Sundance 2025: The Librarians, Middletown, Speak. | Festivals & Awards

There’s a certain prescience to this year’s documentary selections that feel serendipitous given the unique afflictions besetting the world. Political, ecological, and societal grief are all at the forefront of attendees’ minds in Park City as the threat of California wildfires and the installation of the new administration rage on. These three documentaries orbit these grievances but never rest on the laurels of depiction, instead finding stories of localized hope and spotlighting communities who’ve channeled their disillusionment into activism.

Equal parts foreboding and inspiring, recently christened Oscar-nominee director Kim Snyder’s “The Librarians” reaffirms why the vocation of librarians is a vital one, particularly in an age of rampant misinformation and censorship by the country’s most conservative and insecure. Spotlighting librarians who are at the center of book bans––namely in places like Texas and Florida–the film highlights the ways they join together and support each other while politicians there to criminalize librarians’ work. Snyder doesn’t flinch away from the scorn librarians receive which can make for a harrowing watch; footage from community meetings see local members proudly expressing their hatred for the ways librarians are indoctrinating their kids with “woke ideas” involving issues of race and the LGGBTQ+ community.

What is most fascinating is the way the film explores the dangerous intersection of religion and politics particularly when it comes to this crusade against librarians. As one subject says, “What’s dangerous with this book banning is it’s being led by people who say they love God.” Indeed, Snyder shows how the people who are often at the forefront of these crusades to protect the children from “harmful” content found in library books are those who wish to indoctrinate and push their conservative Christian agenda; their concern about scandalous content as found in library books is a simply verisimilitude. While the librarian’s accounts are inspiring enough, Snyder as well as supervising editor Mark Becker cleverly slice in other parts of media (that would most likely get calls to be banned) in with their stories, reinforcing that these ideas of the suppression of ideas by the powerful is an ancient tale; episodes from “The Twilight Zone”, “Fahrenheit 451” and most poignantly, Nazi book burnings all are interwoven to show how these ideas have been recapitulated in the modern day.

What Snyder does so effectively is affirming the dignity of this vocation by showing how the work of librarians goes beyond just saving books; libraries foster better education and community, and the more this country enacts violence toward these spaces, the more spaces for people to be themselves are in decline. It’s a startling and heartbreaking picture of what we may lose.

It’s always a joy to see a Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine film on the Sundance line-up and their latest project, “Middletown,” not unlike “Boys State” and “Girls State,” gifts viewers with another coterie of youth (and then adults) to be inspired by, particular in the fearless ways they speak truth to the powerful and corrupt. The film focuses on a group of students at Middletown High School, located in a small city in New York state. One of their teachers, Fred Isseks, started a class called “Electronic English” which was a way for him to teach his students about digital media and TV. He recruits his students (Jeff, Rachel, David, and Mike) as de facto journalists and they use the school cameras to discover stories about Middletown. The students’ innocuous and gleeful examinations lead them to discover that a nearby landfill was leaking toxic waste into the town’s water supply, causing illness and death for residents. As the students unspool this action further, goaded not only by Isseks but also the energy and zeal of youth, they discover that this corruption extends beyond their hypothesized scope, including several large corporations and the local mafia.

Though a documentary, the film’s pacing feels much more in the vein of crime dramas or thriller films, particularly in how McBaine and Moss reframe each discovery and new piece of information as a disquieting discovery that ups the stakes of the student’s investigative work; in live time, we feel them feel irresistibly pulled into the orbit of the story, even if the breadth feels beyond their capacity to fully understand. It never feels sensationalized though, a testament to McBaine and Moss’ integrity to let this shocking story speak for itself. The film switches between present-day interviews with the now-grown-up students reflecting on their time making the documentary and the cornucopia of ‘90s-era VHS material footage the students shot to make their film exposé such as a scene of tthem breaking into a landfill and discovering holes in the ground filled with a suspicious and harmful substance (not to mention being filled with many other materials such as barrels and syringes that shouldn’t be anywhere near the city’s water supply). It’s touching to see these now-grown students, who have lived full lives since their work, share thoughts about what was going on behind the scenes. It’s a riveting testimony to the power of teachers as well, how for young people who are still figuring themselves out and who may be mired in self-doubt, all it takes is the right instructor to believe in you to help you feel empowered and capable to do work as incendiary as uncovering a a multi-year long pattern of environmental abuse.

It’s frightening and disturbing to see the students realize, in time, the vastness of the corruption, and yet it is equally as inspiring to see them attend town hall meetings and interview administrators and transform their frustration into passion. Though not quite as incendiary as Daniel Goldhaber’s “How to Blow Up a Pipeline,” there’s a similar and satisfying throughline of seeing young people get so disenchanted with systems that try to suppress them that they take matters into their own hands.

The documentary I was most excited to see this year was “Speak.” Having done spoken word in high school, there’s been too little cinematic representation of the art form (if you haven’t yet seen 2011’s “Louder than a Bomb” consider this your invitation) and it’s refreshing to be reminded about the power of oratory performance and to hear youth articulate their hopeful visions for the future, free from the cynicism and pessimism that can accompany growing up.

A spiritual companion to “Middletown” in many ways, directors Jennifer Tiexiera and Guy Mossman’s “Speak.” puts the spotlight on the high school students who are advocating for change, namely by participating in one of the world’s largest public speaking competitions. We primarily follow five orators who are either juniors or seniors: Esther, the child of a Nigerian pastor who laces her speeches with spiritual urgency and political bite, Sam, who uses his speeches to share about the difficulties of being queer in Minnesota, Texas-based Noor who has a fierce love for her brother with special needs, and social media star Mfaz, who speaks from her Sudanese Muslim heritage and pontificates about school reform. Even as this competition is public-facing, there’s a sense that these students are using this conversation as a way to process what they think and believe. They realize that to hold the attention of space and to share is a gift and they steward that act carefully, articulately, and passionately calling out the ways religious and political leaders have promoted agendas and legislation rooted in fear instead of care for those around them. In one poignant speech, a student shares how faith leaders are often focused on the wrong things, “staying silent when there are actual threats to children,” which leaves kids having to fight for themselves; it’s one of many beautiful moments of synthesis where righteous indignation and rhetorical prowess align.

The beauty of Teixeira and Mossman’s direction lies in their obvious affection for their subjects, not only letting the students go on long tangents and uninterrupted takes but also in their framing of their process. They shoot it not in a dissimilar way to films about athletes, showing Esther, Noor, Sam, Noah, and Mfaz in the throes of speech rehearsal, not pulling the camera away when they may slip up on a speech. It’s a testament especially, to Tiexiera’s direction; she previously directed 2023’s underrated documentary “Subject,” which focused on the plight often faced by subjects whose lives have been made into a spectacle in documentary or true crime films. She brings sensitivity and attentiveness to how she depicts these kids, protecting them by letting the vibrancy of their personalities shine in full force.

At a time when it’s easy (and understandable) to wallow in the midst of what we face, “Speak.” is a joyful recalibration about the power of dreaming, how sometimes the first step towards envisioning and bringing about a better world is to try and speak it into existence.