Courtesy of Sundance Institute
The crop of documentaries that premiere at the Sundance Film Festival is always wide-ranging, both in style and in content. And this year’s selections were no exception, even if the 2021 festival was an unusual one, having largely migrated to digital platforms.
They ran the gamut from dramatic explorations of refugees’ experiences to funny and heartbreaking looks at American high schools to experimental films about technology’s effects on our lives. The world is a wide, wide place, and documentary filmmakers are committed to exploring it, celebrating it, and warning us not to take it for granted.
Kathy Huang/Sundance Institute
What’s it like to be a teenager in 2021?
Teens have always been great movie subjects, perhaps especially for documentaries. Watching a nonfiction movie set in a high school, adults can sigh with both nostalgia and relief. High schools are microcosms of society as well as a peek into the future, and the arc of a school year makes for a natural story progression.
For decades, documentarians have often trained their cameras on teenagers. But being a teenager in 2021 is not like being a teenager in 1981, or, for that matter, 2011. Teenagers now write, direct, distribute, and star in their own mini-documentaries virtually every day, thanks to smartphones and social media. And making a nonfiction film in which your subjects are used to not just being on camera, but directing and editing and constructing their own image for it, is a special challenge.