Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic As the 2025 Sundance Film Festival in Utah entered its final weekend, there was some excitement — and maybe relief — when two films were acquired for hefty sums. Neon snapped up Together, a body-horror about a couple in danger of literally becoming stuck with each other, for a reported $17mn while Netflix bagged meditative Americana portrait Train Dreams for an allegedly similar figure. But even in the absence of newsflashes like these, worries about the state of independent filmmaking tended to evaporate in the face of a beautifully executed movie. Sorry, Baby is one such film, a sharp, funny, altogether bracing feature about an academic, Agnes, who is sexually assaulted. It’s a triumph from Eva Victor, who writes, directs, and stars in a debut feature that nimbly combines black humour, deadpan naturalism and an emotional fearlessness that has no patience for false notes. A switchback structure deftly follows Agnes before and after the event: as a graduate student living with her close friend Lydie (Naomi Ackie) and, years after, as a successful professor, welcoming Lydie for a visit.Victor rose to some fame making amusingly anxious viral videos, which might make Sorry, Baby sound like an unexpected project. In fact her compressed storytelling and unfiltered delivery prove well-suited to expressing Agnes’s lows and joys. Agnes is nourished by Lydie’s supportive friendship and, later, a developing relationship with an appealingly dorky neighbour (Lucas Hedges). Victor also sketches in cutting portrayals of a tone-deaf doctor and callow university administrators, after the assault. Her candid comedic voice, accompanied by some smart visual choices, rediscovers the authenticity with which so many recent Sundance movies have lost touch.Angst was the keynote emotion of this edition, also dominating another standout performance in the comedy If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. Rose Byrne plays burnt-out therapist Linda, who has to take care of her ailing daughter alone while her husband, a boat captain, is indefinitely away. Directed by Mary Bronstein with a connoisseurship for everyday irritation, the film digs fruitfully into the double binds of motherhood as Linda pushes away the stress by smoking a lot of weed and befriending a hotel clerk (A$AP Rocky). Less helpful is her own therapist, a resolutely expressionless and very funny Conan O’Brien.Bronstein starred in her 2008 debut feature Yeast, a story of fractious friendship, opposite a mumblecore-era Greta Gerwig, but its limited availability since then makes If I Had Legs I’d Kick You something like a second debut — and a welcome one. Byrne expertly switches up rhythms as Linda variously confronts and hopelessly evades the obstacles the world keeps throwing at her, starting with a flood that blasts open a gigantic hole in her ceiling. Also, in a remarkable directorial choice, we only ever hear Linda’s daughter (Danielle Macdonald), who is persistently kept off screen. This surreal but apt touch reflects Linda’s conflicted feelings, which the film eventually hears out in full.When it came to Sundance’s strong nonfiction line-up, it’s worth noting first the sheer diversity of the 37 documentary features on display. Zodiac Killer Project, for example, wittily deconstructs the true-crime genre through Charlie Shackleton’s aborted attempt to make such a documentary, while in Endless Cookie two Canadian animators make a casually funny, yarn-spinning saga about their Indigenous family. Biographical documentaries have also come in different flavours. Sally, about the first American woman in space, becomes a hidden love story, while Life After examines the right-to-die legacy of Elizabeth Bouvia to argue its insidious implications for the disabled, when enforced by governments. And in 2000 Meters to Andriivka, Academy Award winner Mstyslav Chernov (20 Days in Mariupol) vividly embeds with a Ukrainian brigade battling for a spit of land with Russian invaders. The Perfect Neighbor might attract the biggest spotlight among these selections as the year goes on. Geeta Gandbhir uses body-cam footage and other sources to create a richly detailed portrait of a community and a killing: the 2023 shooting of Ajike Owens, a Black mother of four, by Susan Lorincz, her disgruntled white neighbour. Lorincz’s repeated complaints about neighbourhood children lead to multiple visits from police. These in turn provide the astonishing visual and audio material that Gandbhir and her team have crafted into a chronology around the crime.But the result is more than an indictment of Florida’s notorious “Stand Your Ground” self-defence law. The Perfect Neighbor carefully depicts a modest corner of Ocala, Florida, where children play among single-level houses, and finds nuances in community-police relations. The violent outcome approaches with crushingly tragic inevitability as this maturely told story becomes a microcosm of a social system that seems set up to foster aggression. (Lorincz, as the film shows, was convicted of manslaughter, despite torturous self-justifications, and is serving a 25-year sentence.)Working with found footage in a different way, Predators analyses the regrettable craze around 2000s TV show To Catch a Predator, which featured stings of suspected child abusers. Predators director David Osit begins by deconstructing how the show was filmed, even interviewing the young adult actors who played the underage children the men believed they were meeting. The show’s host, Chris Hansen, delivers righteous one-liners as he steps into the room to confront each man, all with an eye towards maximising audience indignation.Osit highlights the perniciousness of creating TV spectacle around child abuse, and shadows an online imitator of Hansen who runs his own try-hard vigilante show, trapping would-be abusers. In the end, Hansen sits down for an interview with Osit, and while their exchange is cordial, it drives home the point that the show was more concerned with creating jarring entertainment than with addressing the anguish of survivors.After these draining documentaries, Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine’s Middletown restores a little faith in human nature. Their delightful documentary looks back at an investigation by high-school students in the early 1990s exposing the dumping of toxic waste in their upstate New York community. A maverick teacher schools the teenagers in journalism and democratic ideals, and while the kids joke around, they don’t let up in their questioning of shifty adult authority figures, shown in videos they created.The students’ integrity offered a view of the world through fresh eyes, and the same could be said of the most original and striking films at this year’s edition of Sundance — at its best, still a place for digging and discovery.festival.sundance.org
