John Wilson attends The History Of Concrete premiere during the 2026 Sundance Film Festival at The Yarrow Theatre on January 22, 2026 in Park City, Utah. (Photo by Arturo Holmes/Getty Images for Sundance Film Festival)
By Erik Adams
“I just want to congratulate all of you here, because you are clearly doc ball knowers,” Sundance Institute programmer Sudeep Sharma says to the audience packing the house for The History of Concrete’s premiere at the 2026 Festival. “You know this is a big film.”
Taking an opposite tack, director John Wilson strikes a more modest stance in his opening remarks. He recalls one of the first times he discussed the movie with his agent, who he told “I didn’t really want that many people to see it. Which is not what your agent wants to do.”
But people — including Wilson’s parents, brother, and friends, who receive a heartwarming shoutout at the top of the screening — clearly want to see The History of Concrete. Fans of the filmmaker’s late, great HBO series How to with John Wilson or any of his previous POV documentaries will be familiar with Concrete’s surprising, free-associative flow. But even the most ardent Wilson supporter won’t be able to guess where the director’s debut feature goes.
It begins with Wilson searching for a new project, a quest that winds through a seminar on writing a romantic comedy for the Hallmark Channel and eventually lands on, well, the history of concrete. “Concrete is the second-most used material on the planet,” Wilson says in the film — and yet it’s a topic that’s rarely given a second thought. Narrating in his signature deadpan, Wilson gives second, third, fourth, and fifth thoughts to this ubiquitous mix of limestone, ash, clay, water, clay, and sand, eventually branching off into other avenues of exploration, like a 52-day race around a single block in Queens or a short film production starring a guy who, coincidentally, works in concrete.
These surprises are often funny, but they have the potential to be profound, too. Wilson’s knack for documenting happenstance and coincidence is all over The History of Concrete, always ready to be given new meaning (or any meaning) in voiceover. Within this seemingly bottomless trove of B-roll, you’re as likely to encounter a major celebrity as you are an off-color, supremely specific piece of graffiti.
“A lot of times, the shots are so funny already and they demand a certain voiceover, and we end up writing to that,” says editor Cori Wapnowska during the post-premiere Q&A.
“There are also the times when you’ll have a line and no visual for it, and then there’s like four days worth of clips lined up, and then Cori has to scrub through them super fast until you’re like, ‘Stop that one,’” adds co-producer Francis Carr.
Wilson is the voice and driving force of The History of Concrete, but he acknowledges the tremendous amount of collaboration that made the film possible by bringing Wapnowska, Carr, and producers Clark Filio, Shirel Kozak, and Allie Viti up with him for the Q&A. Theirs is one of the many projects playing the Festival this year about the ups and downs of creative pursuits, something we see in scenes of Wilson trying to drum up funding for the movie, or in his friendship with Jack, a liquor sales rep by day and aspiring guitar hero by night. It’s not hard to draw a line from scenes of Wilson surrounded by Zoom windows full of production execs who can’t see his vision and the sight of Jack playing his heart out to bar patrons who are barely listening.
Jack opens up to Wilson in unexpected ways over the course of the movie, but so do a lot of the other interviewees. There’s just something about the filmmaker’s approach that gets people to reveal their true selves. It didn’t hurt that he was in dire technical straits when he met Jack. After a day of filming potholes, and at a point in the production where he was seeking musicians to feature in the documentary, Wilson found himself entering a liquor store with a broken camera.
“I saw Jack, and he just looked like a musician,” he says during the Q&A. “And so I’m holding the viewfinder in one hand, and the body [of the camera] in the other, and the mic is barely hanging on. I think that was disarming, in a way. My shit was so fucked up in that moment, and I think that makes people feel a bit calm.”
It certainly struck some sort of chord with Jack, who Wilson and the team wound up filming for a year-and-a-half. Carr says that Jack still texts him “all the time.”
“He just texted me,” he says. “He said the band is killing it right now. They’re booking a lot of gigs. And he said something like, ‘Everyone is just out for promotions and premonitions,’ or something. He has a poetic texting style.”
