By David D’Arcy

Films can transform the way that their subjects are seen, sometimes by just making a subject visible. That was the case with three films which were among the best that I saw at Sundance this year.

2000 Meters to Andriivka, produced by the Associated Press and PBS Frontline, follows the mission of a Ukrainian army unit. The soldiers need to advance 2 kilometers (1.24 miles) to the town of Andriivka, a key point on a Russian supply route on the road to Bakhmut. If the Ukrainians take Andriivka, they block the Russian advance. If they don’t, the Russians push ahead.

There is not much of Andriivka left. The buildings are sticks and stones, barely ruins. The trees that sit in a 2 kilometer swath of former forest in the way are shriveled upright sticks. The path through dead woods and dead bodies to the town is empty, except for Russian troops hiding (or just trapped) underground.

The documentary’s director, Mstyslav Chernov is a journalist for the Associated Press who won an Oscar for 20 Days in Mariupol, his 2023 dispatch from hell during the Russian siege of a port city.

That was an eyewitness account of a relentless siege of a city of 500,000 at a time that Russian media coverage of the “fascist” Ukrainian aggression was just as relentless. Chernov and his team were lucky to get out with their footage and their lives. The world was lucky, if that’s the word, to have such massive and irrefutable evidence of what was really going on.

In 2000 Meters, a Ukrainian officer tells Chernov that he’s crazy to accompany the soldiers, some of whom are killed within sight of the director. The toll was high. Some of the survivors in the film whom we get to know were killed later.

Much of what we see on the way to Andriivka was shot from helmet-mounted cameras. The cameras record the look of war, sometimes inches away from the ground. Other cameras are set in drones above. Russian soldiers trapped in trenches throw grenades — or at least try to — rather than surrender, assuming that they’ll die no matter what. Ukrainians fire at dark spaces underground and the shooting stops.

This tactility can be hard to watch, given how close the combatants are to each other. Russians and Ukrainians communicate by yelling back and forth. Yet the immersion in combat oddly feels and sounds like the images of war in a video game, as drones maneuver overhead and the platoon advances. The Ukrainians fire their rifles with a quiet push-button efficiency, as in the click-click that you might hear on a video monitor. You see it all. It’s a troubling mix of raw emotion and deadly efficiency.

In 2000 Meters, Chernov has made another revelatory film about the war in Ukraine. What’s new here, amid scenes of brave men seeing their friends fall and die alongside them as they trudge through dead bodies and vehicles haul out the dead and wounded, is the war fatigue that risks growing worse as Trump talks of making a deal with Putin. The distance to Andriivka is measured in meters, but the progress toward peace is made or lost in maneuvers made far away from the battlefield. For all the humanity of the soldiers that Chernov accompanies, some speaking to each other for the last time, they know that what matters are the whims of the leaders.

In The Alabama Project, a sustained look at the horrors of the Alabama prison system, directors Andrew Jarecki (Capturing the Friedmans, The Jinx) and Charlotte Kaufman rely on prisoners breaking the law while they are in jail in order to supply evidence and analysis of their own mistreatment. The prisoners use the telephone — smuggled cell phones — to get incriminating information out. These phones are illegal for prisoners to own; if they are caught with the devices, the men are subject to penalties and solitary confinement.

Consider this. Sean Baker Anora (2024) shot Tangerine (2015), his humane portrait of street-level Hollywood at Christmas, on two iPhones. Jarecki and Kaufman raised the bar in Alabama — building an expose of the state prison system on cell phones, portals to a view of life inside. These images tell disturbing stories. “There’s a lot of corruption in those prisons,” said a lawyer representing prisoners in Alabama as he exited the Sundance Fest premiere.

Smuggling in cell phones seems a minor crime compared to what the prisoners in Alabama endure. Those institutions had the highest state prison homicide rate in 2018. (It’s a competitive category.) In Jarecki and Kaufman’s doc, every prisoner interviewed seems to be sentenced to a long term for an offense that doesn’t merit such severe punishment.

We watch as state legislators meet and, as if in a pageant, condemn crime and vote to build a new prison. Most of them are white. The governor at the time, the elderly Kaye Ivey, leads that chorus. With the exception of a woman in authority, it feels like a throwback to the Confederacy.

As conditions worsen, prisoners throughout the state decide to strike in September 2022. calling for a work stoppage inside the institutions. We observe the actions through the cell phone of a prisoner coordinating the protests among several prisons. Solidarity fades, however, when hunger (along with other punishments) undercuts the determination of starved detainees. Strike leaders move from solidarity to solitary. Somehow they still manage to get cell phones.

The Alabama Solution reveals the horror of long prison terms in hellish conditions – everything from beatings to bodies on the floor to rats swimming in prison toilets. Also understood: the certainty that those unjust conditions will become even worse for “troublemaker” prisoners who dare to complain about their treatment. Those prisoners who want to expose what is going on to the outside world are forced to break the law.

And what about the directors of the film? Did they break the law by dealing with prisoners who were calling them on illegal devices? Does HBO face legal penalties for airing conversations that were conducted illegally? Alabama can’t be happy with how it is seen in this documentary. Officials there are already doing damage control, calling this kind of coverage ‘fake news’ from compromised sources, i.e., prisoners, i.e., the people who are experiencing it.

Any journalist who has covered prisons will tell you that conditions are awful in almost every state. Jarecki reiterated this fact to the Sundance audience at his film’s premiere. Thanks to technology — and some guile from prisoners and others — we are provided hard truths about how wretched those conditions are in Alabama.

Jarecki’s tales from Alabama may be shocking, but Reid Davenport’s Life After ventures into its own troublesome life and death territory. This was Davenport’s second documentary feature at Sundance, and it took on the subject of assisted suicide, or the right to die, with a special focus on the plight of the disabled.

Davenport, a working filmmaker, has cerebral palsy. Life After comes across as a narrative told by a person who could be one of his film’s subjects. Davenport’s speech is affected by his condition. At Sundance, his film played without subtitles, which made the audience work to understand him. Let’s see what PBS does about that issue when it plays there.

Davenport’s film argues that the practice of assisted suicide is seen by some to be a matter of economic efficiency. From this bottom-line perspective, disabled people are often treated as an inconvenience. The doc suggests that, for policymakers in the US and Canada, assisted suicide is viewed as cost-effective, certainly when compared to fully funding aid to the disabled. Therefore, it’s seen as preferable to raising costs. The disabled are branded as troublemakers if they ask for more state support, Davenport says.

A protester’s poster puts the film’s point simply: “Assisted suicide, the world’s cheapest healthcare.”

Among the film’s case histories is the story of Elizabeth Bouvia (1958-2014), a California woman with cerebral palsy who demanded the “right to die” and fueled a debate on disability and personal freedom. In another, an American man is tested for Canada’s MAID (Medical Assistance in Dying) program and found to qualify – it is Davenport himself.

The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, seems poised to recommend that his billionaire friend, Donald Trump, cut budgets to aid the disabled. Remember how in 2016 Trump mocked a disabled NY Times reporter at a televised news conference. Davenport insists that it all boils down to the money a government is willing to commit to its citizens. That’s where he and Musk might agree.

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David D’Arcy lives in New York. For years, he was a programmer for the Haifa International Film Festival in Israel. He writes about art for many publications, including the Art Newspaper. He produced and co-wrote the documentary Portrait of Wally (2012), about the fight over a Nazi-looted painting found at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan.