andrea

As the Sundance Film Festival winds down its final edition in Park City, Utah, this week, ahead of its move to Boulder, Colo., next year, its sway over the nonfiction field at the Oscars remains as steady as ever. All five current Academy Award nominees for documentary feature premiered at last year’s festival, with Sundance films winning the category six times over the last decade.

“Sundance has been a kick-starter for my entire career,” says Ryan White, director of “Come See Me in the Good Light,” his fourth film to premiere at the festival. The intimate portrait of Colorado poet laureate Andrea Gibson, who faces a terminal diagnosis with a spirit of resilience, needed the boost. “The lead words are poetry and cancer, and it’s a character-driven film about a non-binary person,” White says. “It wasn’t the easiest film to get off the ground.” A similar challenge could apply to other nominees, including “Mr. Nobody vs. Putin” and “Cutting Through Rocks,” which focus on everyday individuals taking on oppressive systems in Russia and Iran, respectively. “There are the types of films that can get lost because they’re not about a celebrity, and they don’t have these marquee descriptors. Sundance does such an amazing job of discovering these diamonds.”

Andrea Gibson, left, and Megan Falley in “Come See Me in the Good Light.”

The exposure at the start of the film festival season “gives you that one-year runway that allows you to play festivals all year long,” says White, who was back at Sundance to celebrate the end of an era. He also knows the pain of not making the cut. “My first two films didn’t get into Sundance, and then my third one did. I’m always telling young filmmakers to use the Sundance rejection as fuel.”

A festival berth was strong motivation for “Mr. Nobody” filmmaker David Borenstein, who collaborated with his subject, a schoolteacher near the Ural Mountains named Pavel (“Pasha”) Talankin, as he quietly documented Russian propaganda efforts to rally his young students around the war in Ukraine. “That was the goal the entire time making this film,” says the director, an American based in Copenhagen. “I never thought once about anything after Sundance.” When the Danish Film Institute submitted his film as the country’s entry for the international feature Oscar, he had a new goal. “We were the last to start campaigning because we didn’t have a streamer behind us.”

Borenstein interrupted a family vacation in the Dominican Republic to return to Sundance for meetings and figure out next steps. “Forget winning or losing,” he says. “You have six weeks where you have a voice, where Pasha has a voice. How do you use it?” Talankin, who fled his home — first for Turkey, then the Czech Republic — is, for the moment, no longer “Mr. Nobody,” but as Borenstein notes, “He sacrificed his whole life to do this.”

Iranian American filmmakers Mohammadreza Eyni and Sara Khaki were well into the eight-year production of “Cutting Through Rocks” when they became recipients of a 2020 Sundance Documentary Fund grant. “The timing was perfect and we really, really, really needed that support,” says Khaki, joining Eyni on a video conversation from Park City, where their film won the Grand Jury Prize in the world cinema category last year. “Sundance is something beyond only the festival for us,” Eyni says. “It’s more about persistence as a filmmaker and the cinematic approach to the stories and sense of community.”

“Cutting Through Rocks” follows Sara Shahverdi, the first woman elected to the council of her northwestern Iranian village, as she challenges the practice of child marriage and other patriarchal norms and empowers young women by showing them how to ride motorbikes, as she does herself. The message of resistance feels relevant worldwide, but most urgently in Iran, where estimates of deaths during recent protests top 30,000 people. “We want small stories and anecdotes to remind us that we can bring change,” Eyni says, “even when it’s tough, even when it seems impossible.” Although the film is the first documentary from Iran to be nominated for an Oscar, the news has been hard to share there because of the government’s weeks-long internet blackout.

“We are experiencing a lot of complex emotions,” Eyni says.

Sara Shahverdi, the subject of Oscar-nominated documentary feature “Cutting Through Rocks.”

(Gandom Films)

Sundance thrives on exactly those kinds of feelings. The dramatic premiere of “Come See Me in the Good Light” was, for its filmmaker, “The best night of my entire career.” What began as a film about the end of Gibson’s life quickly became a story about the joy of a life well-lived, experienced alongside the charismatic subject’s wife, poet Megan Falley. When White broke the news about the film’s acceptance, “Andrea was so emotional saying, ‘You’re telling me if I survive for six more weeks, I might see this movie?’” he recalls. And they did.

“I think people fell in love with Andrea during the course of that film, but they probably assumed that Andrea had passed away, and they were about to see a card at the end of the film,” White continues. Then Gibson walked up. “It was like a rock star rising from the ashes. You could literally feel the theater vibrating.”