The Sundance Film Festival announced all of its awards on Friday afternoon, with audience awards going to Navalny, Cha Cha Real Smooth, Girl Picture, The Territory, and Framing Agnes. Grand jury prizes were awarded to Nanny, The Exiles, Utama, and All That Breathes. I had missed a bunch of these during the premiere and second-screening windows; so I was grateful that the festival dedicated its final weekend to third showings of all of them so that I could catch up with a few more before packing up my virtual snow boots until next year.

Navalny (2022 | USA | 98 minutes | Daniel Roher)

A late entry to the festival, Navalny is the kind of documentary that would be too preposterous for as a spy thriller. A tall, handsome, charismatic opposition politician nearly dies on a cross-country flight after being poisoned by his arch-villain’s signature toxin, which was covertly applied to his boxer briefs by undercover assassins. Saved from the brink of death by German doctors, he and his wife spend his recovery in the Black Forest feeding miniature horses while collaborating with a freelance Bulgarian data nerd to solve his own attempted murder, in part through a prank call that would garner millions of views across his widely popular social media channels.

But for Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, the politician who so flummoxes Putin that the Kremlin won’t even speak his name aloud, the story is all too real. Daniel Roher weaves together archival and news clips with footage filmed in Germany while Navalny and his close-knit team worked with a Bellingcat investigative journalist to use surprisingly easily-obtained black market data to identify the perpetrators of the attempted assassination. Having built his movement through social media, Navalny is a telegenic figure who gives great tape and plays expertly to the camera. He exudes a natural magnetism and is as quick on his feet with humor as inspirational calls to action. In an extended interview, Roher doesn’t go too easy on his subject — raising questions about some of the questionable factions he’s had to ally himself with to build a broad pro-democracy coalition — but in telling this story in the form of a pulse-pounding narrative, he also paints a deeply chilling picture of the media and political landscape to which he is about to return (and where he currently remains imprisoned).

Navalny played as an official selection of the U.S. Documentary section at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival where it won the Festival Favorite and Audience Awards. It will be distributed later this year by HBOmax.

Nanny (2021 | USA | 91 minutes | Nikyatu Jusu)

Being an immigrant under-the-table caregiver for a wealthy Manhattan family’s precious five-year-old daughter is scary enough on its face: perpetually underpaid for unpredictable hours, constantly trying to please a controlling breadwinner mother, navigating the often absent journalist father’s lack of personal boundaries, all while trying to put together enough cash to reunite with your adorable son who was left behind in Senegal. And that’s before the ancient supernatural forces start creeping into your dreams and waking hours with portentous and terrifying watery visions.

In telling this horror story with elements of West African folklore, writer-director situates her heroine Aisha (Anna Diop, an instantly compelling presence) firmly in the real world of New York City. Rather than taking the shortcut of the disenfranchised and isolated immigrant abroad, she grants her character a sense of agency, a place in a vibrant multi-generational community, and a pretty sexy and well-realized romance with the charming single father doorman who she meets at her new nannying job. As tensions rise at her workplace and the date of her reunion with her son get frustratingly postponed, increasingly ominous portents blur into her reality. Even when parts of the plot feel occasionally underdeveloped, Jusu’s camera is always finding innovating or unsettling angles. Exceptional sound design combines with Rina Yang’s cinematography, which makes every character look and the constrained settings look absolutely phenomenal, to weave together an affecting and unsettling story.

Nanny played as an official selection of the U.S. Dramatic Competition at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival where it was awarded the Grand Jury Prize; it is currently seeking US distribution.

The Exiles (2021 | USA | 95 minutes | Brian Klein and Violet Columbus)

In the immediate aftermath of the Tiananmen Square massacre, the prolific Oscar-nominated documentarian and NYU professor Christine Choy began to film three nascent leaders who escaped China to build a pro-democracy movement among students and intellectuals abroad. A Chinese expat (who came to the US in her teens, an important distinction that she makes), she and sound engineer Renee Tajima-Peña followed them in New York City and around the country for months as they rallied collegiate congresses to their cause and lobbied the US government. For unspecified reasons, largely related to budgets, the project never came to fruition.

While the original reels of the young student, professor, and tech company executive who fled their beloved country after the Chinese military violently crushed the mass protest are themselves less than electrifying — perhaps part of the reason that the original project didn’t coalesce — the film’s most galvanizing scenes come as Choy travels around the world to visit with these men thirty years later. Juxtaposing the present and past across the great divide of time allows for personal reflection, inquisitions about regret, and assessment of the effect of decades of geopolitical complicity on China’s current political landscape and ascent on the international stage.

Yet even as these scenes form the film’s effective and galvanizing core, it’s the story of Choy herself and her time on camera that make for the documentary’s electrifying heart. Even when it feels like Klein and Columbus aren’t entirely sure what to do with all of this material, the interviews with her make it worthwhile. A true character, famous for freewheeling opinions, a cigarette and vodka soda as her constant companions, she steals absolutely every scene she’s in and a few that she isn’t.

The Exiles played as an official selection of the U.S. Documentary Competition at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival where it was awarded the Grand Jury Prize; it is currently seeking distribution.

The Territory (2022 | Brazil/Denmark/USA | 86 minutes | Alex Pritz)

The title of The Territory refers to a large swath of rainforest inhabited by the dwindling population of Uru-eu-wau-wau people, who first came into contact with non-Native Brazilians in 1981. Protections have made this land one of the few remaining bulwarks against the clear-cutting that threaten to fundamentally erase the lush and biodiverse Amazon river basin.

Alex Pritz’s documentary juxtaposes life among the Uru-eu-wau-wau with those of indigent farm workers seeking to establish their own settlements within the untouched lands as a way of elevating themselves from poverty. Set against Brazil’s national politics and the inflammatory rhetoric of Jair Bolsanaro, the film provides an harrowing and intimate view of the stakes of the increasing incursions into the territory in the face of a political establishment actively hostile toward its commitments to its indigenous peoples. With calls for assistance from an longstanding ally and environmental activist unheeded and rogue settlers impatiently stage environmentally devastating land grabs, the Uru-eu-wau-wau elevate a young technologically savvy member named Bitate as their new leader.

In collaboration with the documentary film crew, who capture the stakes of the conflict from macroscopic shots of tiny rainforest creatures to sweeping drone shots of the sharp lines of stark contrast between the rainforests and ever-encroaching farmlands. Scenes of giant trees being felled and swaths of nature engulfed by flames play like nightmares, yet never dwarf the human toll of a young leader’s death and the constant unsettling threats against resilient environmental advocates. Ultimately, the film finds the community rallying to stand their ground, patrol the territory against intruders, and leveraging the tools of filmmaking and media as their most potent weapons. Whether the film is a furious call to action, an inspirational story of reclaiming ownership of your own narrative, or a fleeting document of brave but futile resistance remains to be seen.

The Territory played as an official selection of the World Cinema: Documentary Competition, where it won the Audience Award and a special jury award for documentary craft; it is seeking distribution.

All That Breathes (2022 | India/United Kingdom | 91 minutes | Shaunak Sen)

An elegantly observed documentary about brothers dedicated to mending the wings of beloved birds that continue to fall from Delhi’s toxic skies and their place in an ecosystem unsettled by unchecked pollution and violence. It’s a story that began twenty years and hundreds of thousands of rescued birds ago, when teenage bodybuilders Saud and Nadeem used their knowledge of anatomy to rescue an injured black kite (one of the city’s ubiquitous avian predators) that was turned away from an established animal facility for being a non-vegetarian bird held sacred to the city’s Muslim population.

Their labor of love grew into a life’s calling, taking over a corner of their basement garage as makeshift hospital and rehabilitation center. Free time from their day jobs is spent risking their lives swimming across cold and dangerous currents to rescue injured kites from circling crows, giving neighbors tutorials on avoiding overprotective nesting parents, or putting together spreadsheets for long-shot grant application. Nights find the brothers performing surgeries or rehydrating exhausted birds, some of whom wander the often flooded garage in the background. With excessive pollution dramatically reshaping the natural world — from metabolic disorders and changes in frequency of songs to birds adapting to use cigarette butts from vast open garbage pits as pesticides — they have no shortage of feathered customers.

Although the brothers describe themselves as uncommonly close, Shaunak Sen’s hypnotic documentary is every bit as fascinated in the silent gulf between them as it is fascinated by the natural world that they strive so valiantly to protect, one animal at a time. One is content with this life of never-ending service, the other wonders ruminates on how his dedication to this one cause has closed doors to him for education, travel, and devours time he might be spending with family. Using techniques of a stark environmental portrait that considers everything from the tiniest insects to smokestacks spewing thick clouds over a city whose skies patrolled by these regal birds, the film doesn’t ignore the insidious threat of political and religious violence erupting ever-closer to their door. As it follows the brothers to the precipice of achieving one lifelong dream, it nevertheless doesn’t allow either its subjects or audiences any sense of complacency regarding the uncertain interconnectedness of all living things.

All That Breathes played as an official selection of the World Cinema: Documentary Competition where it won the Grand Jury Prize; it is still seeking distribution.