Aaro Ray, Nehemiah Ray, Carver Ray and Eliza Ray attend Documentary Short Film Program at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. © 2026 Sundance Institute | photo by Breanna Downs.
By Erik Adams
It’s a capacity crowd at the Library Center Theatre for the debut of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival Documentary Short Film Program. Narrowed down from hundreds of submissions, the selected shorts represent a wide array of topics, techniques, and perspectives. But they’re united by a commitment to advancing the art of independently produced nonfiction film.
Take a closer look at the lineup, and some overlapping themes emerge. The Boys and the Bees and The Chimney Sweeper depict age-old crafts being handed down from generation to generation. Tuktuit : Caribou and Going Sane: The Rise and Fall of the Center For Feeling Therapy find their filmmakers experimenting with form and medium — the actual physical medium for the former.
Devastating fires and environmental decay connect Tuktuit : Caribou and STILL STANDING. STILL STANDING and Luigi draw subject matter from current events. Luigi and The Baddest Speechwriter of All concern public figures whose actions had a tremendously galvanizing effect (in tremendously different ways).
At the Festival, The Baddest Speechwriter of All shows that Clarence B. Jones, attorney and speechwriter to Martin Luther King Jr., can still cause a commotion at age 92. His parting words in the film — an imagined warning from King that ends “and he’s not gonna let you sleep until he puts his foot, nonviolently, up your ass” — practically blow the roof off of the Park City Library. “It became an opportunity to give a platform to Dr. Jones,” says Ben Proudfoot, who co-directed The Baddest Speechwriter of All with Stephen Curry. (Yes, basketball fans: that Stephen Curry.)
Proudfoot and Curry’s movie marries a dazzling conversation between Jones and Curry to beautiful watercolor animation. Painting is central to Liza Mandelup’s Luigi, too: It begins in the studio of artist Boo Paterson, who became an instant online sensation when she applied an Old Master’s touch to photographs of Luigi Mangione, the alleged murderer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. There was a similar immediacy to Mandelup’s inspiration for Luigi: She and her longtime collaborators were looking for a project that they could make quickly at the same time that Mandelup was, in her words, “well down a Luigi rabbit hole.”
“And I was like, ‘Let’s go shoot this,” she says in the Q&A following the premiere. “We didn’t pitch it. We just shot it on our own money and edited it, and I was like, ‘We’re just gonna put it up online.’”
Mandelup adds, to the audience’s amusement, “And then I was like, ‘What if we submitted to Sundance?’”
In the shocking crime story of Going Sane, the radical methods of now-disgraced psychotherapists Richard “Riggs” Corriere and Joseph Hart trap patients of the Center for Feeling Therapy in a lifestyle that begins to resemble a cult. Wanting to anonymize the Center survivors who granted him interviews, director Joey Izzo had actors lip-sync recordings of their voices while reenacting a ’70s group therapy session.
“They have professional careers,” Izzo says. “They’re therapists, lawyers, social workers. Some might be in the audience right now. But I really saw myself with these people. A majority of my friends — and probably half of this audience — could have signed up and been a part of the Center for Feeling Therapy. It looked nothing like a tinfoil-hat type of cult to me. And I’m still wrestling with what the group was — if it was a cult or a community.”
The Boys and the Bees director Arielle Knight likewise had to earn the trust of the real people featured in her movie. When she proposed documenting the Ray family’s life on the 12-acre Georgia property where they raise fruit, vegetables, sheep, chickens, and, of course, bees, “they were reluctant at first.”
“‘Who is this? What is this about?’,” she recalls the Rays saying. “And then it was just mutual — we fell in love with each other, and they were like, ‘Hey, come on in. Let’s do this thing.’”
Knight began with the Rays in mind and built a movie around them; The Chimney Sweeper director Jack Raese knew he wanted to “go to the middle of nowhere and meet some eccentric character,” and narrowed his options down from there. By searching local newspapers, he discovered Markus Füchtner, descendant of the inventor of the nutcracker doll and current head of the family business.
“His personality pops off the page a bit,” Raese says of Füchtner. “And I knew immediately that I wanted to meet him.”
A year after the Eaton Fire dominated headlines and cut a path of destruction across Southern California, some homes untouched by the fires remain uninhabitable. That’s the overlooked story married directors Victor Tadashi Suárez and Livia Albeck-Ripka tell in STILL STANDING. Their movie takes us into houses — like that of their friend, Roy Werner, who also composed the score for the short — whose walls, surfaces, and contents have been irreversibly tainted by toxic byproducts of the fire.
STILL STANDING was shot on film — a thematic choice as much as a stylistic one. “Our film’s about contamination, so it was important for us to shoot on film, [to] see the dust and the particles on the film once it’s been exposed.” But Lindsay Aksarniq McIntyre goes one step further: She manufactured her own film stock for Tuktuit : Caribou. Her abstract still lives, breathtaking landscapes, and scenes of traditional caribou-processing practices are partially captured on film processed from those same caribou.
“The inspiration for this is that I really like to make things difficult for myself,” she says.
