Sundance documentaries tackle gender-affirming care, cancer treatment, and warmongering

The moments where these reluctant clients open up about their wholesome desires, their dreams of spending their lives with someone they can grow old appreciating, invigorate the unfocused film. The rest of the time is spent whirling around all the fascinating subtopics Feng brushes. The state of Chinese dating, in a period of transition between in-person matchmaking tradition and traditional values carried over into the digital space, gets a bit of glancing analysis. So too does a subpopulation of women who’ve given up on men entirely, choosing instead to spend their days flirting with dating sims. Even Hao’s relationship—seemingly a thematic pivot point for the film—barely gets any screen time. He and his wife are on the rocks, then, after a time jump, they’re fine. The rest of the runtime is spent asking unsuspecting women for their numbers, which eventually stops making you cringe and starts making you check your watch.

Move Ya Body: The Birth Of House (C-) doesn’t have that problem, because the brief film leaves you wanting much more. Elegance Bratton (The Inspection) gets great access to the founding DJs, musicians, queer club kids, and South Side scenesters of house music, but loosely arranges what he gets out of them into a history lesson that seems to be missing a few pages from the syllabus.

As the disco fad died out—hurried along by a cultural backlash that included Chicago’s infamous Disco Demolition Night, where shock jock Steve Dahl led what was effectively a funk-hater’s book-burning—its tracks went underground. Rock resurged in the mainstream, but in the Warehouse, disco lived on, mutating in the dark into something stripped-down, youthful, and raw. Specifically focused on “On & On” writer Vince Lawrence as the progenitor of the genre, Move Ya Body looks intensely at where house came from, then stumbles around where it went, and what happened to its prominence in America before it got co-opted by the EDM scene.

Some of this vagueness seems concerned with legal issues and record companies, with exploited artists unable to speak to how screwed over they actually were. Much of it, though, simply seems like missing context, shorthand, or glossed-over history—especially ironic considering the little respect ever paid to house’s gay, Black origins. Though the music is great and the interviewees are often as funny as old-heads tend to be, Move Ya Body gets out of step and can’t get its groove back. (Some deeply cheesy reenactments don’t help.)

Finally, a pair of documentaries highlight the intense militarization and warmongering of two nations: Russia and Israel. Mr. Nobody Against Putin (C+) is a solidly queasy film shot surreptitiously by its subject/co-director, Pavel “Pasha” Talankin, a Russian elementary school teacher/videographer. In polluted, rundown Karabash, Pasha’s carved out a sweet little life pushing back on conservative politics. The students who use his classroom as a hangout spot have piercings and dyed hair; they film music videos for fun. But when Russia invades Ukraine, a propaganda platform is passed down from Putin, and Pasha’s school is slowly infected by a virulent patriotism.

Partially because of its shooting method, where Pasha smuggled out two years of footage shot during the course of his school duties, Mr. Nobody Against Putin can feel limited in scope, the gaps bridged by confessionals he delivers in his apartment. Perhaps exacerbated by director David Borenstein putting this film together after the fact (well, more after the fact than most movies), aspiring narrative threads can feel forced or half-baked, as if assembled without the actual clips needed to make the point stick. But plenty of the film feels vital—its observations of a nation’s shifting attitude towards war, towards hate, is crushing and familiar. 

Most teachers rebel in small ways against the new lessons they are mandated to teach. One in particular, an old-school hardliner, embraces it wholeheartedly. He wins a competition for “favorite teacher” and is rewarded with a new apartment. As corruption reigns and his former students are conscripted into a conflict orchestrated by a dictator, Pasha’s desperation to make a difference becomes all the more painful. Viewed as our own government rolls out increasingly authoritarian policies, his minor defiance feels aspirational.

Noam Shuster-Eliassi’s work may not feel aspirational per se, but it is at least worthwhile compared to what most of us are used to seeing when it comes to Israel’s war on Palestine. Sundance doesn’t have a great track record when it comes to Palestine, and the film featuring Shuster-Eliassi—Coexistence, My Ass! (C)—can be just as frustrating as the festival’s insistence on platforming people like Noa Tishby and Allison Josephs. Shuster-Eliassi is an Israeli diplomat who grew up in Neve Shalom (a community intentionally composed of Israelis and Palestinians) and decided that stand-up comedy is the best way to get the good word out.

The result, besides lots of groaners laced into a familiarly biographical routine, is a look at the conflict from a sympathetic Israeli perspective. Filmed over a decent span of time—covering the onset of COVID and the beginning of the wanton destruction waged by Israel after Hamas’ attack on October 7, 2023—Coexistence, My Ass! documents a population hardening in much the same way as Mr. Nobody Against Putin. 

Shuster-Eliassi, with her coexistence-focused upbringing, naturally has a pretty liberal family and social circle. It’s not surprising, but still harrowing, to see that community turn against her when she remains critical of her country’s actions. Filmmaker Amber Fares assembles a ton of footage into a thorough portrait of a disillusioned activist-comedian, though that portrait and the one-woman show it revolves around are themselves limited messengers of a worthwhile call to action.