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In recent years, hard-hitting, timely films have taken the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature: No Other Land this past year; 20 Days in Mariupol the year before, and Navalny in 2023.

Will it be another urgent, political or war-themed film that takes the prize when the next Academy Awards roll around? Or perhaps it will be a film whose social import comes with a rhythmic beat, like 2022 winner Summer of Soul? It’s early to be discussing Oscar contenders – but not too early, at least in the collective wisdom of John Ridley and Matt Carey, hosts of Deadline’s Doc Talk podcast. In today’s episode, we dive in where others fear to leap, joined by journalist and film critic Lauren Wissot, contributing editor of Filmmaker magazine and Documentary magazine.

Two recent Oscar winners have emerged as early contenders: Mstyslav Chernov, the 20 Days in Mariupol director who returns with 2000 Meters to Andriivka,...

The Palm Springs International ShortFest, one of the largest short film festivals and the first stop on the campaign trail for Oscar-qualifying shorts, announced its winners today, including director John Kelly's "Retirement Plan," which was named "best of the festival" and received a $5,000 cash prize.

Awards were also given for best animated short, best documentary short, and best live-action short, as well as student shorts.

Over 300 films were part of the official selection at the festival, which ran from June 24-30. The winners of the five Oscar-qualifying awards are eligible to submit their shorts for Academy Award consideration.

The complete list of winners includes:

Best of the Festival Award

Winner: "Retirement Plan," directed by John Kelly

Special Mention for Best Director: "Passarinho," directed by Natalia García Agraz

Special Mention for Best Acting: "Beyond Silence," directed by Marnie Blok

Best Animated Short

Winner: "Budō" (Sweden), directed by Amanda Aagard and...

Over the weekend, just blocks away from President Trump’s June 14 military parade in Washington, D.C., the third annual DC/Dox got underway. The four-day documentary film festival kicked off on June 12 and highlighted films that explore some of America’s most pressing issues, including school shootings, book banning that target race and Lgbtqia+ issues, attacks on free speech and the country’s growing income and wealth divide.

Director Anayansi Prado was at DC/Dox with “Uvalde Mom,” a feature doc about the 2022 mass school shooting that rocked the small town of Uvalde, Texas, and left 19 children and two teachers dead. Prado said that screening her film in D.C. during the military parade felt meaningful.

“There are so many films here that are addressing really important social justice and global issues, so I think it’s really significant and interesting that this festival is taking place on the day of the military parade,...

The Palm Springs International ShortFest, one of the world’s premiere festivals dedicated to short form film, has announced a 2025 lineup boasting an exceptional array of acting talent: Ian McKellen, John C. Reilly, Chris Pine, Alicia Silverstone, Domhnall Gleason, Rosie O’Donnell, Alan Cumming, Archie Panjabi, Haley Joel Osment, Finn Wittrock, Emma D’Arcy, Simon Rex, Jane Levy, and Roger Guenveur Smith, among many others.

Documentary shorts in the program include films directed by Geeta Gandbhir and Christalyn Hampton, Ömer Sami, and Glenn Kaino, among more than a dozen others.

The 31st edition of the festival, running June 24-30 in the famed Sonoran Desert town in California, will showcase 311 films hailing from 64 countries and territories. Of those, 45 are world premieres, 10 international premieres, and 36 North American premieres. Palm Springs International ShortFest is an Oscar-qualifying festival in five categories: Best of the Festival Award, Best Animated Short, Best Documentary Short, Best Live-Action Short Over...

The documentary streaming boom is officially over, according to Academy Award-winning producer and Impact Partners co-founder Geralyn Dreyfous.

“The market for streamers is not coming back,” Dreyfous said during a panel discussion at Chicago’s Doc10 film festival over the weekend. “To go into these film festivals like Sundance and think that you are going to get a big sale is la la land (thinking). The numbers are just not there. One of 20 films is being bought out of Sundance. When we started Impact Partners, eight out of 10 of our films were being bought. That’s gone. Gone! We have to create new distribution models.”

Dreyfous, whose credits include “The Invisible War,” “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” and “Navalny,” helped launch Jolt, an AI-driven, direct-to-consumer streaming platform, in 2024. Meant to give a literal jolt to indie docs that might have been a success at festivals across the world but have not found traditional distribution,...

Okema T. Moore’s “Laundry” and Ian Phillips’ “Reconciliation” were among the winners of this year’s American Black Film Festival (ABFF), presented by Nice Crowd.

The 29th annual ABFF will return to Miami Beach from June 11 through June 15, and is dedicated to elevating the stories of Black men as fathers and leaders within their communities.

George Tillman, Jr. returns to ABFF as a mentor to the emerging filmmakers, providing invaluable feedback and industry insights through dedicated and purpose-driven sessions.

The winning directors will also receive industry mentorship, a $10,000 cash award, and the opportunity to attend and screen their films at the festival. Each film will also be featured on ABFF Play, the festival’s online global platform, and Walmart’s YouTube channel from June 16-24.

The competition will culminate with the premiere screenings of the top three winning films, followed by an insightful onstage panel discussion between a celebrated artist and their child,...

Deming Chen’s debut documentary Always won the top Dox:Award prize at Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival (Cph:dox) 2025.

Set in the mountains of China’s Hunan province, Always follows an eight-year-old boy living with his poor family, who discovers poetry as a way of describing his feelings and place in the world.

Scroll down for the full list of winners

The US-France-China co-production is produced by Hansen Lin for US company Timelight Film, in co-production with France’s SaNoSi Production and Taiwan’s Rustic Pictures.

Always receives the €10,000 in the main competition, from a jury of Rikke Tambo Andersen, Max Kestner,...

Deming Chen’s debut documentary Always won the top Dox:Award prize at Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival (Cph:dox) 2025.

Set in the mountains of China’s Hunan province, Always follows an eight-year-old boy living with his poor family, who discovers poetry as a way of describing his feelings and place in the world.

Scroll down for the full list of winners

The US-France-China co-production is produced by Hansen Lin for US company Timelight Film, in co-production with France’s SaNoSi Production and Taiwan’s Rustic Pictures.

Always receives the €10,000 in the main competition, from a jury of Rikke Tambo Andersen, Max Kestner,...

Cph:dox has crowned winners at the latest edition of the renowned nonfiction film festival in Copenhagen.

The Dox:Award, the festival’s top prize, went to Always, the directorial debut of Deming Chen. The film tells the story of a young poet, 8-year-old Youbin, who lives “deep in the lush mountains of Hunan province” in southern China.

“There’s a huge difference between nothing and small things. But life is in fact made up of many, often unnoticed, small things. We need the sensibilities of artists to show us the greatness of the little things,” noted the Dox:Award jury comprised of Rikke Tambo Andersen, Max Kestner, Nicolas Rapold, Adele Tulli and Raul Niño Zambrano. “This exquisitely shot chronicle of a rural farming family is alive with compassion and poetry.”

The ‘Always’ filmmaking team celebrates their Dox:Award win at Cph:dox

The Dox:Award, sponsored by Politiken and Politiken-Fonden, comes with a €10,000 prize.

Mikal...

Cph:dox, the documentary film festival based out of Copenhagen in Denmark, has revealed the jury winners for its 2025 edition. Audience Award prizes will be announced in April.

More than 90 feature films screened in Copenhagen this past week, including the European premiere of Sundance favorites like “The Perfect Neighbor,” directed by Geeta Gandbhir, whose bodycam-based documentary about a wrongful killing in Florida in 2023 is positioned as one of Netflix’s forthcoming top awards contenders this year. Also bowing in Copenhagen were Amy Berg’s music doc “It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley,” Amber Fares’ portrait of Israeli comedian Noam Shuster-Eliassi with “Coexistence, My Ass!” David Osit’s “Predators,” about the rise and fall of NBC’s controversial documentary TV series “To Catch a Predator,” also bowed at Cph:dox and will be released by MTV later this year.

But Cph:dox, which has been going since 2008 and is gradually becoming a first stop...

On Friday, the top Dox award at Copenhagen documentary festival Cph:dox went to “Always,” the first feature by Chinese director Deming Chen. The film follows eight-year-old Youbin, raised by his father and grandparents in a remote mountain village in Hunan province, who discovers poetry as a means of making sense of his solitude and the world around him.

Shot in stunning black and white, the film blends lyrical beauty with raw realism, following Youbin’s coming-of-age as he grapples with life, loss, and the passage of time.

Taking to the stage, a very emotional Chen thanked his entire team. Producer Hansen Lin said: “Through the journey of making this film, we hope to share this happiness and achievement with everyone who still believes in their dreams. If you believe in it, you will make it – even if life may sometimes disappoint you. We always hold onto the hope that peace...

Netflix has confirmed its acquisition of worldwide rights to Sundance prize-winning documentary The Perfect Neighbor, from director-producer Geeta Gandbhir.

Gandbhir won the directing award for US documentary at Sundance, where Netflix was reported to be in talks Cinetic Media to acquire the film for $5m. The film is also set to screen at this month’s SXSW and Cph:dox festivals and will get a Netflix premiere later this year.

Using police bodycam footage and investigative interviews, The Perfect Neighbor exposes the consequences of Florida’s ‘stand your ground’ law in a minor neighbourhood dispute that escalates into deadly violence.

Gandbhir...

“The Perfect Neighbor” has found a home.

The film, which premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, where it won the directing prize in the U.S. Documentary competition, has been acquired by Netflix. A sum for the acquisition has not been disclosed but earlier reports from February had the number around $5 million. The streaming giant is planning a release for later this year.

The Geeta Gandbhir-directed film uses police bodycam, investigative interviews and dashcam footage to tell the chilling story of Susan Lorincz, who in 2023 fired a gun through her locked door, killing her Black neighbor, Ajike “Aj” Owens. Lorincz used self-defense and Florida’s “stand your ground” laws as an excuse. The official Sundance synopsis described “The Perfect Neighbor” as “a remarkable exploration of one horrific event that has profound implications for the challenge of living in community with the monsters who might live next door.

It’s early. Really early. But Netflix have a future repeat winner in The Perfect Neighbor – the buzz documentary out of this year’s Sundance by Geeta Gandbhir that won plenty of critical acclaim and the Directing Award for U.S. Documentary to boot. Deadline reports that the deal falls somewhere in the $5 million range and that the film will be released later in the year. While this isn’t mentioned in the article, this docu could easily be programmed at the Cannes Film Festival.

On June 2, 2023, Ajike “Aj” Shantrell Owens was murdered by Susan Lorincz. The Perfect Neighbor explores disputes leading up to the murder by using bodycam footage of disputes.…...

Updated to note that Cinetic brokered the deal. Exclusive: It’s official. After weeks of indications that it would acquire The Perfect Neighbor, Netflix has finalized a deal for the film which won the directing award for U.S. Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival.

The streamer is planning a release later this year for the documentary directed by Geeta Gandbhir, putting it in position to become a strong Oscar contender. Terms of the deal were not announced, but some earlier reports pegged the acquisition figure in the range of $5 million.

Through the use of police bodycam and dashcam footage, the documentary tells a heinous story from Central Florida. In 2023, Susan Lorincz, a white woman, fired a gun through her locked door, killing her Black neighbor, Ajike “Aj” Owens. Lorincz invoked Florida’s notorious “stand your ground” laws, claiming she feared for her life after Owens banged on her door...

In her latest documentary film, Emmy Award–winning director Geeta Gandbhir confronts viewers with the stark realities of “stand your ground” laws. The Perfect Neighbor explores the 2023 killing of Ajike Owens by her neighbor in Florida, after a seemingly minor dispute escalated into deadly violence. Using police bodycam footage and investigative interviews, the film illustrates the impact of these controversial, yet widely common laws.

“The Perfect Neighbor is a deeply personal project, created to transform grief into purpose and honor the lasting legacy of Ajike Owens and her family,” Gandbhir said. “My team at Message Pictures, along with our incredible partners at S’Ob Productions and Park Pictures, are thrilled the film will be available on Netflix, offering audiences worldwide the chance to experience this urgent and powerful story.”

The Perfect Neighbor made its world premiere at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, where it was awarded the Directing Award: U.S.

Back in 2021, Max premiered the new documentary Eyes on the Prize: Hallowed Ground.

Despite being an extension of one of the most acclaimed television franchises ever produced, Hallowed Ground was basically ignored by critics.

I mean, I reviewed it, but to date, Sophia Nahli Allison’s film doesn’t have enough reviews to have an average score on either Metacritic or Rotten Tomatoes.

And I get it. HBO/Max barely promoted the documentary and it was an extremely complicated project to approach — not exactly a sequel to Henry Hampton’s seminal chronicle of the Civil Rights Movement, which aired its first six episodes in 1987 and the eight-hour second part in 1990, both on PBS. Eyes on the Prize: Hallowed Ground was a 61-minute complement to the brand, a formally experimental meditation on Eyes on the Prize, its importance and its limitations. But if you were looking for something that picked up...

Netflix’s upcoming documentary from Alisa Payne on the impact of Hurricane Katrina on the city of New Orleans will be available in August 2025. Katrina: Come Hell and High Water will be a three-part series with three directors, including Spike Lee. Here’s everything we know so far about the documentary.

Katrina: Come Hell and High Water is a Netflix documentary by showrunner and producer Alisa Payne. The series has three directors: Geeta Gandbhir, Samantha Knowles, and Spike Lee. Sam Pollard is also listed as a producer.

Picture: Showrunner Alisa Payne

The series is focused on the impact of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans, which, thanks to government neglect, left the city defenseless against a storm of such magnitude. It will also catch up with locals who have spent the past 20 years recovering from the disaster and what the future holds for the city of New Orleans.

Photograph by Jerry Grayson...

The conference program of Copenhagen Intl. Documentary Film Festival, a.k.a. Cph:Dox, will explore topics such as AI in non-fiction, immersive storytelling, investigative journalism and climate justice.

Speakers attending the program, running March 24-28 and held in partnership with Documentary Campus, include Christo Grozev, James Jones, Alexis Bloom, Kate Townsend, Sam Soko, Mstyslav Chernov and Nathan Grossman.

The conference this year is curated by Mandy Chang, former head of BBC Storyville, and global documentaries at Fremantle.

Mara Gourd-Mercado, head of industry and training at Cph:dox, said the conference “creates space to explore how documentary filmmaking shapes the world around us.” She added: “Through hands-on discussions and insights from industry leaders, the conference promises to spark fresh ideas and equip filmmakers with new tools for telling impactful stories.”

Donata von Perfall, managing director of Documentary Campus, added: “The documentary filmmaking community has an immense sense of shared responsibility and values.

Netflix is in talks to acquire “The Perfect Neighbor,” a powerful documentary that won the Directing Award at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Directed by Geeta Gandbhir, the film explores a fatal neighborhood dispute in Florida, shedding light on the state’s controversial self-defense legislation.

The documentary, which premiered in the U.S. Documentary Competition, uses police body camera footage and interviews to examine how a minor disagreement between neighbors turned deadly. By focusing on a single incident, the film raises critical questions about community safety and legal standards for self-defense.

This potential purchase would be Netflix’s second major acquisition from Sundance this year, following their recent deal for “Train Dreams.” The streaming service appears to be investing heavily in thought-provoking documentaries that tackle contemporary social issues.

The film’s sales are being managed by Cinetic, though Netflix has not officially commented on the ongoing negotiations. Its Sundance...

Netflix is in talks to acquire Sundance documentary “The Perfect Neighbor,” according to an insider with knowledge of the project.

“The Perfect Neighbor” explores how a tight-knit community was torn apart after Susan Lorincz, a 60-year-old white woman from central Florida, shot and killed her neighbor Ajike Owens, a 35-year-old Black mother of four, through a locked door. The film uses police footage to document both the peaceful community life before the incident and the fallout in its tragic aftermath.

In an unconventional approach to documentary filmmaking, director and award winning editor Geeta Gandbhir relied entirely on police body camera footage to tell the story. The film won the directing award in the U.S. Documentary category at Sundance.

“We got our hands on the body cam footage, and we realized how critical it was to show the before of this story,” Gandbhir told TheWrap CEO Sharon Waxman at TheWrap’s Sundance Studio.

Netflix is in talks for the Geeta Gandbhir directed documentary The Perfect Neighbor which won the Documentary Directing Award at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

The Perfect Neighbor made its world premiere in the U.S. Documentary Competition section.

The film follows a minor disagreement between neighbors in Florida which takes a lethal turn, with police body camera footage and interviews probing the aftermath of the state’s controversial “stand your ground” laws.

The Perfect Neighbor reps the second pick-up for the streamer out of this year’s festival after Train Dreams which they took for high teen millions, as Deadline first told you.

Deadline first reported the first sale out of Sundance with Neon taking the Michael Shanks’ directed, Dave Franco and Alison Brie starring horror movie Together in a $15 million-plus deal.

Cinetic handled sales on The Perfect Neighbor. Netflix decline to comment.

“The Perfect Neighbor,” a documentary that examines Florida’s Stand Your Ground laws and gun regulations, is in final negotiations to sell to Netflix after premiering at the Sundance Film Festival. The price tag is roughly $5 million, although the deal hasn’t been signed.

Netflix declined to comment.

The film, which debuted to critical praise, uses police bodycam footage to tell the story of how a neighborhood dispute slowly escalated into a shocking act of violence. It follows a tragedy that captivated national attention, one in which a woman named Ajike “Aj” Shantrell Owens was shot and killed by her neighbor, Susan Lorincz, after Lorincz kept complaining about children playing near her apartment.

So far, it’s been a glacial market, with only a handful of films landing distribution out of Sundance. Netflix has been the most prolific buyer, also nabbing rights to “Train Dreams,” an acclaimed drama starring Joel Edgerton and Felicity Jones.

Sundance is a place for discovery, where new stars are minted because of the fresh, invigorating images they bring to the screen. It was where Steven Soderbergh helped kick off the indie film revolution in 1989 with “sex, lies, and videotape” and Quentin Tarantino launched “Reservoir Dogs” in 1992. They showed that, at Sundance, if you have something to say, you can have a seat at the table.

This year, that daring new voice belongs to Eva Victor, whose comedic character study “Sorry, Baby,” about a young professor reeling from a trauma, sold to A24 for $8 million. “Sorry, Baby” also has the distinction of placing first in many of the categories in IndieWire’s 2025 Sundance Critics Survey, including Best Performance (for Victor herself), Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best First Film, and Best Film itself.

Though “Sorry, Baby” was the undeniable favorite across the board at Sundance 2025, our critics survey shared the love...

If there’s one word to describe this year’s Sundance Film Festival, it’s “uncertainty.” That’s not necessarily a bad thing, as this year’s festival was far more interesting than any festival has been since the Covid-19 pandemic. And, amazingly, despite all the challenges that came their way, Sundance’s organizers were able to make the event feel genuinely fun and memorable. So they deserve massive kudos for that.

The question that was in everyone’s minds at this year’s festival: where will the festival be come 2027? Next year, at least, will still be in Sundance’s long-time home of Park City, Ut, but after that, we could see the festival move to Boulder, Co, or Cincinnati, Oh — with the possibility of still staying in Park City and nearby Salt Lake City.

Then, there’s the issue of the festival’s online component, which saw two...

February 2 Update: Ryan White’sCome See Me in the Good Light won theFestival Favorite Award on Sunday, marking the final piece of business for the festival, which endedon February 2.

The US film charts two poets’ “journey through love, life and mortality”.

Original January 31 Report:Sundance Film Festival announced its awards winners on Friday, with grand jury prizes going to Atropia, Seeds, Sabar Bonda (Cactus Pears), and Cutting Through Rocks.

In the audience awards, Twinless, André Is An Idiot, DJ Ahmet, and Prime Minister prevailed.The Next Innovator Award went to Zodiac Killer Project and Next Audience Award was presented to East Of Wall.

Composed almost entirely of police bodycam and interrogation room CCTV footage, Geeta Gandbhir’s The Perfect Neighbor tries to make sense of a senseless killing that happened in Ocala, Florida, in 2023. At first, the documentary plays out like a mystery, as we hear from both sides of a petty neighborhood dispute and try to figure out who’s lying. Since we know from the beginning that this conflict will end in a death, we also spend this time wondering how something so small could possibly have ended so tragically. And then, when the truth emerges, it becomes a powerful statement about the Stand Your Ground laws that have made these tragedies so much more commonplace, and justice afterwards much harder to achieve.

The film begins on the night of the shooting as first responders arrive on the scene to find people in a state of pure panic. All we know...

The Alabama Solution

Relying heavily on footage shot by inmates on prohibited cellphones, Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman’s powerful and gripping documentary isn’t an easy watch, but it’s a crucial one. The film’s focus is on corruption and abuses of power specific to Alabama’s prisons — and the heroism of the men who have found ways to evolve within a system that has no interest in participating in their rehabilitation and denies their basic humanity in every way. — Daniel Fienberg

Blknws: Terms & Conditions

Before his death in 1963, scholar W.E.B. Du Bois spent decades trying to publish an encyclopedia about people of African descent. That mission propels Kahlil Joseph’s hypnotic debut feature — a kinetic video essay blending Afro-futurist narrative, archival footage and memoir — that’s like an index of Black culture from the past 50 years. Joseph animates the fictional story of a journalist reporting on a transatlantic curatorial project with voiceover,...

Ahead of the final weekend of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, the annual event in Park City, Utah, announced its big winners on Friday, with Atropia, Seeds, and Twinless among those taking the biggest prizes.

“Arriving at our awards ceremony after seven days of connection and discovery is especially rewarding this year,” said Eugene Hernandez, director, Sundance Film Festival and Public Programming. “We are thrilled to honor these filmmakers fore their inventiveness, generosity, and for their valuable conversations, moments of levity, and deep insights their work has offered.”

See: ‘Kiss of the Spider Woman,’ ‘Sorry, Baby’ and other 2025 Sundance titles that could shape the awards conversation this year

Written and directed by Hailey Gates, Atropia earned the Grand Jury Prize for Dramatic Film, Sundance’s top award. Alia Shawkat stars as an aspiring actress in a military role-playing facility who falls in love with a soldier cast as an insurgent, and...

The 2025 Sundance Film Festival awards were announced today at The Ray Theatre in Park City, Utah.

See the list of 2025 winners below, and congrats to all the winners.

U.S. Dramatic Competition

Grand Jury Prize

Atropia (USA) – Hailey Gates

Directing Award

Ricky (USA) – Rashad Frett

The Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award

Sorry, Baby (USA) – Eva Victor

Special Jury Award for Acting

Twinless (USA) – Dylan O’Brien

Dylan O’Brien and James Sweeney appear in Twinless by James Sweeney, an official selection of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by Greg Cotten.

Special Jury Award for Best Ensemble

Plainclothes – Carmen Emmi

Audience Award

Twinless – James Sweeney

U.S. Documentary Competition

Grand Jury Prize

Seeds (USA) – Brittany Shyne

Directing Award

The Perfect Neighbor (USA) – Geeta Gandbhir

Special Jury Award

Life After (USA) – Reid Davenport

Special Jury Award for Archival Storytelling

Selena y Los Dinos (USA) – Isabel Castro

Jonathan Oppenheim Editing Award...

Atropia, Seeds, Sabar Bonda (Cactus Pears) and Cutting Through Rocks were among the key winners at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.

During a ceremony held Friday in Park City, Atropia won the Grand Jury prize for U.S. Dramatic Competition, while Seeds picked up the U.S. Documentary Competition award. Sabar Bonda (Cactus Pears) prevailed for the jury prize for the World Cinema Dramatic Competition section, while Cutting Through Rocks nabbed the award for World Cinema Documentary Competition.

Among the audience awards, Twinless won in the U.S. Dramatic Competition, and André Is an Idiot topped the U.S. Documentary Competition. DJ Ahmet collected the audience award for World Cinema Dramatic Competition, with Prime Minister prevailing for the World Cinema Documentary Competition.

Additionally, Zodiac Killer Project landed the Next innovator award, with East of Wall receiving the audience award for the Next section.

Sundance Institute acting CEO Amanda Kelso said in a statement,...

As the Sundance Film Festival heads into its final weekend, the Park City event handed out trophies this morning to this year’s best. See the full list below.

Hailey Gates’ war satire Atropia took the marquee U.S. Grand Jury Prize for dramatic features. Alia Shawkat stars as an aspiring actress in a military role-playing facility who falls in love with a soldier (Callum Turner) cast as an insurgent, but their unsimulated emotions threaten to derail the performance.

The Audience Award: U.S. Dramatic went to Twinless, James Sweeney’s film about two young men (Dylan O’Brien and Sweeney) who meet in a twin bereavement support group and form an unlikely bromance.

Georgi M. Unkovski’s DJ Ahmet won the Audience Award: World Cinema Dramatic and also nabbed the Special Jury Award for Creative Vision. It follows Ahmet (Arif Jakup), a 15-year-old boy from a remote Yuruk village in...

Awards for the 2025 Sundance Film Festival were handed out on Friday morning, with the Dylan O’Brien-fronted dark comedy “Twinless” taking home the audience award in the U.S. Dramatic Competition category. The film, which received a warm response upon its debut at the beginning of the festival, hails from writer/director/co-star James Sweeney and follows two strangers who meet in a twin bereavement support group. O’Brien also won a special jury award for acting for his work in the film.

Writer/director Hailey Gates’ “Atropia” won the U.S. Grand Jury Prize in the Dramatic category, scoring top honors for a film that started life as a documentary. Produced by Luca Guadagnino, the film stars Alia Shawkat as an aspiring actress in a military role-playing facility who falls in love with a soldier cast as an insurgent. Callum Turner, Chloë Sevigny and Tim Heidecker co-star.

The U.

The snow from this year’s Sundance Film Festival has mostly melted off of Hollywood’s Dior boots, and as the Utah event draws to a close the time has come to crown a new class of indie filmmaking stars.

Multiple pedigreed juries will hand out prizes to movies in competition on Friday at Park City’s The Ray Theater — where buzzy titles will duke it out for honors including directing, acting, screenwriting and the most coveted honors, the audience award and the grand jury prize.

“Storytelling is important, part of human continuity,” Sundance interim CEO Amanda Kelso said at the top of the ceremony, quoting its founder Robert Redford.

This year’s U.S. dramatic jury consists Reinaldo Marcus Green, Arian Moayed (“Succession”) and Celine Song. Steven Bognar, Vinnie Malhotra, and Marcia Smith are presiding over the domestic documentary section. Actor Elijah Wood is the sole juror for the Next section,...

This year's awards season is wrapping up, which means it's time to look forward to the films we'll be discussing this time next year. Some of those hopefuls just premiered in Park City during the Sundance festival, which generally provides one of our first glimpses at next year's landscape. If...

Vinnie Malhotra, the president of Higher Ground, the film, TV and new media production company founded by Barack and Michelle Obama, offered some insight into what it’s like to navigate Hollywood amid widespread industry consolidation and cutbacks. Turns out having projects endorsed by the former President and First Lady doesn’t immediately translate to a greenlight from the powers that be at studios or streamers.

“We are not immune to the same challenges that so many companies like ours, so many filmmakers, so many storytellers, find themselves. It is a challenging business, and it doesn’t matter if the Obamas are behind your project,” Malhotra said this week while sitting on a panel of documentary industry insiders during the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. “We get a lot of passes, we get a lot of nos. We don’t have a magic bullet that gets our projects made.

Prepare for some captivating documentaries and docuseries from Netflix this year. The streamer announced during its Next on Netflix event that it will be premiering new projects about the Manson murders, Osama Bin Laden, the Titan submarine implosion and Hurricane Katrina, just to name a few of its upcoming buzzy docs.

The first major new documentary release is a big one. The documentary film “Chaos: The Manson Murders” will premiere on March 7. From legendary filmmaker Errol Morris, who previously released “The Thin Blue Line” and “The Fog of War,” little is known about this project other than its subject matter. The film is likely based on Tom O’Neill’s “Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties.” Morris, Robert Fernandez and Steven Hathaway serve as producers.

That will then be followed by “American Manhunt: Osama Bin Laden,” which will premiere on March 10. The upcoming docuseries offers...

Spike Lee’s next joint for Netflix is called Katrina: Come Hell and High Water — one of three documentaries planned for the streamer in 2025.

Lee’s doc with Message Pictures will revisit the hurricane that caused 1,392 fatalities and more than $100 billion in damages in 2005. The official logline for the doc set to drop in August says the “hurricane turned cataclysmic through human error and neglect. Over the course of a gripping and emotional three episodes, the people of New Orleans recount their past, extoll their present and lean into the future of what they and their beloved city survived and have become 20 years later. The series sets the stage for a tragedy — whose man-made elements expose the systemic governmental neglect that led to the city being defenseless in the face of the storm — and Katrina’s devastating impact that changed New Orleans irreparably. Detailed, harrowing and triumphant first-person accounts and...

For a second year in a row, international-focused stories have dominated the Oscar nominations for Outstanding Documentary Feature: films set in the occupied West Bank, Japan, Ukraine, Canada and Congo. Each of the filmmakers in the category is a first-time nominee, and only one is American — Brendan Bellomo, who made Porcelain War with Ukraine artist-soldier Slava Leontyev.

On the latest episode of Deadline’s Doc Talk podcast, hosts John Ridley and Matt Carey analyze the nominations in the doc feature category, breaking down what the nominations say about the state of the documentary field, and identifying the odds-on favorite to win the Academy Award on March 2.

Four of the five Best Documentary Feature nominees premiered at the Sundance Film Festival last year. As Sundance 2025 continues, we also turn our attention to a documentary that could well find itself in Oscar competition next year: The Perfect Neighbor. Director Geeta Gandbhir and...

Geeta Gandbhir’s The Perfect Neighbor, which premiered in the US Documentary section of this year’s Sundance, is likely one of the first feature docs primarily composed of police body camera footage. Sifting through footage with editor Viridiana Liberman (The Sentence), Gandbhir builds out a suspenseful and heartbreaking portrait of neighborly violence in a close-knit Central Florida community, after white woman Susan Lorincz fatally shot Ajike Owens—Gandbhir’s sister-in-law’s best friend, though Gandbhir didn’t know Owens personally. Given the world context of a déjà vu US regime, the ongoing reverberations of Black Lives Matter and the steady bulldozing with anti-democratic and dangerous legislation […]

The post “We Have to Think Deeply about Community Policing”: Geeta Gandbhir on The Perfect Neighbor first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Geeta Gandbhir’s The Perfect Neighbor, which premiered in the US Documentary section of this year’s Sundance, is likely one of the first feature docs primarily composed of police body camera footage. Sifting through footage with editor Viridiana Liberman (The Sentence), Gandbhir builds out a suspenseful and heartbreaking portrait of neighborly violence in a close-knit Central Florida community, after white woman Susan Lorincz fatally shot Ajike Owens—Gandbhir’s sister-in-law’s best friend, though Gandbhir didn’t know Owens personally. Given the world context of a déjà vu US regime, the ongoing reverberations of Black Lives Matter and the steady bulldozing with anti-democratic and dangerous legislation […]

The post “We Have to Think Deeply about Community Policing”: Geeta Gandbhir on The Perfect Neighbor first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

First coming under wider scrutiny in 2005 when passed in Florida, the stand-your-ground law allows property owners to use deadly force to defend their home from trespassers. The foreseeable result has been an uptick in homicides and a proven racial bias when it comes to the number of white shooters and Black victims. While there’s an overwhelming amount of data and cases a documentary could explore on the issue, Geeta Gandbhir’s gripping, infuriating The Perfect Neighbor takes an objectively narrow, focused approach, exploring a single case in Florida primarily through police bodycam and CCTV interrogation footage. Initial police calls involving a neighbor upset at the children trespassing on her property shockingly escalates in a single moment; Gandbhir lets the footage speak for itself, creating a documentary far more upsetting and impactful than any number of talking heads could provide.

It’s 2022 in the central Florida town of Ocala. Like...

In an unconventional approach to documentary filmmaking, director and award winning editor Geeta Gandbhir relied entirely on police body camera footage to tell the story of a neighborhood tragedy in “The Perfect Neighbor,” a ripped-from the-headlines documentary that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on Friday.

“We got our hands on the body cam footage, and we realized how critical it was to show the before of this story,” Gandbhir told TheWrap CEO Sharon Waxman at TheWrap’s Sundance Studio presented by World of Hyatt. “We often see the aftermath of such a tragedy, right? But how rarely do we see the community and the family as they were before?”

“The Perfect Neighbor” explores how a tight-knit community was torn apart after Susan Lorincz, a 60-year-old white woman from central Florida, shot and killed her neighbor Ajike Owens, a 35-year-old Black mother of four, through a locked door. The film...

Who among us, when we were young, did not annoy the cranky old geezer down the street? In some cases, you couldn’t help it, as there are some people who simply aren’t made for suburban living, terrifying the neighborhood kids by growling “Get off my lawn!” any time an oblivious child stepped foot on their precious property. In so doing, they made themselves targets when it came time to toilet-paper someone’s house or ding-dong ditch. No one dreamed the witch next door would make good on her threats.

Director Geeta Gandbhir’s ironically titled “The Perfect Neighbor” focuses on the shocking case of one such grouch, Florida woman Susan Lorincz, who went all Clint Eastwood on a trespasser. That’s a flippant way to describe a real-life tragedy, which resulted in the death of African American single mom Ajike “Aj” Owens, but movies like “Gran Torino” have...

There’s a scene in Geeta Gandbhir’s harrowing documentary The Perfect Neighbor, in which a Marion County police officer asks Susan Lorincz, a white Floridian, if she has ever called her Black neighbor’s children “the n-word.” Lorincz seems confused by the question and immediately denies it. But she eventually concedes, acknowledging that maybe the word had “slipped out.” She claims she was taught to use the word when referring to people who were being “unlawful, dirty and generally unpleasant.”

That moment is instructive for a couple of reasons: It reveals how Lorincz, one of the principal subjects of Gandbhir’s documentary, thinks; and it clarifies why Stand Your Ground laws are dangerous in a country plagued by racism.

The earliest version of this legislation, which allows a citizen to use force (even lethal) if they perceive the threat of harm, was passed in Utah in 1994. Florida followed suit 11 years later,...

Imagine a new neighbor moving in and immediately objecting to your kids playing on open land down the block where they’ve always played – land that the neighbor doesn’t even own. Then imagine that the neighbor targets and insults your kids and constantly calls the police on them and you. And that the one day the neighbor crosses a line that alters the world of your children forever.

That’s what director-producer Geeta Gandbhir depicts in “The Perfect Neighbor,” her chilling, ripped-from-the-headlines documentary that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on Friday. The setting is Ocala, Florida, with the main conflict involving Ajike Owens, a Black mother of four, and Susan Lorincz, a single, older white woman. Using police bodycam footage almost exclusively, Gandbhir, an award-winning editor prior to turning her focus to directing, puts a magnifying glass on the conflict from its inception. She invites viewers to judge the case for themselves.

Films are made over many days, but some days are more memorable, and important, than others. Imagine yourself in ten years looking back on this production. What day from your film’s development, production or post do you think you’ll view as the most significant and why? Our film is set in Ocala, Florida, just a 40-minute drive from Orlando—a place where beauty and stark contradictions are in constant tension. On one side, you have sprawling, wealthy horse farms and ranches; on the other, economically vulnerable communities living in close proximity to these affluent areas. The neighborhood at the heart of […]

The post “Something Dangerous is Always Lurking Just Beneath the Surface” | Geeta Gandbhir, The Perfect Neighbor first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Films are made over many days, but some days are more memorable, and important, than others. Imagine yourself in ten years looking back on this production. What day from your film’s development, production or post do you think you’ll view as the most significant and why? Our film is set in Ocala, Florida, just a 40-minute drive from Orlando—a place where beauty and stark contradictions are in constant tension. On one side, you have sprawling, wealthy horse farms and ranches; on the other, economically vulnerable communities living in close proximity to these affluent areas. The neighborhood at the heart of […]

The post “Something Dangerous is Always Lurking Just Beneath the Surface” | Geeta Gandbhir, The Perfect Neighbor first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Soledad O’Brien stopped by the Variety Studio presented by Audible at Sundance and scolded the American press for its coverage of Donald Trump. The former CNN host was highly critical of how the press covered Trump’s first administration, and she said her position has not changed as Trump’s second administration gets underway.

“The media has done a really piss poor job, to be honest,” O’Brien told Variety’s Brent Lang. “In a couple different ways. Framing every discussion as ‘this vs this’ is a real mistake. There is lot of access journalism that has just been distressing and dismaying to watch. There are journalists I respect, but they want access. There’s a lot of countries where journalists don’t get access to their political leadership and you can actually do a good job reporting when you’re not necessarily being invited to the dinner or having a front row seat.

The 2025 Sundance Film Festival kicks off this week in Park City, Utah, launching the first major festival of the year and one of the biggest markets for film. Sundance is, of course, home to a slew of independent films seeking distribution. It’s where movies like “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” “Call Me by Your Name,” “Fruitvale Station” and “Palm Springs” got their start, and this year’s lineup is chock-full of true indies looking for a home.

Below, TheWrap rounded up some of the buzziest titles for sale at this year’s festival.

Tonatiuh and Diego Luna appear in Kiss of the Spider Woman by Bill Condon (Sundance) “Kiss of the Spider-Woman”

Valentín, a political prisoner, shares a cell with Molina, a window dresser convicted of public indecency. The two form an unlikely bond as Molina recounts the plot of a Hollywood musical starring his favorite silver screen diva,...