbaijan/Germany/Romania)
Director: Imam Hasanov
Producer: Andra Popescu, Veronika Janatkova, Stefan Kloos
One man’s dream of bringing a European cow in his remote village in Azerbaijan unsettles the conservative community that wants to keep their secular traditions intact.
Maman Colonelle (France/DR Congo)
Director: Dieudo Hamadi
Producer: Christian Lelong
Colonel Honorine works for the Congolese police force and heads the unit for the protection of minors and the fight against sexual violence. Having worked for 15 years in Bukavu, in the east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, she learned she was being transferred to Kisangani. There, she found herself faced with new challenges.
Markie in Milwaukee (U.S.)
Director: Matt Kliegman
Producer: Matt Kliegman and Zac Stuart-Pontier
Markie dreams of completing her gender transition, but can she overcome the ghosts of her past as a Fundamentalist Baptist preacher?
The Pearl Button (El Boton de Nacar)
Director: Patricio Guzmán
Producer: Renate Sachse
The Pearl Button is a story about water, Cosmos and us. It all starts with the discovery of two mysterious buttons deep in the Pacific Ocean, off the Chilean coast.
Proposition for a Revolution (India)
Directors: Khushboo Ranka, Vinay Shukla
Producer: Anand Gandhi
Co-Producer: Ruchi Bhimani
Exec. Producer: Joris van Wijk
What happens when an insider challenges corruption in the world’s largest democracy? Proposition for a Revolution tells the extraordinary story of the 2013 New Delhi elections, which catapulted bureaucrat-turned-activist-turned-politician Arvind Kejriwal into power within a year of forming a new anti-corruption political party. A ground-level verite portrait depicting the transformation of a people’s movement into a political party, the film follows Arvind Kejriwal with unprecedented access as he takes on the oldest political party in India–The Congress Party.
The Reagan Years (U.S.)
Director: Pacho Velez
Producer: Sierra Pettengill
The Reagan Years is about a prolific actor’s defining role: Leader of the Free World. It uses the Reagan administration’s internal documentation to capture the spectacle of American might at its acme.
Teatro (U.S./Italy)
Director: Jeff Malmberg
Producer: Chris Shellen
For the past 50 years, the villagers of Monticchiello have confronted their communal issues through art in the form of a play that the entire town writes and performs. Teatro is a portrait of this tradition seen through the lens of the last man trying to keep it alive.
They Call Us Monsters (U.S.)
Director: Ben Lear
Producer: Sasha Alpert and Gabriel Cowan
They Call Us Monsters takes us behind the walls of The Compound, where Los Angeles houses its most violent juvenile offenders. To their advocates, they’re kids. To the system, they’re adults and to their victims they’re monsters. This film asks us to decide for ourselves.
AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT
1971 (U.S.)
Director: Johanna Hamilton
Producer: Marilyn Ness
On March 8, 1971 a group of citizens broke into an FBI office in Media, PA near Philadelphia and raided thousands of secret files that revealed an illegal government program known as COINTELPRO. Never caught, they have remained anonymous. Until now.
Enter the Faun (U.S.)
Director & Producer: Tamar Rogoff and Daisy Wright
Executive Producer: Véronique Bernard
Art and science collide as a young actor with cerebral palsy and a dancer embark on a journey that leads to unprecedented physical transformation and challenges the limitations associated with disability.
SUNDANCE | ESPN FILMS FELLOW
Shot in the Dark (U.S.)
Director: Dustin Nakao Haider
Producers: Daniel Poneman, Daniel Dewes, Derek Doneen, and Ben Vogel
For the players on Orr Academy’s basketball team, the court is a haven. Outside, it’s the Westside of Chicago – a neighborhood racked with gangs, gun trafficking, and violence. Within those walls, each player has his own struggle. But they’ll need to fight together if they ever want to break out.
Read more
Almost Sunrise, a feature documentary by the award-winning filmmaking team behind Give Up Tomorrow (a 2013 News & Documentary Emmy nominee) Michael Collins (director) and Marty Syjuco (producer), is a timely and groundbreaking look at what could be a missing piece of the puzzle—the true nature of the psychological wounds of returning soldiers known as “moral injury” and the undeniable potential power of meditation and nature therapy in helping veterans to reclaim their lives.
As part of the film’s week-long theatrical release at IFC Center in New York, Collins and Syjuco along with Tom Voss and Anthony Anderson, the subjects of Almost Sunrise, will participate in a Q&A at a special screening on opening night, Friday, July 14 (time TBD), and throughout the film’s opening weekend.
Almost Sunrise tells the inspiring story of Voss and Anderson, two Iraq veterans, who, in an attempt to put their haunting combat experience behind, embark on an extraordinary 2,700-mile trek on foot across America. While the physical trek across snowy mountains and vast deserts is punishing, the inner journey proves to be, by far, the most dangerous mission they will ever undertake. Like many of their fellow returned servicemen and women, Tom and Anthony are tackling post traumatic stress, or PTS, but the pair are simultaneously dealing with an unseen battle scar called “moral injury”—often manifested as an extreme brand of guilt and shame that arises when one goes against one’s own moral code. While PTS, characterized by fear, can be treated with drugs, therapists are finding that no amount of medication can treat the pain that comes from carrying a moral burden. Almost Sunrise is the first feature documentary film to introduce the emerging term “moral injury,” what some experts believe may eventually be recognized as the signature war wound of our generation.
While the film exposes some of the brutality of war, it does not dwell there. “It’s ultimately a story of hope and potential solutions,” Collins says. Most importantly, the film reveals the promise of holistic practices for healing. When Tom signs up for a special breathing workshop for veterans, he must confront his deepest spiritual identity. He encounters Father Thomas Keating, a renowned Trappist monk who has counseled veterans for decades, who gently illuminates the need to turn inward to achieve true peace, guidance that culminates in a remarkable transformation, rarely depicted on screen. Where the stereotypes of “the broken veteran” and “homecoming hero” leave off, Almost Sunrise continues onward, presenting audiences with an unprecedented portrait of those who return from war; richer, far more complex beings—driven by a universal human aspiration for happiness—who discover life’s soaring possibilities.
“One of the main pillars of our Impact Campaign is ‘Connecting Communities,’ and every week we experience this in meaningful ways at screenings across the country,” says Syjuco. “Our vision for the campaign is to walk with veterans on a path towards healing by following these four pillars: 1. Educate on Moral Injury; 2. Promote Wellness; 3. Connect Communities; and 4. Change Legislation.”
Since making its World Premiere on Memorial Day 2016 at Telluride Mountainfilm Festival, where it also launched its immersive two-year Impact Campaign, Almost Sunrise has gone on to screen at impressive 125+ festival, community and live-event screenings across the country, including VA Hospitals and a special screening at the Wisconsin State Senate. University and academic screenings have included Harvard, Columbia, Georgetown, NYU, Stanford, Yale and International House NYC.
The many awards and accolades for Almost Sunrise include the 2017 Media Award for Best Film from the National Association of Social Workers (NASW)—social workers comprise highest number of staff at VA hospitals. At Telluride Mountainfilm, the film won the “Moving Mountains” Award, a top jury prize, which recognizes a film with a powerful social impact. It was also an official selection of the prestigious Human Rights Watch Film Festival, AFI Docs, and was the Centerpiece Presentation at Milwaukee Film Festival. It also took home the Audience Award at Reelworld Toronto and won Best Thought Provoking Film at Waimea Ocean Hawaii.