By David D’Arcy

The Sundance Festival closed its 2025 season Sunday. You can find its winners here.

Yet Sundance itself didn’t seem to be on a roll. It appears poised to move after next year, leaving its gilded ski ghetto of Park City Utah for somewhere else — Salt Lake City, Boulder, Colorado, or Cincinnati. Prolonging the life of a festival dedicated to independent film looks to be a gamble, especially at a time that audiences for indies can’t sustain theaters dedicated to screening them. My guess is that if Sundance survives, it won’t look like the Sundance we know.

From my perspective, having covered the festival for more than 30 years, Sundance 2025 already looked like a shrunken version of the event — fewer films, fewer screens. Still, there were films to discover, many of them without any commercial or theatrical future. All the more reason to seek them out and tell others about them.

Pavel Talankin in Mr. Nobody Against Putin. Photo: Frantisek Svatos

One was Mr. Nobody Against Putin, a no-budget look at a teacher in a small Russian city with a camera and a stubborn insistence on telling stories about the people around him. The teacher and co-director is paunchy Pavel “Pasha” Talankin, a schoolteacher with the girth, wit, and warmth of a Russian Jack Black. The young man is beloved for his tender sense of humor in his hometown of Karabash, a grimy pit in the industrially contaminated Ural Mountains. Most of the few jobs available are in metal smelters that have left the air toxic, in the process reducing male life expectancy to 38 years. Young men without work from Karabash join the army, with lots of government cajoling. The “heroes”come back in body bags to funerals that are illegal to film.

Talankin cares about his students, and they’re drawn to him, but these bonds of fond mutual support suffer after Pasha’s home moviemaking becomes known. They are filled with dark absurdity, as they examine the toll of the war in Ukraine on the town’s high school graduates. In a dictatorship, one can usually trace the injustices of a society to the man at the top, which is what Pasha does, even if that just means including clips of Putin calling for sacrifice and for the imprisonment of terrorists, all of the latter questioning the Kremlin. Once the police begin to trail him, Talankin senses that he’s been branded an enemy: Pasha the Pied Piper of a Russian hell-hole becomes a “terrorist” with a target on his back. The teacher finally leaves Russia: the film was assembled from Talankin’s footage with co-director David Borenstein. Pasha’s current whereabouts are somewhere outside Russia.

Russian humor can be dark and desperate. Mr. Nobody Against Putin was as indelible as the soot of the industrial waste in Karabash. It still has scenes that will have you laughing out loud. This comedy of observation — after all, Pasha was the official videographer of his school — chronicles the militarization of a city and its youth. Are the kids who can’t march in a straight line ready for war? Of course not, but they dutifully go off to fight and come back, often horizontally. Because there is a ban on filming funerals, Pasha records the official audio. It’s no secret that the town’s families are grieving.

Talankin’s approach couldn’t be more Russian. The doc takes some of its cues from Dziga Vertov’s brand of cinéma vérité — capturing the truths seen by surveillance cameras and the helmet cameras police and soldiers wear. It doesn’t hurt that he knows how to play up the laughs, and the government doesn’t. As authorities clamp down on what media can show or even see in Russia, this film provides a rare and valuable perspective on reality in Russia today. But Mr. Nobody Against Putin is in Russian, with subtitles. Who knows when anyone will be able to see it, given the likelihood of plenty more ominous news to report.

A scene from Cutting Through Rocks. Photo: courtesy of Sundance Film Festival

Another documentary at Sundance, Cutting Through Rocks from Iran, directed by Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni, doesn’t present itself as news. The doc is about Iranian traditions and a woman in a remote town who challenges them. The film’s title suggests what she’s up against.

In northwestern Iran, where Persian is spoken with hints of Turkish, Sara Shahverdi is a midwife whose work builds a close bond with the local women. But there are unusual things about Sara. She has six sisters and three brothers, and she was raised by her father to do boyish things. One of those things was riding motorcycles, which is how men get around in her town. Now a divorced adult with no children, Sara is impatient with the way her town is run by the local patriarchy, and she runs for the town council and wins. Women are overjoyed. Men are skeptical and stall her plans.

A key project that goes on, without male support, is Sara’s campaign against child marriage. Most of the girls around her marry as young teenagers in ceremonies arranged by their parents. They start families, so they can’t stay in school. The cycle of dependency for generations repeats itself. Courts are wary of granting divorces, even in the case of a girl who petitions to end a marriage to a much older man. It was arranged when she was 12. A male judge can’t hide his impatience with her plea.

We watch as Sara builds some support for educating the girls around her, but the elders won’t budge. A rumor campaign questions her sexuality, accompanied with hints that she might have had improper contact with girls. Sara is marginalized and weddings with teenage brides continue. Sara is isolated, but she still has her motorcycle.

The constraints of village life are hard to crack, and even harder to film. Yet the filmmakers managed to find a way to get footage of this improbable independent leader as well as the women and men from her town. Their documentary’s visual power owes a lot to its portrayal of the topography of the area, which is surrounded by vast flat fields and ringed by rugged mountains in the far distance. People are trapped in place and time. At weddings that commit teenage girls to servile marriages, the brides may be dressed in gauzy gowns, but they are not smiling. Neither is Sara, who stands by her convictions, but is left to ride her motorcycle alone through fields of dust that seem to go on forever.

Sky Yang in Last Days. Photo: John Allen Chau

Last Days, directed by Justin Chin (“Fast & Furious”), also premiered at Sundance. The feature is based on the real life story of John Allen Chau, a Chinese-American Christian evangelical whose mission to bring Jesus to uncontacted communities takes him in 2018 to the Sentinelese people on North Sentinel Island in the Indian Ocean. The Sentinelese, bellicose and fiercely protective of their isolation, kill the young missionary, as many had warned they might. Chau’s story was adapted for this film from an exhaustive article in Outside magazine. The 2023 documentary The Mission by Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss also examined Chau and his fate.

Commercial, exotic, and earnest, Last Days follows one man’s obsession. It is an adventure story starring Sky Yang as Chau, and it maintains enough ambiguity about where the two-hour film stands on Chau’s religious quest to keep the audience watching at a festival screening I attended. Might the movie connect with the broad and profitable Christian film audience in the US? They might find virtue in Chau’s seemingly chosen martyrdom. Or is Last Days just a new high-budget spin on a fool’s errand of conquest, an Aguirre, Wrath of God 5.0? Critics didn’t rally around Last Days, but the film’s distributors may be banking on crossover audiences, an appeal that might unite environmentalists and extreme sports fans.

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.