2025 Sundance Institute Documentary Fund Grantees Revealed

Electric Waves is a kaleidoscopic hybrid documentary exploring the ocean as a site of mass communication, haunting, and time.

A Japanese American family united by anxiety disorders and vivid daydreams struggles to let go of their dying matriarch.

In Kampuchea, Neary Adeline Hay investigates her origins, shaped by the violence of the Khmer Rouge. Born of a forced “red marriage,” she investigates how trauma is passed from one generation to the next — across mind, body, and DNA — and reflects on the possibilities of healing and resilience.

Director: Samira Vera-Cruz

Producer: Pedro Soulé

The River chronicles the lives of displaced people in Myanmar, setting up new camps by themselves near the Thai border. The film exposes the struggles of a community forced to abandon their homes due to the relentless violence inflicted by the Myanmar military.

This time-bending hybrid feature blurs past and present as it unravels an unsolved mystery at the heart of America.

Director: Pamella Edouard

Producers: Estelle Robin You, Zippy Nyaruri

A lonely night watchman develops a relationship with an AI chatbot, transforming his worldview and challenging his perception of identity and reality.

When Cristina Ibarra’s uncle returns to El Paso, Texas, after decades in exile following deportation, he isn’t free. Through her family’s entanglement with “crimmigration,” the director explores how surveillance and separation reshape our bonds — and how rebuilding itself becomes resistance.

Director: Eli Hiller

Producer: Loi Ameera Almeron

Director Rongfei, who has never seen her birth mother, seeks to hire a “mother” for a day to explore maternal complexities and overcome the shadow of abandonment she experienced. Supported by the Sundance Institute | Free People Creative Spirit Fund

Anu is a transmasculine director, but when he visits his family he shaves his mustache and plays the role of beloved daughter and sister, Anna. With the help of his camera he tries to overcome the fear of coming out while capturing a twisted family portrait with an epic courtroom finale.

In a world that prizes control and domination, a fiercely independent 80-year-old scientist battles patriarchal science and inner turmoil, seeking to reveal the hidden wisdom of wild horses — and in doing so, find peace in her own untamed soul.

To fulfill a dying wish, a filmmaker retraces her mother’s work as an activist and journalist during the Red Power Movement, bringing to light 500 years of Taino resistance and igniting her own journey of reclamation.

The embrace of the fantastic holds a powerful significance — not as an escape from reality, but as a way to challenge the status quo and envision new possibilities for Black identity and personhood. In the Black Fantastic celebrates the brilliance, imagination, and world-building of Black creators.

In Puerto Rico, an unelected Fiscal Control Board has ruled for nearly 10 years, gutting basic services in a playbook from 1975 New York City and 2013 Detroit. But public workers, journalists, and political upstarts have been building a movement to restore democracy for the public good.

A Brooklyn teenager balances helping to raise her younger siblings while reclaiming her own fleeting childhood in this coming-of-age hybrid documentary. The film explores the beauty and burdens of being an eldest daughter and constructs an escapist world where Black girls get to simply be kids.

Supported by the Sundance Institute | Free People Creative Spirit Fund

A 91-year old chef who has a testy relationship with her legacy collaborates with filmmakers to narrate her life. In a playful interplay between fact and fiction, a narrative emerges about love, motherhood, race, and what it takes to come from nowhere to become a future moving through the present.

In this intimate, tender mosaic of El Salvador, women reveal the joys and perils of their lives deeply bonded with water and land. Vena Acuática is shaped by the relationships between women defending a landscape haunted by environmental negligence and forced migration.

For over 60 years, a tiny grocery store in the Taiwanese mountains has been the center stage of a romantic love story between an Indigenous Paiwan princess and an exiled Chinese soldier.

The Animated Mind of Oliver Sacks draws from a newly uncovered archive to trace the beloved neurologist and author’s early career and private struggles — revealing how one outsider’s radical empathy reshaped medicine and laid the groundwork for the neurodiversity movement.

A newly discovered archive linked to an ’80s fanzine titled The Art of War guides us through a polyphonic portrait where reality and artistic representation of Peru in the ’80s and ’90s blur. Times of terrorism, general crisis, and rock and roll.

In a country where eligible men outnumber women by 30 million, three perpetual bachelors join an intensive seven-day dating camp led by one of China’s most sought-after dating coaches in a last-ditch effort to find a girl and love.

After 20 years apart, an Amerasian Vietnamese and Black family shattered by the foster care and prison systems reunites to heal old wounds and rebuild their family, starting with finding their unhoused mother in the streets of Sacramento.

A domestic worker and her filmmaker daughter co-create the fictional character of a writer to uncover the slippage between truth and fantasy in a hybrid documentary that tells a story about immigration, labor, dreams, and the power of fiction to spark emancipation.

A daughter unravels the disappearance of her father, the peaceful opposition leader to Qaddafi, and pieces together her mother’s 19-year search to find him. Without any memory of her father, she tries to reconnect with him and reconcile with her Libyan identity.

Pinball follows 19-year-old Yosef in suburban Louisville, Kentucky, as he dives into the memories of his journey from Iraq to America and what it ultimately means for him to chase his dreams in the shadow of a war that displaced his family from their Iraqi homeland.

The world’s greatest astronomers have calculated that a new planet, never before seen by human eyes, lurks hidden at the edge of our solar system. Now, the race is on between a handful of teams to find it, and whoever succeeds will be responsible for one of the most momentous discoveries in history.

When a Colombian woman confronts a genetic legacy of early onset Alzheimer’s, her family’s fate becomes entwined with scientists racing for a cure, before memory itself disappears.

Untitled Girl Scout Cookie Documentary is the story of the tenacious young women who strive to be top sellers in the annual Girl Scout Cookie sale. Supported by the Sundance Institute | Free People Creative Spirit Fund

For Venida, For Kalief debuts the poetry of Venida Brodnax Browder, mother of Kalief Browder, whose legacy propels incarceration reform. A reimagining of criminal justice storytelling, the film weaves a cinematic mosaic of vérité, poetic visuals, and rare archival imagery from 1970s New York.