By Gregory Crofton From the start you can see this is a meticulously crafted and well-paced documentary. The subject, German filmmaking legend Leni Riefenstahl, is equally fascinating, and in turn this archival film by Andres Veiel is impossible to turn off or turn away from. The darkness of the Nazi Era (1933-1945) remains fascinating and…
The post ‘Riefenstahl’: A Masterful Look at the Life and Self Image of a Nazi Propagandist appeared first on Channel Nonfiction.
By Gregory Crofton From the start you can see this is a meticulously crafted and well-paced documentary. The subject, German filmmaking legend Leni Riefenstahl, is equally fascinating, and in turn this archival film by Andres Veiel is impossible to turn off or turn away from. The darkness of the Nazi Era (1933-1945) remains fascinating and…
The post ‘Riefenstahl’: A Masterful Look at the Life and Self Image of a Nazi Propagandist appeared first on Channel Nonfiction.
With a $7 million opening weekend, it’s the highest opening for a non-music doc in over a decade, but the $75 million price tag for Amazon tells a different story.
After watching 13 documentaries at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, I’ve reviewed two shorts and one feature, and now I’ve got some thoughts to share on six more films. As for the rest, I don’t have enough to say about them at this time. To see our ranking of all 13, check out our Letterboxd list. A few of the selections I was able to screen were on the list of our most anticipated documentaries of 2026, and they generally did not disappoint. One of them even exceeded my expectations. You can find it at the start of this roundup below.
The best short documentary of 2021 may have spawned the best feature documentary of 2026! Well, spawned isn’t the right word, as Nuisance Bear was always meant to be more than the 14-minute version released five years ago. Directors Jack Weisman and Gabriela Osio Vanden returned to Churchill, Manitoba, to continue their spotlight on the “Polar Bear Capital of the World” and expand their coverage to present more perspectives, including those from a second location, as we see the Inuit relationship to those same creatures causing a fuss down the Bay. The result is another enchanting and more spiritual consideration of wildlife in today’s world.
Unlike the short, this Nuisance Bear includes a score, but not one that steers your feelings, and narration, but not the expositional kind. Spoken by the late Inuit elder Mike Tunalaaq Gibbons, this voiceover is especially personal and specific, yet also represents an Indigenous history that metaphorically relates to the polar bears in certain ways. The documentary also has room for the bears’ point of view within the central exploration of animals encroaching on the civilization that first encroached on their territory and participated in its negative transformation.
Without taking the anthropomorphizing route of so many nature documentaries, Nuisance Bear even manages, quite brilliantly, to give the audience one particular polar bear to care about. Between that and opening with a tourist gaze, Weisman and Osio Vanden really know how to grab the audience and then subvert their expectations. They tug at our heartstrings in a manner that ultimately yanks on our brains. You’ll want to watch it twice, at least once on a big screen, to really appreciate how much is going on with this film, and many more before it.
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Last year, Sundance gave us “by far the best war movie I’ve seen in a long time” with 2000 Meters to Andriivka, and now the festival has given us another war film masterpiece with Soul Patrol. It’s a completely different kind, though, not that visceral in-the-moment variety. Instead, it’s a historical documentary. But one thing they have in common, as do all the greatest war movies, is attention to characters. Soul Patrol introduces us to the surviving members of the first Black special ops team as they reunite to reflect on their experiences in the Vietnam War. Sadly, some of them didn’t live long enough to see the film, and after getting to know them and hearing their stories, you’ll be choking up seeing the notes on their passing in the end credits.
I tend to appreciate documentaries that contain micro and macro levels (and share that appreciation in my recommendations as a critic). Well, Soul Patrol feels like it does even more. It’s about Vietnam; then zooming in, it’s the story of Black America at the time; then zooming in further, it’s about Black soldiers in Vietnam, then this particular group, then each member of the group. The film reminds us that, beneath the generalizing, broad-scoped histories, each individual’s story is unique. Yet, every individual exists within the context of the world in which their story takes place. And there are multiple levels of context between the micro and macro extremes.
Soul Patrol flawlessly combines disparate documentary elements, including reenactments and judiciously selected archival footage. Plus, sequences of phantasmal encounters that could have easily come off as corny, but in the hands of director J.M. Harper, are stirring (I’m reminded of the “I Lied to You” sequence in Sinners, as it similarly shouldn’t work but does). Many people will think of Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods when hearing about and maybe even while watching parts of Soul Patrol, which only proves we need more movies centered on Black experiences and perspectives. Personally, I don’t think I’ve seen anything quite like this documentary.
There were times when I felt like I had seen Liz Garbus and Elizabeth Wolff’s Give Me the Ball! before. It’s a conventional biographical documentary about Billie Jean King, albeit one where the subject seems to be at the wheel, given the way she is filmed in close-up, talking directly through the screen and telling her story rather than being interviewed (another Sundance film, The Baddest Speechwriter of All, frames and indulges its subject the same way). One extensively addressed part of her story is certainly familiar to viewers today thanks to the dramatic depiction of the 1973 “Battle of the Sexes” match between King and Bobby Riggs in a 2017 biopic.
The documentary also especially recalls Sally, which premiered at Sundance just last year, partly because its subject, tennis legend Billie Jean King, was also in that film, and partly because it’s another tale of a Queer person who became famous at a time when being gay or bi, especially as a prominent figure idolized by children, was something to hide. What works differently and somewhat in its favor, while also less sad, is that, unlike Sally Ride, King is still alive and can talk about her life and identity on screen. King was also outed when she was at the peak of her celebrity, so we see exactly why it was unfortunately necessary for such figures to remain closeted then. But part of the need for this film is that King is more than just the lesbian tennis player.
Garbus and Wolff do something with Give Me the Ball! that breaks from the celebrity biography norm: they hold the applause to the end. They tell King’s story (with King doing most of the telling), and then, at the end, they bring in the complimentary guests spouting praise and discussing the subject’s importance. This plays more like a concluding epilogue, explaining that this whole story has led to this and to these people, mainly younger women tennis players, such as Serena Williams, who have benefited so much from how King changed her sport and women’s athletics in general, especially when it comes to widespread respect and financial compensation.
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All this time, we’ve just been worrying about the rise of the machines as a replacement for humans, or at least our jobs. Valerie Veatch’s Ghost in the Machine gives us more reason to fear AI: the technology has origins in eugenics, and the industry is steeped in misogynistic elitism. The latter might not be as much of a surprise, but the documentary may shock viewers with its arguments that artificial intelligence is intrinsically racist and prone to fascism even before its current leaders direct it to be less “woke.”
Structurally, Ghost in the Machine is an effective, chaptered essay, even if its points may be narrow in their concerns. Aesthetically, there is more to be desired, only because the many talking heads providing their expertise on the matter appear via Zoom calls as if the documentary were made during the pandemic. I would think it better to present the human side of the film more directly, practically, and materially. Another visual issue comes with an otherwise sensible idea. Veatch adds a caption to every image, labeling it as either AI or not AI, but some of them seem incorrect. I think this is a substantial work, and I only wish that it had the appearance of one in order that it may be taken seriously.
Going into Alysa Nahmias’s Cookie Queens, I expected fluff, and for the most part, that seems to be how it’s been received. The documentary follows four Girl Scouts from various parts of the country as they sell cookies and learn about business and entrepreneurship. They’re all adorable, but their stories carry hints of an ugly truth about the Girl Scout Cookie trade. One girl pushes herself to break a sales record even while regularly stating that she’s not that into it anymore. Another displays a desire to be as good at selling cookies as her older sisters, who held records in their area. One struggling family is too ambitious and risks losing their own money in the fundraiser.
The film doesn’t implicate Girl Scouts of the USA in any of these pressures, but there is some light talk of the organization’s profit sharing and minimal incentives related to all this child labor that, by being included in the edit, relays that criticism. To the organization’s credit, perhaps, there’s also little discussion of what the cookie selling is meant to teach or empower in these kids. Only one of the young characters, a five-year-old with type-1 diabetes and a very modest sales goal, appears to be truly happy in her efforts, and when she does hit a challenge, she tackles it with the sort of enterprising ingenuity you’d hope to come out of being a member of an organization like Girl Scouts. And she does it altruistically, not to be the best. It may not be the point of the film, but it’s a good reminder of the importance of quality over quantity.
With so many documentaries focused on the importance of journalism and journalists lately, it’s fair and necessary that we get one about a rare small-town newspaper still in operation. Just as Americans should be paying more attention to their local governments, they should also be aware of what local media they might have. Sharon Liese’s Seized follows the story of a little print weekly in Marion, Kansas, that was raided by the police in a clear misuse of power. Since its premiere, we’ve seen prominent journalists arrested in protests simply for intimidation and for show, making this film even more relevant as a microcosmic spotlight on the larger concerns for the First Amendment and political corruption.
The only problem with Seized is that there are no characters that hold our interest. The guy who owns and runs the paper isn’t the greatest representative for the issue, and that might be why the film also follows a young reporter who is new to town and marginally involved in covering the continuing story. He’s just not enough of a part of the narrative or issue at hand to matter to the documentary, and the more we are made to engage with him as a character, the less focused the film feels. When he inexplicably leaves the town and the paper at the end, that weakens our investment even more. Still, the core scenario of Seized is worth a look, but for a tighter documentary about a small-scale media outlet, I recommend Bad Press.
After watching 13 documentaries at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, I’ve reviewed two shorts and one feature, and now I’ve got some thoughts to share on six more films. As for the rest, I don’t have enough to say about them at this time. To see our ranking of all 13, check out our Letterboxd list. A few of the selections I was able to screen were on the list of our most anticipated documentaries of 2026, and they generally did not disappoint. One of them even exceeded my expectations. You can find it at the start of this roundup below.
The best short documentary of 2021 may have spawned the best feature documentary of 2026! Well, spawned isn’t the right word, as Nuisance Bear was always meant to be more than the 14-minute version released five years ago. Directors Jack Weisman and Gabriela Osio Vanden returned to Churchill, Manitoba, to continue their spotlight on the “Polar Bear Capital of the World” and expand their coverage to present more perspectives, including those from a second location, as we see the Inuit relationship to those same creatures causing a fuss down the Bay. The result is another enchanting and more spiritual consideration of wildlife in today’s world.
Unlike the short, this Nuisance Bear includes a score, but not one that steers your feelings, and narration, but not the expositional kind. Spoken by the late Inuit elder Mike Tunalaaq Gibbons, this voiceover is especially personal and specific, yet also represents an Indigenous history that metaphorically relates to the polar bears in certain ways. The documentary also has room for the bears’ point of view within the central exploration of animals encroaching on the civilization that first encroached on their territory and participated in its negative transformation.
Without taking the anthropomorphizing route of so many nature documentaries, Nuisance Bear even manages, quite brilliantly, to give the audience one particular polar bear to care about. Between that and opening with a tourist gaze, Weisman and Osio Vanden really know how to grab the audience and then subvert their expectations. They tug at our heartstrings in a manner that ultimately yanks on our brains. You’ll want to watch it twice, at least once on a big screen, to really appreciate how much is going on with this film, and many more before it.
Nonfics is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Last year, Sundance gave us “by far the best war movie I’ve seen in a long time” with 2000 Meters to Andriivka, and now the festival has given us another war film masterpiece with Soul Patrol. It’s a completely different kind, though, not that visceral in-the-moment variety. Instead, it’s a historical documentary. But one thing they have in common, as do all the greatest war movies, is attention to characters. Soul Patrol introduces us to the surviving members of the first Black special ops team as they reunite to reflect on their experiences in the Vietnam War. Sadly, some of them didn’t live long enough to see the film, and after getting to know them and hearing their stories, you’ll be choking up seeing the notes on their passing in the end credits.
I tend to appreciate documentaries that contain micro and macro levels (and share that appreciation in my recommendations as a critic). Well, Soul Patrol feels like it does even more. It’s about Vietnam; then zooming in, it’s the story of Black America at the time; then zooming in further, it’s about Black soldiers in Vietnam, then this particular group, then each member of the group. The film reminds us that, beneath the generalizing, broad-scoped histories, each individual’s story is unique. Yet, every individual exists within the context of the world in which their story takes place. And there are multiple levels of context between the micro and macro extremes.
Soul Patrol flawlessly combines disparate documentary elements, including reenactments and judiciously selected archival footage. Plus, sequences of phantasmal encounters that could have easily come off as corny, but in the hands of director J.M. Harper, are stirring (I’m reminded of the “I Lied to You” sequence in Sinners, as it similarly shouldn’t work but does). Many people will think of Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods when hearing about and maybe even while watching parts of Soul Patrol, which only proves we need more movies centered on Black experiences and perspectives. Personally, I don’t think I’ve seen anything quite like this documentary.
There were times when I felt like I had seen Liz Garbus and Elizabeth Wolff’s Give Me the Ball! before. It’s a conventional biographical documentary about Billie Jean King, albeit one where the subject seems to be at the wheel, given the way she is filmed in close-up, talking directly through the screen and telling her story rather than being interviewed (another Sundance film, The Baddest Speechwriter of All, frames and indulges its subject the same way). One extensively addressed part of her story is certainly familiar to viewers today thanks to the dramatic depiction of the 1973 “Battle of the Sexes” match between King and Bobby Riggs in a 2017 biopic.
The documentary also especially recalls Sally, which premiered at Sundance just last year, partly because its subject, tennis legend Billie Jean King, was also in that film, and partly because it’s another tale of a Queer person who became famous at a time when being gay or bi, especially as a prominent figure idolized by children, was something to hide. What works differently and somewhat in its favor, while also less sad, is that, unlike Sally Ride, King is still alive and can talk about her life and identity on screen. King was also outed when she was at the peak of her celebrity, so we see exactly why it was unfortunately necessary for such figures to remain closeted then. But part of the need for this film is that King is more than just the lesbian tennis player.
Garbus and Wolff do something with Give Me the Ball! that breaks from the celebrity biography norm: they hold the applause to the end. They tell King’s story (with King doing most of the telling), and then, at the end, they bring in the complimentary guests spouting praise and discussing the subject’s importance. This plays more like a concluding epilogue, explaining that this whole story has led to this and to these people, mainly younger women tennis players, such as Serena Williams, who have benefited so much from how King changed her sport and women’s athletics in general, especially when it comes to widespread respect and financial compensation.
Thanks for reading Nonfics! This post is public so feel free to share it.
All this time, we’ve just been worrying about the rise of the machines as a replacement for humans, or at least our jobs. Valerie Veatch’s Ghost in the Machine gives us more reason to fear AI: the technology has origins in eugenics, and the industry is steeped in misogynistic elitism. The latter might not be as much of a surprise, but the documentary may shock viewers with its arguments that artificial intelligence is intrinsically racist and prone to fascism even before its current leaders direct it to be less “woke.”
Structurally, Ghost in the Machine is an effective, chaptered essay, even if its points may be narrow in their concerns. Aesthetically, there is more to be desired, only because the many talking heads providing their expertise on the matter appear via Zoom calls as if the documentary were made during the pandemic. I would think it better to present the human side of the film more directly, practically, and materially. Another visual issue comes with an otherwise sensible idea. Veatch adds a caption to every image, labeling it as either AI or not AI, but some of them seem incorrect. I think this is a substantial work, and I only wish that it had the appearance of one in order that it may be taken seriously.
Going into Alysa Nahmias’s Cookie Queens, I expected fluff, and for the most part, that seems to be how it’s been received. The documentary follows four Girl Scouts from various parts of the country as they sell cookies and learn about business and entrepreneurship. They’re all adorable, but their stories carry hints of an ugly truth about the Girl Scout Cookie trade. One girl pushes herself to break a sales record even while regularly stating that she’s not that into it anymore. Another displays a desire to be as good at selling cookies as her older sisters, who held records in their area. One struggling family is too ambitious and risks losing their own money in the fundraiser.
The film doesn’t implicate Girl Scouts of the USA in any of these pressures, but there is some light talk of the organization’s profit sharing and minimal incentives related to all this child labor that, by being included in the edit, relays that criticism. To the organization’s credit, perhaps, there’s also little discussion of what the cookie selling is meant to teach or empower in these kids. Only one of the young characters, a five-year-old with type-1 diabetes and a very modest sales goal, appears to be truly happy in her efforts, and when she does hit a challenge, she tackles it with the sort of enterprising ingenuity you’d hope to come out of being a member of an organization like Girl Scouts. And she does it altruistically, not to be the best. It may not be the point of the film, but it’s a good reminder of the importance of quality over quantity.
With so many documentaries focused on the importance of journalism and journalists lately, it’s fair and necessary that we get one about a rare small-town newspaper still in operation. Just as Americans should be paying more attention to their local governments, they should also be aware of what local media they might have. Sharon Liese’s Seized follows the story of a little print weekly in Marion, Kansas, that was raided by the police in a clear misuse of power. Since its premiere, we’ve seen prominent journalists arrested in protests simply for intimidation and for show, making this film even more relevant as a microcosmic spotlight on the larger concerns for the First Amendment and political corruption.
The only problem with Seized is that there are no characters that hold our interest. The guy who owns and runs the paper isn’t the greatest representative for the issue, and that might be why the film also follows a young reporter who is new to town and marginally involved in covering the continuing story. He’s just not enough of a part of the narrative or issue at hand to matter to the documentary, and the more we are made to engage with him as a character, the less focused the film feels. When he inexplicably leaves the town and the paper at the end, that weakens our investment even more. Still, the core scenario of Seized is worth a look, but for a tighter documentary about a small-scale media outlet, I recommend Bad Press.
The 2026 Sundance Film Festival may be the final edition for the celebration of independent cinema in Park City, Utah. However, as Sundance moves to Boulder, Colorado for its next edition, the festival continues its tradition of new beginnings. Deals happened with hopefully some to come for the documentary side. Oscar campaigns threw some seeds for a year-long run. Careers enjoyed some big breaks.
The story of the films may have been secondary to the narrative of the festival proper, but Sundance overall came out well in the year this year. To recap their 2026 festival, we’re changing gears somewhat for a conversational approach and calling upon POV’s veteran Sundance kid Jason Gorber to join the conversation and share his thoughts about what the move means for the festival and how the documentary slate compared to other years. He joined Pat Mullen to discuss the vibe and atmosphere that made Park City unique, but also to consider the best films at this year’s festival and what the docs of 2026 say about the business overall.
A view of Egyptian Theatre at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. | Photo by Sam Emenogu. Courtesy of the Sundance Institute
PM: Pat Mullen
JG: Jason Gorber
PM: 2026 was the final year for Sundance at Park City. I’m a child of virtual Sundance, so, unfortunately, I never got out there properly. What do you think it means for Sundance to be leaving Park City?
JG: The last time I stood in Park City, I was watching news about this virus that was coming from Asia. Being from Toronto and living through SARS, I knew what could happen when a virus like this actually affected people. I had this weird feeling of, not anxiety, but recognition that none of this could be sustained—and 2020 was a pretty good year for Sundance. 2019 was actually great year, but in 2020, it felt like some things were slipping away. Robert Redford seemed a little bit older. Documentaries had been massive, the streamers were coming in more, and so were the people who buy all this stuff. It felt like things were going away and then things went away in a weird way.
PM: And 2020 was when Boys State sold for huge money to Apple.
JG: I love those filmmakers and Boy State is stunning, but this film would’ve had a much more traditional theatrical run and would’ve been seen and would’ve been part of the Oscar conversation, etc. And then suddenly it’s a very different vibe. There was the feeling that Park City couldn’t continue, and Sundance couldn’t continue in the way that it was moving. A change had to be made. And even back then, there were all these bubblings about where it was going to go. As messed up as it is, COVID shut things down. But Sundance was inevitably going to be leaving Park City because it is an incredibly expensive place to hold a film festival. Logistically, it’s a mess. I desperately miss being there, but it made absolutely no sense to go when virtual became a real possibility to cover this stuff. TIFF is seeing incredible challenges about what they’re able to get given Telluride, Tribeca even, but more importantly, Venice. You look at what SXSW is now getting as soon as something like Everything Everywhere All at Once played SXSW and not Sundance and won the Oscar. You’ve seen a massive shift in all these festivals. Boulder might be the opportunity for it to regain its mojo.
Photo by Stephen Speckman | Courtesy of the Sundance Institute
PM: I think Sundance has some mojo: all five doc nominees at the Oscars are Sundance 2025 premieres. Train Dreams is a Sundance premiere. That’s up for Best Picture. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is a Sundance movie. So there’s a bit of movement.
JG: For nonfiction, Sundance is remarkable. It is absolutely still the home of documentaries. The problem is that what happens with those documentaries afterwards has shifted dramatically in the past 10 years. Documentaries benefitted from the feeding frenzy, but Sundance birthed Miramax and Miramax then birthed Focus, etc., and out of that phase you had the Michael Moores, you had the documentaries that would be discussed in the same way that major releases get discussed. The only time that happens now is when it’s the First Lady.
PM: Melania overshadowed the documentary conversation this year, I think. I was going to see it Friday, but since it was so cold out, I just bundled up with Sundance movies and will catch it this week. When we talk about Melania and the way the festival itself has shifted, I don’t know how much you really lose by doing the virtual festival. It seems like the people who were actually there were binge-watching as many films as they could to get in and get out over the first weekend. I don’t really feel like anything “popped” in a way that they might’ve in previous years or that you have much meaningful engagement when the folks on the ground just shoots out a Tweet, moves on, and cranks out some reviews when they get home.
JG: When I went to Sundance, I was there to the bitter end. I was there from the opening to the closing and that gave the opportunity for films to breathe. I was not doing five, six films a day necessarily. But it allowed you to be in line for some of these movies and to interact with people, to have that sense of community. I miss that tremendously. I would love to go to Boulder and to see some of this and my hand might be forced for me if it becomes more and more challenging to actually see things remotely. It’s a catch-22.
Gabriela Osio Vanden and Jack Weisman win the U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Documentary for Nuisance Bear | Photo by Sam Emenogu. Courtesy of the Sundance Institute
But Colorado will be a much easier festival to access. The fact the Egyptian was closed this year at Sundance, the most celebrated and iconic theater, and the only reason the Egyptian was opened at all during the festival was for the surprise wedding of the directors of Nuisance Bear. The festival opened it for them so that they could get married inside the Egyptian. I think that is amazing
PM: And congratulations to them! On two fronts. But OMG who gets married during a festival? I’ve skipped weddings during TIFF. In terms of the venues, I saw Matt Neglia’s picture of one of the screening rooms of Sundance, and I was like, “Even my TV is bigger than that.”
JG: That was part of the charm. Let’s get to a fundamental thing about Sundance: This was started by Robert Redford to have something tiny in his community where he built a ranch. It was great that it built up and became this amazing thing, but it was meant to be this tiny little community thing where people came. Telluride has maintained that scope by being financially impossible to go to. Sundance has this whole notion that is cinema for all. But in doing so, it became untenable to have it in that community. The politics of Utah shifted. It was always conservative, but it really shifted of late and Sundance’s politics also shifted.
The Lake | Courtesy of the Sundance Institute
PM: Speaking of the politics and the move, did you see the U.S. documentary The Lake? It was funny to see this film about how everyone is leaving Salt Lake City because the lake is drying up, climate change is affecting it, and all this toxic dust is flowing towards Salt Lake City, Park City, and the surrounding area. But in terms of environmental films, it was quite strong as a study of people working across partisan lines, especially given how religious people are in Utah. A lot of characters in the film are from the Church of Latter Day Saints—they pull out the Bible and pray to God that it rains—and there’s a belief in science because of their faith. There’s a lot going on in that film that we haven’t really seen in environmental docs, but a story that’s also productive outside the environmental conversation.
JG: You will find this amusing. There’s all these different venues at Park City, but there was the one called The Temple that I never went to. The temple is way up the highway and I thought that was a Mormon temple. I went there in my fourth year, and it’s a synagogue. But it’s a beautiful space; the theatre is great.
PM: I wonder how they’re navigating programming nowadays. Would they have shown All About the Money in the Temple [given that its subject James Cox takes some hard pro-Hamas/anti-Israel stances in the film]?
JG: One of the things about it being a synagogue is they would allow films to play without editorializing. The encouragement of the discourse is much more important than the restriction of it.
All About the Money | Courtesy of the Sundance Institute
PM: How did you find the slate of docs this year overall compared to other years? I think it ended up being a pretty good year for the docs, but not on par with some of the other years. There was no Come See Me in the Good Light for me this year. Were we spoiled the last few years?
JG: We are in the bubble of the film festival. Even if I love the filmmaker ahead of time or even if I despise the filmmaker, I go in with a certain level of cynicism or at least lowered expectations to be surprised, and when I am surprised, I have a sense of joy. All About the Money is a really good example. I thought the film was incredibly well done. There’s a couple key questions that doesn’t really dive into, such as why Ireland is a place where somebody like him is able to feel at home even more so in the United States, somebody who is so virulently anti-Semitic and his politics veer so far towards the praising of Hitler, and yet a place like Ireland will find a home for him, and an Irish filmmaker refuses to interrogate her own country.
PM: I was interested about her not going there because she’s been quite good about interrogating her own country in other films [Blue Road and Pray for Our Sinners].
JG: This is one of those films showcasing him and his ideas, and giving the audience the opportunity to come up with its own response. That’s what makes it glorious. But there’s nothing more wonderful than for us to take a film that people would’ve otherwise skipped over and to highlight and to champion it.
Photo by Michał Marczak. Courtesy of the Sundance Institute.
PM: My hidden gem easily was Closure. I was familiar with the filmmaker, Michał Marczak, who did All These Sleepless Nights, but I was just bowled over by how powerful it was. The premise of the film is a 16-year-old boy is last seen on a bridge in Warsaw, so the choice is either he jumped or he took off and ran away from home. The father decides that he thinks the boy jumped, so he spends two years dredging the river looking for a body. The film follows him day in, day out as he’s turning over anything he can. It’s just devastating because you see how much the family is doing to find him and the way that not knowing what happened eats away at the parents. But it’s also just incredibly well done. It was certainly the most elevated cinematography that I saw at the festival, which made it a respectful portrait of grief that showed people that if they don’t think their family or network is going to be there to help them, they are—because you just see how much they’re doing now when they think he’s gone. It just devastating
JG: One of the things that we do is we divide and conquer, and so I miss some of these great films. Cookie Queens is less of a hidden gem than a film that you assume you know what it is going to be before you see it and that can shift slightly, but I know the producers as the team behind Gaucho Gaucho and Truffle Hunters. They had let us know about the project ages ago. I didn’t know the filmmaker at all and I thought I’d be watching precocious girls selling cookies, yet it turned into this amazing thing about capitalism, greed, adulting–it’s a terrific, terrific film. Then you have something as middling as The Oldest Person in the World, which ended up being just fine at best—certainly not living up to what that story deserved. There’s nothing more crushing than a failed nonfiction project because this is one of the only opportunities you can actually have to actually deal with this subject in a serious way.
Even the way it’s structured, which shouldn’t necessarily work, the going-back-in-time worked beautifully in Broken English, about Marion Faithfull, which is done in a hybridized fashion. This Ministry of Forgetting with people like Tilda Swinton and George MacKay reflecting not only upon this one artist and her work, but on the very notion of what it is to reflect upon archival documentaries.
It’s a documentary about documentaries, which should be terrible, and yet it’s kind of awesome. Similarly, it’s not like we don’t know Mark Cousins’ shtick by now. Hearing his Northern Irish brogue do its thing and we’re used to that now with Story of Film and Story of Women of Film, and yet I found the first chapter of The Story of Documentary, because it’s a documentary about documentary, the most fascinating collision with form. I go back to Wiseman‘s National Gallery, which, what you do at a gallery is you sit and stare at things until you find something profound, and what you’re staring at is the perfect collision between form and content. It’s finally Wiseman at his most Wiseman-esque. Mark Cousins doing a documentary about documentary is glorious in that way.
PM: I’m glad you mentioned Broken English. That was one that had been on my radar mostly because it’s a hybrid film with Tilda Swinton, but I was cautious because I’m so sick of these boomer music docs. But I found that I learned so much about Marianne Faithfull because it really engaged with the story and it brought other people into it with an authentic look about the effects of her music, but also the fact that it captured her final performance. How much of her story would be lost if they weren’t making this film? It’s an incredible work.
The Last First: Winter K2 | Photo by Elia Saikaly. Courtesy of the Sundance Institute
JG: It’s like The Last First: Winter K2. It’s a mountain climbing movie about tragedy on top of mountain. We’ve seen this a gazillion times and when it’s done well, you can get some glorious things. The Last First is a fascinating geopolitical tale that has much more to do than with its specific subject, and that’s what I look for: a film that, superficially, you think is going to be one thing but becomes another. Even a non-successful film like Hanging by a Wire, which is a bit of a mess made under incredibly complicated circumstances, telling a story in a community where the telling of stories is restricted. Pakistan is very restrictive about what can be said and, between the lines, literally between the wires, I think there’s more to that film. I have a hope that there’s a better film.
PM: I agree in that I’m sympathetic to the circumstances that make the film limited, but the story raises so many questions and they didn’t go to any of them. That was the one film that I was genuinely surprised was in competition. It felt beneath the calibre they’ve set. I mean, the drone footage is incredible and the rescue story is great, but–
JG: –It’s in competition because it’s from a region that is underrepresented and its restrictions can be excused in the broadest sense by where it was shot. It could have been this, but it being a competition film is almost unfair for the film, which is to your point: it’s half a film. It is not much more than the news reports. It’s making point to show how it’s exploitation.
Hanging by a Wire | Courtesy of the Sundance Institute
PM: When there are ten films representing U.S. documentary and ten films representing the rest of the world in competition, there’s a certain calibre that I think they have to consider. Surely there was a film made in equally limiting circumstances that could have brought more to the table. Birds of War and One in a Million were made under very difficult circumstances in Syria and really tackled huge questions about geopolitics, families, and gender. The other film that I thought was beneath the competition was Public Access in that there were so many avenues it could have gone and it was very obvious in terms of the parallels between public broadcasting and today’s social media use, but didn’t really do much besides finding the most titillating aspects of the archive.
JG: There’s nothing more annoying than film critics jumping up and down saying, “This is what the film should be.”
PM: Oh, I agree!
JG: That is not what either of us is saying. They are missing opportunities within the context of the film that they’ve actually made to take it on face value and they miss out.
PM: Public Access showed how, if you give people a forum to democratize the media, they’re just going to whip their dicks out and get naked and do obscene things and we all tune in. There’s so much you could have done with that, bit it gets stuck in the archive.
JG: To go back to Hanging by a Wire, I want to believe that the filmmakers knew exactly what they were doing when they showcased that thing hanging empty at the end as being the metaphor for the political norm of living within this incredibly complicated nation for very specific colonial and internal and religious and sociopolitical reasons. The one visual is more interesting and provocative outside of what the film is actually saying out loud.
Once Upon a Time in Harlem | Photo by Bruce Stanford. Courtesy of William Greaves Productions and the Sundance Institute
Now one film that’s not a surprise, but is glorious, is Once Upon a Time in Harlem. If it would’ve come out in 1972, it would have been not only forgotten, but it wouldn’t have had impact, it wouldn’t have been appreciated, but more importantly, I’m not sure it would do what it does now. That film needed half a century to digest, it needed us to be able to reflect back on what was to happen to the people in the film after the making of the film, about what would happen to New York City through the 1970s, about what would happen to Black community. When you see New York, not as it was in 1972, but that 1972 New York by today’s standards—the graffiti, the kids on the street, while these beautifully dressed people are having this elite conversation—these are interesting contradictions then. Maybe they’re fascinating now.
PM: That point really hits home around the middle of the film when someone at the party takes a moment to acknowledge how important it is that William Greaves is shooting it. Then it took 50 years for it to see the light of day. That says so much about the larger politics in which the film and all artists and cultural types found themselves in the institutions they were working within and against. I was so worried it would be like The Other Side of the Wind and we’re like, “We waited for this?” Although what does it say if one of the best films at a 2026 festival was shot in 1972?
JG: But that’s it. I will argue for that this is not the film from 1972. This is a 2026 film. The crafting of this footage now works in the same way that Summer of Soul coming out at the same time as Woodstock would not be as impactful. It would have been dwarfed by the very festival that dwarfed it at the time. What made Summer of Soul amazing was the sense of reflection. This film doesn’t have anybody going back and doing the reflection, but these are people reflecting themselves back on a half century before. So it’s this double sense of non-nostalgic analysis of how the past is shaping the present.
Árni Kjartansson sits overlooking a glacier in Iceland in Time and Water. | Courtesy of Andri Snær Magnason
PM: I would love to know what the paper edit for Once Upon a Time in Harlem was in 1972 compared to the scenes they selected now. In terms of editing, a couple of films used that approach spectacularly, like Time and Water from Sara Dosa who did Fire of Love. For me, that was easily a standout. It’s a really different dynamic with the archives. It doesn’t have the same immediate wow factor of volcanoes exploding. But it’s about the death of glaciers and the memory that’s housed within layers of ice, and it reflects upon how generations of family are melting away. There’s an interplay between the subject’s family archive and the footage his grandparents shot while exploring glaciers. It’s a thoughtful film and kind of haunting. It was definitely the most fun to write about, which is the best compliment I can give a film.
JG: There are people doing really amazing stuff with archival work, for sure. Some of these filmmakers are finding a hyper textual way of drawing stuff in and finding connections. I get your point about boomer music docs, and a tedious archive doc is also really egregious. But for me, bad movies are bad movies and good movies are good movies and whatever the film is, subject is or form, there can be a good version of that. A mediocre talking heads documentary bothers me much less than a mediocre poetic documentary. Doing poetry badly is worse than doing prose badly. There are a lot of these films that we see, the ones that didn’t get into Sundance—
PM: —the Tribeca premieres—
JG: —that are versions of these structured ways of doing nonfiction. Is there anything worse than the completely poetic film, which is meandering and useless?
Give Me the Ball! | Photo by Thor Thielow. Courtesy of the Sundance Institute
PM: It was interesting to see Sundance have two ESPN docs in the Premieres section: Give Me the Ball about Billie Jean King, by Liz Garbus and Elizabeth Wolff, then The Brittany Griner Story. For the Billie Jean King, we’ve al seen this story before in Battle of the Sexes with Emma Stone and Steve Carrell, but she’s such a great character and is a really good presence and interviewee, has a lot of history to talk to, and both these films are driven by a master interview with the subject. The Billie Jean King one raises all these questions about gender equity, LGBTQ rights and what she was fighting for on the court.
The Brittney Griner has so much potential with this story about her arrest in Russia, the complications of being in a Russian prison, her own fight for LGBTQ representation in pro sports, and her relationship with her wife, but it just doesn’t have the same perspective even though it hits so many similar beats. It doesn’t have anywhere near as much material to work with, and you feel that. One film is like a really bouncy ball. The other one’s just…deflated.
JG: Forget sports docs, but some of the greatest documentaries ever came out of the original 30 for 30 series.
PM: We talked a bit before about the Oscars at the beginning of the conversation, and all five nominees this year are Sundance premieres: Come See Me in the Good Light, The Alabama Solution, Cutting through Rocks, Mr. Nobody Against Putin, and The Perfect Neighbor. Do you think we have any future nominees from this year’s Sundance?
JG: I think always the majority of nonfiction films up for Oscars start at Sundance. These are the films that we’re having in the conversation. In a funny way, the way that Cannes has re-established itself as such a dominant cultural force in terms of dramas, Sundance remains by far the most important for documentary, which to your earlier point, the fact that a lesser film is taking a competition spot matters. One would hope that given the fact that they have such incredible prestige and they’re clearly getting thousands of the best films being made, and with these very limited spots, one would hope that the top of the top the top is what we get to see. But I think we saw some pretty damn good movies. We saw Nuisance Bear.
PM: Nuisance Bear has entered the chat!
A still from Nuisance Bear by Gabriela Osio Vanden and Jack Weisman, an official selection of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute | Photo by Gabriela Osio Vanden
JG: This is one of those incredibly rare cases where I’ve known about the project ahead of time because I had the opportunity to give the short a jury award at Saguenay, and I normally don’t watch documentary shorts, Oscars or otherwise, but it was so clearly and extraordinarily well done. In a weird way, despite the fact that I had hope it would be good, I was even more concerned that, being one of the people who did see and champion the short, that we’re just going to get more of the same. And yet the films work so beautifully together. They’re totally different movies, and yet one led me entirely to appreciate the second one in deep, deep and profound ways. It is a glorious film and one of absolutely the most impactful things that I saw for sure this year. But more importantly, it actually asks complicated questions and allows us as an audience the space to come to terms with them. Amazing.
PM: It was the best. The short can stand on its own right, but the way they elevated the storytelling here by bringing in the colonial history, tying it in with the human characters, and looking at people who’ve been driven off the land and the larger politics that are reflected in what the bear’s seeing was brilliantly told. Even stylistically, the cinematography, the editing, and the music from White Lotus guy, Cristóbal Tapia de Veer, gave it a sense of humour that you don’t see a lot in documentaries. It could have gone sideways, but everything clicked and the approach drew you in even more.
JG: This, unfortunately, was not one over devilled eggs at the whiskey bar on Main Street, this was a Zoom interview, but to speak with the two filmmakers the day after they eloped and got married at the Egyptian—he proposed to her the day after the screening, they got married that night, spent a honeymoon day on the day that was supposed to be our interview, and the next day I had a 45 minute conversation with them—we spent an inordinate amount of time talking about how it was only because of the [writers’ and actors’] strike that they were able to use such cinematic cameras because they weren’t being used to shoot whatever the newest X-Men movie was in Vancouver.
It’s the right place, the right time, telling the right film that took a decade for them to put together. And it is so beautifully done. My favourite thing is a film that should be terrible, and my favourite film brings that sensation of, “They’re just about to screw this up,” and then it turns something glorious. This film joins the pantheon of films that go way beyond their form, way beyond their content, and become something truly transcendent.
Dr. Clarence B Jones appears in The Baddest Speechwriter of All by Ben Proudfoot and Stephen Curry, an official selection of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. | Photo by Brandon Somerhalder. Courtesy of the Sundance Institute
PM: Speaking of Canadians in shorts, Ben Proudfoot won the Grand Jury Prize for The Baddest Speech Writer of All, and I think he could be looking at Oscar number three. I still like Last Repair Shop best, but it’s certainly worthy of attention again for this work with Stephen Curry. And what a great character with a Martin Luther King Jr.’s speechwriter and lawyer Clarence B. Jones, who’s taking us through all these stories, and they really riff throughout the movie. They make jazz. The shorts always get lost, but there were some really great ones, like the Luigi Mangione, which one was a lot of fun.
JG: We talked about the $12 million Boys State sale, which is absolutely amazing, but a lot of it was that the streamers couldn’t buy the big drama films, so they would throw their weight around and buy documentaries. That certainly reduced by 2019, at least. Shorts have never really had that impact financially within the system. We talk about finance because Sundance became this incubation of purchases even more so than of films. So there’s a purity to the kind of short film showcase at a place like Sundance. And you get somebody like Proudfoot who has just been kicking it for years doing incredible work within this relatively non-commercial way of making films that are the big ones that we’re talking about when it comes time to the end-of-the-year lists when we’re talking about all the features.
Come See Me in the Good Light | Brandon Somerhalder
PM: On the business front, they had a virtual panel during the festival. It had Ryan White, who did Come See Me in the Good Light, and Geeta Gandbhir who did The Perfect Neighbor, as well as RJ Cutler who did the Billie Eilish documentary, and there were a couple of salespeople and agents. They were talking about the business of Sundance because Ryan and Geeta had the two big hits from last year’s festival. I was surprised that nobody seemed too worried. They’re kind of like, “Well, it’s always waves.” They said the number of buyers is down, but that if Netflix is still out there getting films like The Perfect Neighbor, they know that people are watching. If you know how to look at it and know that the buyers are looking and whatnot, we can be hopeful that great films will find a market. Gandbhir talked about The Perfect Neighbor being a “Trojan horse” because it could get pegged as true crime to draw viewers, but it wasn’t that at all. But at the same time, Ryan White was saying that for a few years he and his producing partner had a load of stuff, and then other people weren’t getting anything. That point’s similar here.
JG: That’s a much, much longer conversation about whether stuff a theatrical run or works better on small screen. Come See Me in the Good Light being a really good example of something that obviously benefits enormously from being seen with a community in a theatre of a bunch of weeping people—
PM: —or people laughing.
JG: Exactly. On the one hand, I love that these filmmakers are making enough money to encourage them to do other things. On the other hand, oftentimes I am with theatrical runs. I love that anybody all over the world can watch these films on a moment’s notice, and it makes me kind of sad that they’re not getting theatrical runs.
Ed Emanuel, Jerry Brock, Ellis Gates, Thad Givens, Franklin Swann, Lawton Mackey and Donald Mann appear in Soul Patrol by J.M. Harper, an official selection of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute.
PM: None of the Sundance docs has announced a sale yet, so if you were putting on your buyer’s hat or sales agent’s hat, what do you think should be looked at in terms of distribution potential?
JG: A24 already has Nuisance Bear, but it’s still up for sale. So there’s a good example: A24 gave them money to make it, but doesn’t necessarily have the rights for theatrical, etc. It gets very complicated with that. It will be interesting to see how something like Cookie Queens gets responded to. I would love to see that get showcased in a bigger way. Same with All about the Money. The last title card talked about how the subject wanted to buy the film so that it would be buried, but of course it’s one of those things. This is a subject who says a bunch of stuff and doesn’t do it. What do you think going to get attention?
PM: Nuisance Bear is the obvious one. And then Soul Patrol. It’s about Black soldiers in a special ops unit in Vietnam. Great archival footage and brilliant re-enactments that create, again, really elevated storytelling. And then maybe for potential sales movies, the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize winner To Hold a Mountain, but I think that’s more of a festival movie. It’s a really strong feminist environmental film and has just a great salt-of-the-earth, pastoral cinematography, lots of cats. It’ll play well with people, but I think it’s a tough sell.
JG: One of the challenges of that type of film is that people want political docs, but they want political docs from particular perspectives about particular regions.
<em>American Doctor</em> | Photo by Ibrahim Al Otla. Courtesy of the Sundance Institute
PM: One of the stronger films at Sundance was American Doctor about doctors volunteering in Gaza, and that was the feature directorial debut of Poh Si Ten, who’s pretty well connected in the documentary space, but I worry about the film because it wears its politics on its sleeve. That’s tough in this climate.
JG: I think we’re all looking for a film that will teach us about something. Even if we agree with it, shows it in a different light. For example, AI is everywhere, and while it may be too esoteric and cerebral, Ghost in the Machine is actually really strong. It is a fascinating examination that probes pretty deeply into the philosophical depths of AI. It obviously speaks to me as somebody who’s interested in technology and this background in philosophy. I don’t expect this to go wide, but I think that there are some people that will actually recognize the core tenet of fascism that fits very nicely into the techno futurism.
Then let’s talk about the films that we didn’t see and didn’t play the online festival. The Salman Rushdie film being an obvious example of something that I wish I would’ve seen and there was no virtual opportunity.
PM: And the AI documentary by Daniel Roher and Charlie Tyrell.
JG: History of Concrete, which looks amazing. These are films that I desperately want to see was unable to.
Salman Rushdie appears in Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdieby Alex Gibney, an official selection of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. | Photo by Rachel Eliza Griffiths. Courtesy of Sundance Institute.
PM: The Salman Rushdie got a fair bit of coverage, but I don’t think I read anything about the AI documentary. I heard nothing, and that’s a shame. One producer who I’m friends with on Facebook made a post that she overheard someone at Sundance, a filmmaker with a film in the selection, say that he didn’t want many people to see his film there. It was causing a lot of debate about the fetishization of feature documentary, but also the politics of programming. If you’re in it just for the laurels, why are you at the festival? How many good films have you seen that had embargoes up the wazoo, and then just died because nobody talked about them?
JG: There was always a baked-in hustle at Sundance. Traditionally and habitually, Sundance has been where people take chances, where there’s an entrepreneurial notion of what’s taking place in the filmmaking: aesthetically what drives better films, not better product. The art itself is outward looking. The reason some films birth at Sundance and then go on to be the ones that we talk about a year later is because they truly are looking in a deeper, more profound way at the audience than are many similar films from different regions where the quality of the film is secondary to a particular funding mandate or a particular subject. May Sundance be a place where people look to bring films to share with the world, but to get their start at this extraordinary little winter film festival!
Barbara Forever | Photo by the Estate of Barbara Hammer. Courtesy of the Sundance Institute
PM: One of the better films in the U.S. competition was Barbara Forever about Barbara Hammer, the experimental filmmaker who really pushed boundaries for lesbian visibility and onscreen representation. It repurposed her archives brilliantly, but the climax of the film is her getting a movie into Sundance and what that meant in terms of attaining that level in her career. But then it was a great year for queer representation and lesbian representation comparatively at the festival. She had her camera around at all the screenings and was talking about what it meant to be there at that moment. It was fun to see the politics and institution of Sundance come together in the narrative arc of one of the better films at the fest.
JG: When it comes to nonfiction, if you’re even tangentially a fan of the form, this truly is the birthplace for some of the great documentaries ever made. It cannot be over-emphasized. If we talk about the great film festivals ever in the history of this medium, Sundance by far is the locus for nonfiction at its peak, and it continues to plow that. The Sundance-y drama has other outlets these days or challenges within the marketplace, but whatever happens, Sundance is a documentary film festival that happens to play some dramas. There can be three or four drama films that pique interest, but there are often a dozen works of nonfiction that are the ones that we’re talking about not only this, but in years to come. And so long may it run.
The post The 2026 Sundance Documentary Report: On Last Calls & New Beginnings appeared first on POV Magazine.
Darren Aronofsky’s new project has stirred up quite the debate in the past 72 hours.
The filmmaker has a multi-part animated web series from AI studio Primordial Soup, it’s titled “On This Day… 1776,” and re-creates moments from the American Revolutionary War. The short-form series combines “traditional filmmaking tools and emerging AI capabilities,” including from Google’s DeepMind AI division, to tell the stories about the Revolutionary War.
TIME reports that the figures featured in the series are voiced by SAG-AFTRA actors. Darren Aronofsky serves as executive producer, the score is composed by Jordan Dykstra, and the scripts come from a writers’ room overseen by Lucas Sussman.
The series is licensed by Time Studios, which plans to roll out the episodes on TIME’s YouTube channel across 2026. The first two instalments debuted on Thursday.
In a statement, Time Studios president Ben Bitonti described the project as “a preview of what intentional, imaginative, artist-driven uses of AI can be,” adding that it is meant to complement creative craft rather than replace it, while opening new possibilities for storytellers.
Despite that intent, the response so far has been largely critical. Viewers, critics, and fellow industry creatives have pushed back, with many arguing the project crosses an uncomfortable boundary.
Over on social media one joked, “Used to be that when Darren Aronofsky wanted to feature a dead-eyed actor, he’d just employ Jared Leto.” PC Gamer wrote, “Darren Aronofsky might have finally killed art.” THR blasted the series as “AI slop.” “Daredevil: Born Again” showrunner Steven S. DeKnight labeled the series a “complete betrayal of cinema.”
Despite the backlash from unions all across the industry, some notable filmmakers have recently come out in support of AI usage in “cinema,” including Roger Deakins, George Miller, Brady Corbet, Michael Mann, Paul Schrader, Werner Herzog, and James Cameron.
Donald Trump and Melania Trump posing for the press on January 29, 2026 at the world premiere of the film Melania at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Craig Hudson/Variety via Getty Images)
AS A GENERAL RULE, my theory of criticism is that the only thing that really matters is the work on the screen. Producer is corrupt? Director has been hit by sexual harassment claims? Star is embroiled in tabloid drama because they have ties to a sexually deviant blackmailer who flew people to his private island? Not really germane to the action on the screen.
But Melania is hard to separate from the off-screen nonsense as it only exists because of the off-screen nonsense. Just to briefly recap the ways in which this movie is . . . odd:
Amazon MGM Studios paid $40 million for the rights to make Melania, a deal the Wall Street Journal reported came about after a dinner between Jeff Bezos (who has, shall we say, multiple interests of great value that could be hurt or helped by Donald Trump’s White House) and the Trumps at Mar-a-Lago. Melania’s cut of that pie? Seventy percent.
Bezos and company have spent another $35 million advertising the film, which, as I noted in Morning Shots yesterday, means that it needs to recoup about $150 million at the box office to break even. And while there is a case to be made for conservative documentarians being an undervalued cinematic niche—a lot of dupes out there find great value in Dinesh D’Souza’s work—it is not a “$150 million worldwide haul” niche.
The director of the film, Brett Ratner—who was introduced to Trump by former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin—was forced out of Hollywood in disgrace after the Los Angeles Times in 2017 reported allegations that he forced actress Natasha Henstridge to perform oral sex on him and masturbated in front of Olivia Munn without her permission. (Ratner would later claim to have had sex with Munn, humiliating her further, before admitting that was a lie. He denies the more salacious allegations and has not faced criminal charges.)
A photo of Ratner was included in the Epstein files, though his relationship to the pedophilic blackmailer is unclear. Just as it is unclear what Melania and Donald Trump’s relationship to the pedophilic blackmailer is, given the DOJ’s refusal to release all of the Epstein files.
Ratner has attempted to parlay his relationship with Trump into a return to Hollywood writ large, using Trump’s leverage over Paramount’s father-son duo, Larry and David Ellison, to get a new Rush Hour film made.
All of which is to say that there is no reason for Melania to exist outside of rank corruption. The Trumps are using the power of the presidency to grift Jeff Bezos; Bezos hopes that this bribe will keep his companies safe from government interference; Ratner is worming his way into Trump’s good graces as a way to get past his own history of alleged sexual misconduct; and the Ellisons are putting up with Ratner’s return and potentially distributing a new Rush Hour in the hope that Trump will use his considerable influence to push the FTC toward allowing Paramount Skydance to swallow up Warner Bros. Discovery.
It’s all quite disgusting.
But is the documentary any good?
You see how we here at The Bulwark suffer for you, the reader? You see what we put ourselves through? If you haven’t signed up to become a paying Bulwark+ member just yet, maybe do so now to demonstrate that such immiseration is worth it, would you? I don’t think Jeff Bezos is going to be buying any pricey banner ads for Melania in this here newsletter after he reads what follows.
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Well, no, it’s not any good—and that’s partly because “documentary” here is a category error. This isn’t a documentary, as the opening moments make plain, Melania entering the frame and hitting her marks while a camera swoops overhead and watches her enter her SUV, which we then track as it arrives at an airport, private jet waiting as “Gimme Shelter” and then “Billy Jean” play in rapid succession. The term “documentary” is all wrong for something this stage-managed, this carefully put together.
No, this is reality TV with a hint of HBO’s long-defunct series Entourage, a strange combination of lifestyle porn and hagiography with the barest hints of public policy flitting around at the edges like fruit flies circling a moldy melon. Keeping Up With the Kardashians by way of Trump Tower, Mar-a-Lago, and the White House, say, albeit one that looks better than any reality TV show I’ve seen.1
Set in the period between the re-election of Donald Trump and his second inauguration, Ratner’s camera follows the once and future first lady as she does all the things a first lady does: obsess over her hat brim’s straightness, ensure that the tablecloths and plates for the billionaires at the donor’s ball match the marble of the National Building Museum, and chit-chat with other first ladies about limiting screen time for teenagers. I don’t want to downplay all of her work here—there is a genuinely moving sequence with a survivor of October 7th whose husband was still being held hostage by Hamas when filming took place—but this is not a film that is particularly interested in Melania’s absurdly named Be Best campaign.
No, the film’s real interest is in the clothes and the glitz and the style; Ratner lovingly shoots Melania from the heels up, so routinely tracking her high-heeled feet up to her torso that one can’t help but feel as if he’s auditioning to be Quentin Tarantino’s second unit director. We learn all about the seams of her inaugural gown (it’s going to be in the Smithsonian one day, don’t you know) and how smart she is about clothes. It’s true: she’s a former model (it’s how she got her Einstein visa, don’t you know) and quite pretty and knows how to flatter herself.
And she is her biggest concern, for sure. The most telling sequence in the film doesn’t come when she’s chatting with an interior designer who immigrated from Laos, though it was infuriating to watch these two talk about being American success stories in the midst of a nationwide ICE crackdown on immigrants, legal and otherwise. No, it came during a sequence in which Melania and Donald go to Jimmy Carter’s funeral. And Melania spends the entire time focused on . . . her own mother, who passed away a year prior to Carter’s death.
Now look: Grief hits people differently and I would never presume to judge how someone grieves. But spending the whole of Carter’s funeral musing about your own mother—making the whole thing about yourself, never once mentioning even something as uncontroversial as Carter’s work for Habitat for Humanity—displays an almost jaw-dropping level of solipsism. I can’t say I’m surprised Melania didn’t pay tribute to Carter; the former president said mean things about Donnie T, and one wouldn’t want to risk infuriating the current occupant of the White House by shedding a tear for someone who didn’t bend the knee and kiss the ring. It was, however, bizarre to watch.
Look: This movie’s not for me. If you’re reading this at The Bulwark, it’s probably not for you, either. The target audience seemed to enjoy it fine; the 12:40 p.m. showing at the AMC NorthPark in Dallas was 80 percent full and laughed in all the right places. It preaches to the faithful with great reverence and they were thrilled to bask in the golden glow of Trump Tower. But it’s fascinating to see so pure and naked an instrument of graft and propaganda deployed to great effect on an audience happy to lap it up.
I spoke with JVL about Melania yesterday, and the video just went up:
(Also available on YouTube.)
One must credit the cinematographers: Barry Peterson, Dante Spinotti (who earned Academy Award nominations for L.A. Confidential and The Insider), and Jeff Cronenweth (another two-time Oscar nominee, for The Social Network and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo). They’re, uh, making great use of their talents here.
If you film anyone for long enough, you’ll have a story to tell. If nothing else, you’ll have a biographical narrative. If you film a child as they grow, you’ll have an easy coming-of-age documentary (or drama, in the case of Richard Linklater’s Boyhood). That doesn’t mean it will be a great story or a great film, and some of that might depend on the subject chosen and the choices they make, but you’ll likely have the resources needed. A great editor might find something brilliant to carve out of the footage shot willy-nilly, but a great director would be keen enough to capture material that best lends itself to such cinematic sculpture.
The title One in a Million may as well refer to its existence as a documentary that came together so well because of both directorial and editorial acumen. Credit may also go to the decisions of its characters and, ultimately, world events, but that could be like acknowledging the marble and model as much as the artist. The film, directed by Itab Azzam and Jack Macinnes, and edited by Iain Pettifer and Alec Rossiter, was shot over a decade and follows one family of Syrian refugees as they migrate to Germany and adjust in various ways. The main character is the eldest daughter, Isra’a, who is 11 at the beginning of this story. But her parents’ individual journeys and how their lives and minds change over time are often even more interesting than her tale of growing up and coming into her cultural identity before eventually returning to a free Aleppo.
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A lot of films covering extensive periods of time tend to play catch-up — here’s another year, and what has happened since the last visit from the filmmakers. They depend more on interviews, providing relayed updates rather than documenting the lives as they’re happening. One in a Million does depend on updates here and there, but it shows at least as much as it tells, if not more so. Things we see or hear early in the documentary lead to developments that happen years later, as if they’re scripted foreshadowing. I assume those moments were retroactively selected from (likely hours of) footage that had been shot with a sharp awareness of what Isra’a and her family were going through and how they were feeling. Maybe some connections were fortuitous, but the structuring of the film is too tight to have been all happy accidents.
One in a Million captures a decade in the lives of one particular family, but it’s a wide snapshot of a particular period, from the migrant crisis to the rise of right-wing anti-immigration campaigns in Europe (and protests against them) to the fall of the Assad regime. It begins with the plight of refugees crossing the Mediterranean that we saw in several documentaries 10 years ago, such as Gianfranco Rosi’s feature Fire at Sea and the short film 4.1 Miles, both of which were nominated for an Oscar in the same year. Much of this family’s story is also timeless, in the film’s portrait of a people on the move: the universal tale of immigrants, carrying forth customs (some good, some bad) while also becoming acclimated to assimilation (some good, some bad). We see both the usual and specific differences in the hopes and outcomes for a husband and a wife, and for older and younger generations, in their new world.
There are plenty of documentaries filmed for a decade or more that only come together with their point at the end, a la the good but often dull 2013 feature American Promise (which was too uniformly compared to Boyhood). Occasionally, we get one that is poignantly observed and conveyed throughout, as is the case with One in a Million. It’s fitting that the last documentary of this kind to resonate so much as both a timely and timeless coming-of-age story within a specific era debuted almost a decade ago: Quest (which I reluctantly also compared to Boyhood), an underrated 2017 film that is to life during the Obama presidency as this film is to life during the migrant crisis. They’re nothing alike except in their documentary artistry and substance. I wish One in a Million weren’t such a rarity, but it’d probably stand out regardless.
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Cookie Queens
(USA, 91 min.)
Dir. Alysa Nahmias
Prod. Michael Dweck, Gregory Kershaw, Alysa Nahmias, Jennifer Sims
Programme: Family Matinee
Leave it to the producer of Wildcat and Unrest, and the guys behind the stunning observational films Gaucho Gaucho and The Truffle Hunters, to craft such a deliciously effective film about the business of Girl Scout cookies. Superficially, Cookie Queens follows the normal “competition doc” route, pitting differing competitors against each other as they struggle to reach a certain achievement. But thanks to some crafty filmmaking and stellar instincts to find key characters to follow, we’re treated to much more than some sugary snack.
The annual sales drive of Girl Scout cookies is the central funding scheme for this storied organization, resulting in over $800 million dollars of revenue annually. In the U.S., some 200,000 young girls are set out to achieve their stated goals, trafficking the likes of Thin Mints, Lemonades, Trefoils and Do-So-Dos to members of the community. Standing in the cold outside grocery stores, wandering the aisles of flea markets, or using the tools of social media, e-commerce, and even broadcast television to hawk their wares, the cookie drive is, on the one hand, an exercise in developing entrepreneurial skills, and on the other hand, an explicit example of child labour exploitation.
What elevates Cookie Queens are the perspectives of four kids from various backgrounds who thrive and struggle with these cookie conundrums. The film isn’t some shiny celebration, nor is it a dour excoriation of the practice. Instead, it’s a terrifically nuanced look at this formative experience for these young people, belying any preconceived expectations of what’s to transpire as they set out on their sales goals, while still allowing central questions and concerns to be raised throughout.
We meet Olive, a legendary salesperson who, at the age of twelve, is already a veteran in the game. A record holder for her region, we see as she creates a slightly modest goal of 5,000 boxes sold (still almost double the other members of her troupe), and sets about making things happen. Assisted by her parents, she has the tenacity and slightly manic approach of a young Tracy Flick from Alexander Payne’s comedy Election, and one could easily see this mode of entrepreneurial intensity mocked in other circumstances.
Yet Olive is well aware of the pressures to achieve, both from within and without, with the responsibilities buttressed by the drive to upsell to her prospective clients. The blasé way she receives constant compliments of being such a “good little sales lady” shows how much of the work has become rote. At the same time, there’s a clear drive to add another record to her list of achievements.
We’re introduced to Nikki as she watches her older sisters Nyah and Nala as they rehearse for their latest TikTok dance video. She peeks around the corner but isn’t invited to participate in the fun. The elder siblings are all former champion sellers in Chino, California, and Nikki is in a position to make a mark of her own. The goal for them is to sell enough cookies to warrant a trip to Europe, and it’ll take many trips in the family’s Cadillac SUV to be selling rain or shine to make this dream a reality.
We then travel to El Paso, Texas to meet Shannon Elizabeth, an eight-year-old whose dream is simply to attend a summer camp. Her parents are of lesser means than the others, but together as family, they take a real financial risk in order to foster their daughter’s dream. Part of the mechanism of these sales is that parents must pre-buy the inventory, meaning that success or failure to achieve sales goals can have real lasting consequences on those without the income to regularly gamble on such ventures.
Finally, there’s Ara, a precocious five-year-old with the modest goal of 50 boxes sold. Traipsing on the California beaches with her red wagon in tow, she exudes warmth and joy while trying to share sweets with strangers. A small device to regulate her insulin levels is attached to her arm, making the selling of sugary snacks a slightly ironic practice. Here too the film deftly injects a small amount of critique in showing how inclusion only goes so far within the massive process of the cookie game.
Executive produced by Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, the film has the markings of something major, primed to be embraced by the millions who have either sold these cookies themselves, or simply have partaken of the treats on an annual basis with attention gained from the royal imprimatur. Yet Nahmias’ deft storytelling sets the film apart from any celebrity endorsement, beautifully navigating the various complexities without ever losing its sweet appeal.
Cookie Queens is one of those terrific works of non-fiction that explores a microcosm only to uncover far broader social and political factors that emerge from what otherwise would appear to be a minor cultural event. Emotionally rich, terrifically paced and handsomely framed, this is an exceptional work that’s greater than its ingredients, sandwiching politics, commerce, and the joys of childhood all into one package.
The post Cookie Queens Review: This Doc Never Crumbles appeared first on POV Magazine.
