I might not have been in Park City proper, but I’m glad to report that I co-sign the people’s choice. The standout film at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, in an absolute runaway, is Come See Me in the Good Light. The Sundance audience agreed, bestowing the Festival Favourite Award upon the portrait of poets Andrea Gibson and Megan Falley as the former confronts a diagnosis with terminal cancer. Debuting outside the competition in the Premieres section, the win proved a pleasant surprise after André Is an Idiot and Prime Minister scooped those prizes earlier in the week for the competitive streams.
Arguably Ryan White’s best film yet as a director, Come See Me in the Good Light marks the Sundance standout for its unwavering ability to immerse audiences in emotion. This documentary offers a truly poetic and refreshingly intimate consideration of life in the face of death. It’s a five-alarm ugly cry of a movie as White observe the poets as they navigate the procedures that prolong Gibson’s life and ease (somewhat) their pain.
This film isn’t afraid to make people feel because, ultimately, emotions are reminders that we’re alive. It’s an accessible portrait of life and death, a profound consideration of love told with a poet’s touch. There’s wonderful catharsis as Gibson’s strength and awesome poetry wrap the film with a warm hug.

While Come See Me in the Good Light will inevitably be atop the list of 2025 best docs, this year’s line-up might not match the bar for the documentary programming set by previous years. The 2025 slate is quite strong, mind you, just perhaps not as collectively gargantuan as, say, 2021 with Flee, Summer of Soul, and Misha and the Wolves; 2022 with Fire of Love, Navalny, The Territory, All that Breathes, and A House Made of Splinters; 2023 with Milisuthando, 20 Days in Mariupol, The Eternal Memory, Still, and A Still Small Voice; or last year with Skywalkers, Daughters, Never Look Away, Black Box Diaries, Porcelain War, Union, and Sugarcane.
But that’s not to say it was an off year. Sundance’s 2025 documentary slate boasts many committed political docs, a diversity of perspectives, and engaging takes on social issues. These films should have good runs on the circuit. Many boast audience-friendly elements that should be viable for distributors and streamers. And there’s lots of fire that speaks to the collective unease heading into another Trump presidency.
This year’s class includes several films that feel in conversation with each other. André Is an Idiot, for example, sits nicely in conversation with Come See Me in the Good Light. The doc by Tony Benna offers the second-best cancer doc of Sundance 2025. The film follows marketer André Ricciardi as a long-delayed colonoscopy leaves him with months to live. The film mixes a great cocktail of self-deprecating humour and unsentimental inspiration. Besides the great sense of humour, the doc also boasts a whipsmart editing job that perfectly balances the complex tones. Benna ensures that the contrasting emotions complement each other beautifully as André ponders his encroaching demise.

Meanwhile, 2000 Meters to Andriivka and The Perfect Neighbor, as POV’s Jason Gorber notes, illustrate artful appropriations of bodycam footage to tell harrowing tales. They’re worthy winners of the directing prizes for World Cinema Documentary and U.S. Documentary at the festival. 2000 Meters offers Mstyslav Chernov’s follow-up to his Sundance Audience Award winner and Oscar winner 20 Days in Mariupol. The doc boasts an astonishing feat of reportage from the thick of the war in Ukraine. It may lack the sense of revelation one feels in Mariupol, which was among the first portraits out of the gate of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and arguably the best to date. Chernov imbues the documentary with a haunting sense of loss as images caught by bodycameras share heroic acts by soldiers on the ground, many of whom have since passed.
Meanwhile, The Perfect Neighbor arguably marks the most significant work of the U.S. Documentary Competition. This feature directorial debut for Geeta Gandbhir, a long-time film editor, puts one’s heart in one’s throat. It’s a chilling consideration of a Florida community besieged a neighbourhood Karen. Bodycam footage from police officers document how cops arrive in the neighbourhood week after week as Susan Lorincz complains about kids playing in a field adjacent to her rental apartment. There’s an accumulating sense of dread as Lorincz’s calls become increasingly irrational and aggressive, as well as more overtly racist.
As Gandbhir unfolds the events that show how one of those calls led to the shooting death of neighbour Ajike Owens, who simply defended her kids’ right to play, The Perfect Neighbor composes a damning portrait of a broken America. The film builds a tense finale as Lorincz’s case highlight’s Florida’s “stand your ground laws” and just eviscerates a legal system that even invites such loopholes for violent crime. It’s top-notch filmmaking in every regard: a work that astutely combs through the evidence to rebuild the scene of the crime and interrogate it frame by frame.

The two directing prize winners arguably speak to a tough jury deliberation, although I can’t quite say that the Grand Prize winners, while strong, necessarily stand atop the field. The World Cinema winner, Cutting through Rocks, directed by Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni, arguably proves a feat of access first and foremost. The vérité portrait of Sara Shahverdi, the first woman elected for office in her rural Iranian community, doesn’t quite have the dramatic spark as its competitor Prime Minister does with its energetic look at former leader Jacinda Arnerd. Prime Minister admittedly hews closely to the vein of celebrity bio docs that offer limited perspective, but there’s a tighter precision to the filmmaking and a pressing consideration of what it means to be a courageous leader in the face of populism and virulent misogyny. Both films should nevertheless be staples in line-up across the festival circuit.
U.S. Grand Prize winner Seeds, meanwhile, marks another impressive feature debut at Sundance. Brittany Shyne’s beautifully shot first feature offers a sombre yet poetic consideration of Black farmers in America. Her monochrome cinematography captures a history of systemic racism that continues to inform the economic reality for farmers and let some landscapes thrive while others struggle. The film immerses itself in the farmers’ environments. It gleans moments from everyday life and bides its time with the characters, if a bit too lethargically. The film’s glacial pace may prove a hurdle for some audiences, although a tighter cut could ease the struggle. The film nevertheless stands as a promising feat of slow cinema. It grants people time and space rarely afforded to them.

Another strong debut comes in Shoshanna Stern’s Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore. Stern’s portrait of the Deaf actor, Oscar winner, and activist rises above the steady stream of celebrity docs. The film uses Matlin’s story to offer a substantial and engaged consideration of representation. There’s a certain fearlessness to Matlin’s interviews as her unconventional road to fame leaves her hard-wired to be outspoken. Stern, meanwhile, admirably makes the film noteworthy in its own right by using an accessible format. She employs American Sign Language and subtitles for interviews with Deaf participants, while hearing interviewees have listening aids that interpret the director’s questions without making them audible for the audience. The film itself proves that accessibility doesn’t stand in the way of a good story. It only elevates it.
On the celebrity front, Selena y Los Dinos, directed by Isabel Castro, hits many right notes with its portrait of Tejano singer Selena Quintanilla. The doc doesn’t necessarily bring much new to the table, but it’s a beautifully and engagingly assembled archival film. The film unfortunately leaves Sundance as one of two films pulled from the online platform due to piracy. (The other being James Sweeney’s drama Twinless, which had a steamy sex scene leak online.) Unfortunately, the rogue antics of some users pirating movies for likes on social media could spell the end of the one festival that got the virtual edition right—and was willing to keep it going to level the playing field.

The online festival era may be nearing its end, anyways, as virtual Sundance has a different vibe this year. Previous years let films “pop” with collective reactions, but with the online window understandably delayed by five days, reactions from the ground seemed more fragmented, less considered, and less discerning. Many reactions from the festival’s front half favoured the higher profile Premieres. Films like Kiss of the Spider Woman and Sly Lives! dominated the conversation, while indie films that characterize what Sundance is all about got a smattering of attention afterwards. It’s as if people on the ground spent five days watching as many films as they could, wrote about them on the flight back, and resumed binge-watching when the virtual portal opened mid-festival. (The demise of X/Twitter adds to the fragmentation.)
Most of the festival’s documentary headliners, though, were available to both audiences. Films like Deaf President Now, Heightened Scrutiny, and Middletown, joined Come See Me in the Good Light as impressive titles by name directors.
However, this year’s festival again boasts a sense of discovery. Many of the doc highlights hail from early career filmmakers and spotlight worthy subjects and voices like GEN_, How to Build a Library, and Speak. The latter by from Jennifer Tiexiera and Guy Mossman marks a riveting and inspiring competition doc. Speak follows five students in the national public speaking championships. Its employs a winning model that lets young Americans articulate their fears and hopes as they assess topical issues through personal lenses. Speak. arguably marks the most commercial-friendly title of the competition docs. It engages audiences through numerous topical issues in an open and accessible manner.

Reid Davenport also balances the personal and political with Life After, his sophomore feature after Sundance prizewinner I Didn’t See You There. The film takes the story of Elizabeth Bouvia, who fought for the right to die in a landmark 1983 case, to consider disability rights. Davenport again takes a first person perspective, but makes a surprising and effective leap into Canadian politics. He explores the implications of Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) policies that treat death as an easy alternative to care for people with disabilities. Told with conviction, the film considers not the right to die, but the right to live.
Similarly, Pavel “Pasha” Talankin makes a brave feat with Mr. Nobody Against Putin. The doc directed by David Borenstein uses tapes that Talankin recorded while teaching in a Russian high school. Talankin, observing the machinery of a dangerous ideology infiltrating the curriculum, shares a brave act of resistance to show to the world how Vladimir Putin compromises a generation of children to serve his own game.
Slightly veering from conventional ranks, alternatively, is Sundance’s one all-out misfire on the doc front, Khartoum. It’s a well-intentioned if scattered hybrid portrait of Sudanese refugees re-enacting their stories. The film struggles with the disjointed meta-theatrical conceit that has participants dramatize their tales together, especially since it frequently reverts to compelling vérité that captures the situation back home. Other films employ a dramatic conceit more successful while considering the politics of displacement, such as shorts Neighbor Abdi and the poetic and haunting family saga from this year’s shorts selection, Entre le Feu et le Clair de Lune.

More successful with its innovative form is the animated Endless Cookie. It boasts the most eclectic artistic vision of the festival. Half-brothers Seth Scriver and Pete Scriver deliver a hilarious and irreverent consideration of storytelling and community. The animated lark serves as an early Canadian highlight for the year.
So too does director Amber Fares’ US-produced Coexistence, My Ass! This very funny portrait of comedian Noam Shuster Eliassi and her outspoken humour delivers great laughs and bold commentary. It’s a personal glimpse at the situation in Palestine and Israel, viewed through the eyes of someone brave enough to speak the truth as a laughing matter. This film alone should satisfy anyone desperately seeking docs that hit the sweet spot between audience accessibility and political engagement. In a way, that’s what the films of Sundance 2025 reflect: a documentary field in search of that increasingly elusive middle ground.