Spring is just around the corner (yes, aldready!) & we are working hard to slate some of our Sundance Film Festival favorites. Kicking off the year viewing some of the most anticipated documentaries on the circuit is always an exciting jump-start to planning the season ahead.
In no particular order, here are our top 7 picks from this year’s fest:
1. Alive Inside: A Story of Music and Memory
As dementia continues to affect millions of elderly Americans, Alive Inside: A Story of Music & Memory reveals a remarkable, music-based breakthrough that has already transformed lives.
2. The Battered Bastards of Baseball
Chapman and Maclain Way’s energetic telling of one of baseball’s great, unheralded stories is as much about independent spirit as it is about the game.
3. The Green Prince
The Green Prince is such an extraordinary story that one is tempted to think it is fiction, if only somebody had the audacity to invent it. Based on Yousef’s memoir, Son of Hamas, The Green Prince is a story of two men, spy and handler, whom history insists must be adversaries.
4. The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz
As a teenager, Aaron Swartz was a computer-programming prodigy with an unquenchable thirst for knowledge. After emerging as a pioneer of Internet activism, education, and politics, he was indicted on multiple federal charges in 2011 and 2012, setting off a complex chain of events that left the Internet community reeling.
5. The Last Days in Vietnam
Renowned Sundance Film Festival veteran Rory Kennedy dares to reopen the books on a war that scarred our national psyche. Chronicling a story few of us know, Kennedy’s potent documentary may both shock you and restore your faith in humanity.
6. The Overnighters
When hydraulic fracturing unlocks an vast oil field in North Dakota’s Bakken shale, tens of thousands of unemployed men descend on the state with dreams of six-figure salaries. In the tiny town of Williston, busloads of newcomers step into the sad reality of slim work prospects and nowhere to sleep.
7. Happy Valley
The town of State College, the home of Penn State University, has long been known as Happy Valley, and its iconic figure for more than 40 years was Joe Paterno, the head coach of the school’s storied football team. Filmed over the course of the year after Sandusky’s arrest as key players in the scandal agreed to share their stories, Happy Valley deconstructs the story we think we know to uncover a much more complicated and tragic tale.
Keep you’re eyes peeled, we hope to have a few of these coming up…
