Deep Dive Into Sundance Doc Lineup: Will Ferrell Film, Tammy Faye Series, Lucy Lawless Directorial Debut, And The Film That Made Programmers Cry
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Documentary lovers are digesting the announcement of the Sundance nonfiction lineup, a slate of films certain to factor in awards conversation into next Oscar season.
“I think there’s a lot of discoveries in there,” Sundance Senior Nonfiction Programmer Basil Tsiokos says of the lineup revealed on Wednesday. “It’s a nice blend of new filmmakers and alumni, lots of different kinds of approaches to filmmaking… There’s biodocs, but there’s also films that are political. There’s films that are dealing with the environment. There’s lots of other things happening, so it’s a nice mix we think.”
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Among the most eye-popping titles are Will & Harper, Josh Greenbaum’s nonfiction road movie about comedian Will Ferrell and Harper Steele, his close friend of 30 years who came out as trans. “The two decide to embark on a cross-country road trip to process this new stage of their relationship in an intimate portrait of friendship, transition, and America,” according to a description from Sundance.
“There’s warmth to this film and that’s what we love about it,” Tsiokos tells Deadline. “It’s a film about allyship, it’s a film about openness to trying to understand something that you may not necessarily completely understand, but to have the openness and warmth to explore it together and to be honest and candid about it.”
Ferrell’s broad appeal across blue and red states could make for significant cultural impact for the documentary.
“We see the value of it being able to reach somebody that may not necessarily know trans people in their lives,” Tsiokos says. “Will Ferrell is actually a really smart way of getting entrée to those people and saying, Hey, you like Will Ferrell, you should watch this film! And you may learn something. You may question the things that you have taken for granted around your ideas around what the trans experience might be.”
Will & Harper is playing in the festival’s Premieres section, as is another film that’s sure to elicit an emotional reaction: Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story, directed by Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui. It uses never-before-seen home videos to tell the story of the actor who rose to fame as Superman in the hugely popular films of the 1970s and ‘80s. In 1995, he was paralyzed from the neck down in a tragic horse-riding accident.
“It’s essentially a dual story of Superman, him being cast and the impact that has, and the accident. And so it’s these two threads that interweave and go back and forth in time,” Tsiokos explains. “It’s very notable that this vulnerable man becomes the ultimate vulnerable protagonist in this situation. It has amazing candor from his children and family members and friends.”
Tsiokos adds, “We are a crying bunch in our programming team, but we cried a lot. It’s really emotionally affecting.”
Premiering in World Cinema Documentary Competition is Never Look Away, the directorial debut of Xena: Warrior Princess star and New Zealander Lucy Lawless. Her film centers on late CNN camera woman Margaret Moth, a New Zealand native herself, and courageous photographer who was wounded while covering war in Sarajevo.
“Subject matter, filmmaker, topic — it all just connects in a really powerful way,” observes Sundance documentary programmer Sudeep Sharma. “She’s a very unique person, Margaret, but she’s from New Zealand and same with Lucy, and it just feels like there’s a real connection that Lucy had in terms of the type of person Margaret was and as a media maker. It’s really pretty extraordinary.”
Filmmaker Yance Ford, who debuted Strong Island at Sundance in 2017 (which went on to earn an Oscar nomination) returns to the festival this year with Power, examining the underlying purpose of policing in America. It both connects with and diverges from themes of Strong Island, which told the deeply upsetting story of Ford’s brother, who was killed in an apparently racially motivated crime that went unpunished (Netflix is distributing Power, as it did Strong Island).
“It’s a really, really smart film that looks at the history of policing in the U.S. and how and why we allow it to be what it is and where the limits of control are or are not with it,” Tsiokos says. “Really, really smart film, a different kind of film from Strong Island, but definitely related to it.”
Director Stephen Maing explored some of those themes in his 2018 Oscar-shortlisted film Crime + Punishment. Union, his latest, premiering in U.S. Documentary Competition at Sundance, takes on a different subject – the drive to unionize Amazon workers at a facility in Staten Island, New York. Brett Story directs along with Maing.
“It’s obviously very topical,” Sharma comments. “There’s a lot just focusing on Chris Smalls who’s a leader in that [union drive]. It’s just really incredible access and we think really timely.”
Acclaimed filmmakers Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine premiered their documentary Boys State at Sundance in 2020, a film about high school boys in Texas who take part in a mock government exercise. McBaine and Moss return this year with Girls State (from Apple Original Films), which looks at a program in Missouri that’s a distaff counterpart to the one in Texas.
“It’s not a sequel, it’s a companion piece type film,” Sharma notes, observing that the exercise in government depicted in Girls State “is a very different experience actually, I think for reasons that the film talks about. It’s similar, but it’s also different.”
The Premieres section includes a couple of music-themed documentaries: Chris Smith’s film on Devo, and Luther: Never Too Much, a film about the late Luther Vandross directed by Dawn Porter and produced by Jamie Foxx, among others.
Elton John and his husband Davis Furnish are among the executive producers of a documentary series premiering in the festival’s Episodic section. Better Angels: The Gospel According to Tammy Faye, directed by Oscar-nominated filmmaker Dana Adam Shapiro, focuses on the late legend of TV evangelism, Tammy Faye Bakker.
The Sundance program says, “As told by her family, friends, and enemies, the meteoric rise, scandalous fall, and unlikely resurrection of Tammy Faye, the ‘First Lady of the Electric Church,’ poses an increasingly relevant question: How did we get the story so wrong?”
Jessica Chastain, who won an Academy Award for portraying the titular character in The Eyes of Tammy Faye, appears in the docuseries. That narrative adaptation, in turn, grew out of the 2000 documentary of the same name directed by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato. But if you think those earlier projects cover all conceivable angles of Tammy Faye, think again, says Tsiokos.
“The biodoc kind of space that we have this year does that same thing where you’re taking something that you think, oh, I know about Tammy Faye, I know about Frida Kahlo, let’s say, but it brings real depth and information that you don’t know and that there’s something new brought to the table with it,” Tsiokos comments. “So, even if folks think they know everything about these people, they’re going to get a lot out of these films because they are bringing fresh takes.”
Black Box Diaries (World Cinema Doc Competition), directed by journalist Shiori Ito, is among films in the festival that take on urgent issues. “Ito embarks on a courageous investigation of her own sexual assault,” programmers write, “in an improbable attempt to prosecute her high-profile offender. Her quest becomes a landmark case in Japan, exposing the country’s outdated judicial and societal systems.”
Sugarcane (U.S. Doc Competition), directed by Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie and produced by Kassie and Oscar nominee Kellen Quinn, presents “an investigation into abuse and missing children at an Indian residential school [that] ignites a reckoning on the nearby Sugarcane Reserve.”
Canada has begun to reckon with shocking crimes committed at residential schools there that were designed to assimilate (or indoctrinate) Indigenous children into Euro-Canadian culture. But there has been relatively little attention to this issue in the U.S., where similar kinds of schools operated from the 17th to the 20th centuries.
“This film actually really digs into the experience and to the ramifications of that to native people, to First Nations people,” Sharma says. “I think it is a film that could really affect the conversation, not just in Canada, but in the United States as well.”
Eternal You (World Cinema Doc Competition) is among a number of nonfiction films on their way to Park City that examine frontiers of technology and their impact on society. The documentary directed by Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck tracks AI startups that seek “to create avatars that allow relatives to talk with their loved ones after they have died. An exploration of a profound human desire and the consequences of turning the dream of immortality into a product.”
“Eternal You is really fascinating. It’s definitely a thought piece,” Tsiokos says. “It doesn’t shy away from the darker side of humanity in terms of some of their ability to sort of throw technology out there and just see what happens, even if it might have an emotional impact on folks and might be rife for exploitation.”
Tsiokos observes that Eternal You “ties together with other films in the festival like Love Machina, which is in U.S competition, that is also positing this idea of how do you send love into eternity.” The latter film, directed by Peter Sillen, centers on a couple who “commission an advanced humanoid AI named Bina48 to transfer Bina’s consciousness from a human to a robot in an attempt to continue their once-in-a-galaxy love affair for the rest of time.”
“Seeking Mavis Beacon [NEXT section; dir. Jazmin Renée Jones],” Tsiokos continues, “in a different way also looks at the role of technology, the role of representation in technology and where we are with it, where we’ve gone wrong with it perhaps in the past… talking through things like the representation of race, for example, which is also something that happens in Love Machina. So yeah, there’s some really interesting pieces there.”
In the context of technology-related projects, Tsiokos highlights two works in the New Frontier section, including Being (the Digital Griot) by artist Rashaad Newsome.
“It’s an interaction with AI as it looks at sort of Black consciousness and political thought and ideation,” Tsiokos says. “And then one that is not AI specifically, but it is really interesting kind of related to all this is another New Frontier project on [musician-composer] Brian Eno, which is a generative documentary [directed by Gary Hustwit]. That basically means… every time we show the film, it will be a different version and that will be generated by a really complex engine within the film.”
Sundance 2024 will open with 19 premieres – docs and narrative features — on the opening day, Thursday, January 18, so the festival team is encouraging attendees to arrive a day early. This piece only covers a certain amount of the nonfiction offerings, inevitably, and more additions to the lineup are expected in the coming days and weeks.
“It is our 40th edition,” Tsiokos points out. “That’s exciting too and we’ve got stuff we haven’t even announced yet that will help to keep the energy going through both halves of the festival, and that’s another important thing that we’re excited about too.”
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