Given the current bleak political and cultural climate, and streaming services' keen interest in celebrity-driven content, it's no surprise that the 40th annual Sundance Film Festival is packed with portrait documentaries. Frida Kahlo, Christopher Reeve, Luther Vandross and Tammy Faye are just a few of the famous names featured in the various documentaries featured in Sundance's nonfiction lineup.
The festival has screened a number of star-studded documentaries, including films about Ruth Bader Ginsburg (RBG), Fred Rogers (Won't You Be My Neighbor?), Harvey Weinstein (The Untouchables), Michael Jackson (Leaving Neverland), Kanye West (jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy), Bill Cosby (We Need to Talk About Cosby), and most recently, Judy Blume (Judy Blume Forever) and Michael J. Fox (Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie), which all had their world premieres in Park City in recent years.
But the profile documentaries selected for this year's Sundance Film Festival are not targeted marketing vehicles, unlike films produced by their star subjects themselves, and they're not traditional biopics either. Their growing popularity in recent years has made the genre far more innovative and cinematic than formulaic.
One example is “Frida,” a documentary about Frida Kahlo, which premieres at the festival on Thursday. Director Carla Gutierrez uses Kahlo's own words and meticulously constructed animations to give audiences an intimate glimpse into Kahlo's life. The film, which will be distributed by Amazon later this year, includes animations of 48 of Kahlo's original paintings and 13 illustrations from her diaries.
“At the beginning of the project, it was all about how to get inside her mind and how to feel about her heart,” said Gutierrez, who was nominated for an Emmy for editing “RBG” and is making his directorial debut with “Frida.” “We decided that art would do that for us. We knew it would be amazing to see colorful art emerge from the black and white world that surrounds her.”
Courtesy of Sundance Institute | Photo by Herb Ritts/AUGUST.
©Herb Ritts/AUGUST Copyright Ce
In Superman: The Christopher Reeve Story, filmmakers Ian Bonote and Peter Etedogui explore Reeve's rise to stardom with his starring role in the 1978 film Superman, as well as his real-life transformation into a superhero after a tragic accident in 1995 left him a quadriplegic. To tell both stories, the directors seamlessly move back and forth in time throughout the 104-minute film, resulting in a nonfiction biopic that is as captivating as it is striking.
“It's very easy to make a cookie-cutter biopic, but that was pretty fatal for us,” says Ettedgui. “So we started to realize that as we unfolded this story chronologically, there were a lot of little contrasting moments and contrasts in[Reeve's]life before and after the accident. We started to think that we could really piece these together and create a flashback structure that would allow us to contrast his life before and after the accident. And also find touchpoints, like the overall theme of what it means to be a hero, and the theme of family, which was very important to us.”
Unlike last year's high-profile documentaries “Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie” and “Judy Bloom Forever,” the buzzworthy project, produced independently by London-based Misfits, U.S.-based Words+Pictures and Passion Pictures, is coming to the festival without a deep-pocketed distributor. “Super/Man” premieres on Sunday.
“A lot of celebrity documentaries these days feel pretty formulaic,” Etedui says. “If you want to do something a little different, you need to be independent.”
Director Sarah Dowland also resorted to traveling back and forth in time to tell the story of WNBA basketball legend Sue Bird. In “Sue Bird: In the Clutch,” Dowland chronicles the point guard's record-setting fifth Olympic gold medal, her 21-year professional career, life with fiancée Megan Rapinoe, and Bird's retirement.
“It's a character-driven film, and with that approach I tried to do a couple of things,” Dowland says. “I wanted to chart Sue's career, but I also wanted to interweave it with the contemporary story of her retirement, so I could look back at moments in her career and use that as a vehicle to build out that side of her.”
Bird remains relatively unknown despite having won five Olympic gold medals, four WNBA championships, 12 All-Star appearances and being the WNBA's all-time leader in assists, games played and minutes played, which influenced the editing of the documentary.
“We knew there were foundational elements to include in the film for people who were discovering her for the first time,” she said. “We didn't want them to miss out on the really important parts of her career that established her as the GOAT and the greatest point guard in women's basketball history.”
Like Bonnote and Ettedge, Dowland is hoping to promote the documentary, which premieres Sunday, at the Sundance Film Festival.
“There are some great documentaries about male athletes but not many about female athletes, even though the market for those kinds of documentaries is really booming right now,” Dowland said. “When I embarked on this project I knew it wouldn't be easy – it's never easy to raise money for any film, it's a no-brainer – but I knew from the start we had a good chance of selling it.
“That wasn't the case at all,” she says. “I think there was a lot of enthusiasm for Sue and Sue's story, but that didn't translate into anyone putting their own pocket money into financing the film, which was a real surprise to us.”
Two musician profile documentaries hoping for distribution at Sundance are Dawn Porter's “Luther: Never Too Much,” about R&B superstar Luther Vandross, and Gary Hustwit's “Eno,” about Brian Eno, the composer, producer and self-described “non-musician” best known for producing David Bowie, U2 and Talking Heads.
To tell Eno's story, Hustwit relied on generative artificial intelligence. Using interviews with Eno and contemporaries, as well as hundreds of hours of video from Eno's own archive, he assembled a “modular” film that shifts unpredictably across time periods and mediums to paint a comprehensive portrait of its subject. “Eno” will be different at each screening at Sundance, beginning with its Park City premiere on Thursday.
“This is a compilation of 50 years of Brian's life, work and ideas,” says Hustwit. “To me, it feels like a normal film documentary, except it changes every time. One of the ways we do this is by having a lot more content than your typical 90-minute or so film, so the software can choose which scenes to show and in what order. The software also lets you choose how to build the transitions between scenes, and it lets you build your own scenes from scratch using the raw material.”
Filmmakers are increasingly not just telling the story of a life, but using that life to explore something deeper.
While making the four-part documentary series “Better Angels: The Gospel of Tammy Faye,” director Dana Adam Shapiro (“Operation Murderball”) discovered that not only were his preconceived notions about Faye wrong, but that the story he was telling wasn't just about the former American preacher.
“This isn't just about us portraying women wrong,” Shapiro says of the Vice-financed series, which is seeking distribution. “We wrote it, we shot it, we did the music, and we edited it like a thriller, because there are so many twists and turns in not only Tammy's life, but also in American culture at the time.”
Shapiro relies on Faye's family, friends and foes, as well as reams of archival footage, to examine the evangelist's rise, fall and unlikely return. Despite previous documentaries, “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” and a version of the story featuring Jessica Chastain's Oscar-winning performance, Shapiro says he had no hesitation in retelling Faye's story. “Better Angels” opens Friday.
“I think if you can take four hours and really stretch your legs, it becomes more like a novel,” he says. “When you do a one-off, you usually have to be very simple.
“It's really hard to kill your favorite parts,” he says, “and when you have four hours, you can actually keep them alive. And sometimes those favorite parts end up being the best parts of the movie.”
