By Ramona Flume
Speaking out against injustice rarely comes without a price. Those who do it can face retaliation and persecution, expensive legal battles and ruined reputations, violence, exile, and even death. The change they fight for can take years to arrive, if it arrives at all. Yet time and again, their courage and persistence under pressure have exposed corruption, reshaped laws, and saved lives.
Documentary filmmakers have long stood alongside these truth-tellers. They bear witness and carry these stories to audiences around the world, helping turn individual acts of courage into broader movements for change. Since its founding in 2002, Sundance Institute’s Documentary Film Program has supported many of these nonfiction storytellers.
The following watchlist brings together 13 Institute-supported films set everywhere from Tokyo to the West Bank. They follow individuals who confront militaries, police departments, and governments — even the Vatican. Some are survivors who refuse to keep quiet any longer. Some are employees who notice the numbers don’t add up. Others are reporters, organizers, artists, and human rights investigators who see something wrong and won’t let it stand. What unites them isn’t a job title but a choice: to tell the truth, knowing it could cost them their safety, their livelihoods, or their place in their own communities. Explore their stories below, along with reflections from our DFP team and details on how to watch.
A Thousand Cuts
Director: Ramona S. Diaz
Producers: Christopher Clements, Ramona S. Diaz, Julie Goldman, Carolyn Hepburn, Leah Marino
Logline: With press freedom under threat in the Philippines, A Thousand Cuts goes inside the escalating war between the government and the press. The documentary follows Maria Ressa, a renowned journalist who has become a top target of President Rodrigo Duterte’s crackdown on the news media.
Supported by Sundance Institute’s 2017 Documentary Fund and premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.
Check viewing options here.
Anita: Speaking Truth to Power
Director: Freida Lee Mock
Producer: Freida Lee Mock
Logline: Against a backdrop of sex, politics, and race, Anita: Speaking Truth to Power reveals the intimate story of Anita Hill, the law professor whose testimony at Clarence Thomas’ 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearings brought sexual harassment into the national spotlight.
Supported by Sundance Institute’s 2011 Documentary Fund and premiered at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival.
Check viewing options here.
Black Box Diaries
Director: Shiori Itō
Producers: Shiori Itō, Hanna Aqvilin, Eric Nyari
Logline: Journalist Shiori Itō embarks on a courageous investigation of her own sexual assault in an improbable attempt to hold her high-profile offender accountable. Her quest becomes a landmark case in Japan, exposing the country’s outdated judicial and societal systems.
Supported by Sundance Institute’s 2023 Documentary Edit and Story Lab and premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival.
“Shiori Itō is both director and protagonist. She is an accomplished journalist who documented her fight for justice after sexual assault and the consequences of her public fight that followed. Shiori is courageous, funny, and relentless in her pursuit, which brings her up against the highest order of power in Japan. Though film is her tool, it’s also a testament to strength and an act of love for survivors everywhere.” — Kristin Feeley, Director, Documentary Film & Artist Programs
Check viewing options here.
Citizenfour
Director: Laura Poitras
Producers: Mathilde Bonnefoy, Laura Poitras, Dirk Wilutzky
Logline: Citizenfour is a real-life thriller, unfolding by the minute, giving audiences unprecedented access to filmmaker Laura Poitras and journalist Glenn Greenwald’s encounters with Edward Snowden in Hong Kong, as he hands over classified documents providing evidence of mass indiscriminate and illegal invasions of privacy by the National Security Agency (NSA).
Supported by Sundance Institute’s 2014 Documentary Fund and premiered at the 2014 New York Film Festival.
Check viewing options here.
Collective
Director: Alexander Nanau
Producers: Alexander Nanau, Bianca Oana, Bernard Michaux, Hanka Kastelicová
Logline: Collective is a gripping, real-time documentary thriller that follows a heroic team of journalists as they expose shocking corruption in the Romanian national healthcare system.
Supported by Sundance Institute’s 2017 Documentary Fund and screened at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.
Check viewing options here.
Crime + Punishment
Director: Stephen Maing
Producers: Stephen Maing, Eric Daniel Metzgar, Ross Tuttle
Logline: Amid a landmark class-action lawsuit over illegal policing quotas, Crime + Punishment chronicles the remarkable efforts and struggles of a group of Black and Latino whistleblower police officers and the young people of color they are pressured to arrest and issue summonses to in New York City.
Supported by Sundance Institute’s 2016 Documentary Fund and premiered at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Social Impact Filmmaking.
“Years after its 2018 premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, Stephen Maing’s Crime + Punishment continues to reshape policing in New York City. In the summer of 2026, one of the film’s protagonists, Edwin Raymond, was sworn in as sheriff of New York City in a ceremony attended by legendary NYPD whistleblower Frank Serpico.” — Dominic Davis, Manager, Documentary Film Fund
Check viewing options here.
E-Team
Directors: Katy Chevigny, Ross Kauffman
Producers: Katy Chevigny, Ross Kauffman, Marilyn Ness
Logline: When atrocities are committed in countries held hostage by ruthless dictators, Human Rights Watch sends in the E-Team (Emergencies Team), a collection of fiercely intelligent individuals hired to document war crimes and report them to the rest of the world.
Supported by Sundance Institute’s 2010 and 2013 Documentary Funds and premiered at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Cinematography Award: U.S. Documentary.
Check viewing options here.
Fire Through Dry Grass
Directors: Andres “Jay” Molina, Alexis Neophytides
Producers: Jennilie Brewster, Alexis Neophytides
Logline: Wearing snapback caps and Air Jordans, the Reality Poets don’t look like typical nursing home residents. In Fire Through Dry Grass, these Black and brown artists with disabilities document their lives on lockdown on a tiny island in New York City during COVID-19, using their poetry and art to underscore the danger and imprisonment they feel in the face of institutional neglect.
Supported by Sundance Institute’s 2022 Documentary Fund and premiered at the 2023 BlackStar Film Festival.
“Andres ‘Jay’ Molina [was] one of several Reality Poets, [a group of] young Black and brown disabled artists driven by sharing their rhymes and hard-earned wisdom as gun violence survivors. When they find themselves inside a New York City nursing home at the height of the pandemic, they turn their art into an act of resistance. As public officials deny the suffering and deaths unfolding behind the walls of Coler [Rehabilitation and Nursing Care Center], the Poets clamp GoPros to their wheelchairs and let their rhymes fly, documenting their fight to protect their [own] lives and the 500 nursing home residents, and their refusal to be silenced or erased.” — Maria Caridad Clement, Senior Manager, Documentary Film Program
Check viewing options here.
The Invisible War
Director: Kirby Dick
Producers: Tanner King Barklow, Amy Ziering
Logline: The Invisible War is a groundbreaking investigative documentary about one of America’s most shameful and best-kept secrets: the epidemic of rape within the U.S. military.
Supported by Sundance Institute’s 2011 and 2012 Documentary Funds and premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Audience Award: U.S. Documentary.
Check viewing options here.
The Kill Team
Director: Dan Krauss
Producers: Linda Davis, Dan Krauss
Logline: The Kill Team reveals the story of a young infantryman in Afghanistan charged with murder after blowing the whistle on his platoon’s war crimes.
Supported by Sundance Institute’s 2011 and 2012 Documentary Funds and premiered at the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival.
Check viewing options here.
No Other Land
Directors: Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Rachel Szor
Producers: Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Rachel Szor, Fabien Greenberg, Bård Kjøge Rønning
Logline: For half a decade, Basel Adra, a Palestinian activist, films his community of Masafer Yatta being destroyed by Israel’s occupation, as he builds an unlikely alliance with an Israeli journalist who wants to join his fight.
Supported by Sundance Institute’s 2021 Documentary Fund and 2023 Documentary Edit and Story Lab and premiered at the Berlinale 2024.
“Oscar winner of Best Documentary Feature Film, No Other Land follows the journey of co-director Basel Adra and his family, who are being displaced from their home territory of Masafer Yatta in the occupied West Bank. This collaborative effort by a collective of Palestinian and Israeli filmmakers is rooted in the profound friendship between Basel and co-director Yuval [Abraham], an Israeli journalist, as they confront the social and political realities and power imbalances that exist between them. The use of archival footage throughout the film serves as a document of past and present amid an ongoing genocide across Palestinian [territories] that will echo into the future. As audiences witness Basel’s community being bulldozed, No Other Land serves as a crucial testament to the enduring impact of occupation, challenging viewers to reflect on history and advocate for a more just future.” — Andrea Alarcón, Producing & Artist Support Manager, Documentary Film Program
Check viewing options here.
Nuns vs. The Vatican
Director: Lorena Luciano
Producer: Filippo Piscopo
Logline: When former nun Gloria breaks 30 years of silence to name her abuser, a celebrated artist-priest known as the “Michelangelo” of the modern Catholic Church, a long-buried crisis erupts, exposing a system designed to protect power.
Supported by Sundance Institute’s 2020 Documentary Fund and 2024 Documentary Edit Intensive and premiered at TIFF 2025.
“Emmy-winning filmmaker Lorena Luciano follows Gloria Branciani and Mirjam Kovac, who are among the dozens of women victimized by Marko Rupnik, a former priest awaiting a canonical trial for sexual, spiritual, and physical abuse. The women endured forced abortions and forced resignations from the church for speaking out but have [joined] a support organization, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests [SNAP], to help others like them.” — Dominic Davis, Manager, Documentary Film Fund
Coming to select theaters October 23.
Softie
Director: Sam Soko
Producers: Toni Kamau, Sam Soko
Logline: After years of fighting injustice in Kenya, daring and audacious political activist Boniface “Softie” Mwangi decides to run for political office. But running a clean campaign against corrupt opponents with idealism as his only weapon proves challenging.
Supported by Sundance Institute’s 2018 Documentary Fund and 2019 Luminate Fund and premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award for Editing.
Check viewing options here.
