Sundance 26

A balanced, at times sad and chilling, investigation into the reality and impact of laboratory research into animals, Tony Jones’s rigorously made documentary gives room for both sides of the argument both in terms of animal welfare and the medical benefits. The film is largely seen through the eyes of Dr. Lisa Jones-Engel, a primatologist turned animal welfare advocate, whose insight, knowledge and compassion forms the spine of the film.

For 10 years, Itab Azzam and Jack MacInnes followed Isra’a and her family from Syria to Germany and back again, as they were forced to navigate war, exile and emotional anguish. As we see in the film, selected for Sundance World Documentary Competition, characters don’t always behave as you would expect. “Good people do bad things. People are morally complex. We don’t seek to sit in judgement. We just want to put it out there, the effects on a family of being transplanted into an alien culture and how that can tear them apart,” co-director MacInnes tells Business Doc Europe.

Mark Cousins is back in Sundance with yet another magnum opus, this time telling the history of the doc genre. Park City will present the first part of what will eventually be a 16-hour odyssey. Cousins’ “impulse” was to communicate to audiences his own sense of wonder about all the documentaries that have enraptured him over the years. “The magic is out there. There’s a world outside ourselves which is so complex - a full spectrum of everything we can imagine - the joys and sorrows of being alive,” he tells BDE.

UK producer Beth Earl talks to BDE about Jane Pollard and Iain Forsyth’s highly creative feature doc on the late Marianne Faithfull, which world-premiered at Venice 2025 and is now selected for Sundance. “I think that there is this moment now in our culture where we're re-examining how people are remembered, and who should be remembered and why are they remembered and what we remember them for,” Earl tells BDE of the film’s illustrious subject.

Fergie Chambers may be one of the richest people in America, but he’s also a Marxist revolutionary who lives without any visible trappings of extreme wealth. During the course of Sinéad O’Shea’s film he also becomes a Muslim. “It’s so interesting that someone who comes from one of America’s wealthiest families has decided to rebel against the capitalist system and is intent on creating a communist revolution,” O’Shea tells BDE.

Selected for Sundance World Cinema Documentary Comp and sold by Dogwoof, Birds of War tells the story of the love affair between a London-based Lebanese journalist and a Syrian activist and cameraman. It was a romance which began in extraordinarily unlikely circumstances, in the shadow of war and upheaval. Filmmakers Janay Boulos & Abd Alkader Habak talk to Business Doc Europe.

European Film Promotion will welcome filmmakers and industry professionals to its EUROPE! HUB at Sundance (22 Jan – 1 Feb), “highlighting and celebrating the presence of European films in this year’s line-up,” the organisation writes. European films in World Cinema Doc Comp include All About the Money by Sinéad O’Shea, To Hold a Mountain by Biljana Tutorov & Petar Glomazić, Closure by Michał Marczak, and the UK doc features Everybody to Kenmure Street by Felipe Bustos Sierra, Birds of War by Janay Boulos & Abd Alkader Habak and One In A Million by Itab Azzam and Jack MacInnes.

The 2021 K2 disaster has already assumed its place in the grim history of mountaineering tragedies. It’s not a spoiler alert to reveal that five people died. “We realised early on that, in some ways, this was a classical story of survival, competition, and all the other riveting elements of the mountaineering genre,” director Amir Bar-Lev tells BDE, “but in other ways, it was a snapshot of civilisation at this moment…and we humans bring our greatest traits and our worst traits wherever we go.”

Organisers of the Sundance Film Festival announced Dec 10 their program for the upcoming edition, running January 22–February 1, 2026, and online Jan 29 to Feb 1. Documentaries will compete in World Cinema Documentary Competition and US Documentary Competition, and a raft of docs are selected within the Next, Premieres, Midnight, Non-fiction Showcase, Spotlight, Family Matinee and Special Screenings sections. Read on for all doc selections.