Sundance Film Festival 2025: Predators, The Stringer, FOLKTALES | Festivals & Awards

Sundance has long been a launchpad for the best documentaries in the world. Just this year, “Black Box Diaries,” “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat,” and “Sugarcane” worked that year-long gauntlet from Sundance bow to Oscar nominations. Don’t be surprised if at least one of these films joins that club in 12 months. Honestly, I’d be happy if all three did.

David Osit’s stunning “Predators” is much more than another attempt to interrogate our international obsession with true crime culture. It’s also an act of courage, confronting an increasingly vigilante-driven mindset that never pauses to understand that which is correctly considered vile, choosing instead to turn it into entertainment.

Osit’s three-chapter documentary begins with a relatively straightforward chronicle of the massive success of the “Dateline NBC” off-shoot “To Catch a Predator,” speaking with several of the “decoys,” young-looking show employees who waded into the poisoned waters of pedophilia in their attempts to entice deeply damaged men to come to a house at which they thought a child was waiting for sexual activity. Of course, then Chris Hansen would emerge from the shadows, question them briefly, and send them out the door to awaiting law enforcement. The show undeniably put an important spotlight on a horrible epidemic of child abuse in this country. But it also always felt a bit like a cheap stunt, a truth that hit home when the production went to a man’s house with whom a decoy had been flirting, and the target took his own life, basically putting an end to the show and the awaiting prosecutions of the dozens of men it had trapped.

Even in this first chapter, Osit threads a needle regarding how we should experience something like “To Catch a Predator,” showing unaired footage of these men begging for some kind of help to fix them. An attorney notes rather brusquely that rehabilitation is not his job. Then who’s is it? Of course, there’s no defense for pedophilia, but Osit hinges his production on a question that Hansen would ask almost every episode: “Help me understand.” The filmmaker reveals that he was initially drawn to “To Catch a Predator” in an effort to understand how that could happen. He never did. The show never really even attempted to provide an answer.

Neither have any of the spin-offs. One could really do a whole piece on how much Hansen influenced the true crime landscape, but Osit centers on one specific YouTube hit that follows a similar formula of decoy/host, to the tune of thousands of followers. With on-camera talent pretending to be law enforcement, the whole thing can’t shake the fact that it’s turning a horror of this world into entertainment. For example, these people don’t know how to deal with the potential suicide of one of their targets. They haven’t been trained to do so.

And then “Predators” brilliantly pivots back to Hansen, watching his production on a new predator project that reveals the continued inadequacy of his singular approach. He debates with his producer on how to handle a case of an 18-year-old and someone a couple years younger – something legal in most states under a law that allows seniors in high school to date someone a year or two younger, but not the one they’re in. Should they ruin a life for their show? Osit ends with a breathtaking interview with Hansen that culminates in a formally daring bit of filmmaking that makes you rethink the very title of this excellent film.

A very different story unfolds in Bao Nguyen’s “The Stringer,” but the films, which premiered back-to-back at the Ray in Park City tonight, do have a bit of commonality in unpacking powerful imagery and who controls it. At times, “The Stringer” feels a bit longer than it needs to be, recycling some of the same facts in the first half, but one realizes that its exactitude is essential to the story it’s telling. By the time it reaches a riveting sequence that virtually recreates one of the most important events in Vietnamese history through photographs and footage of that day, it’s an act of courageous journalism that’s impossible to deny.

The logline for “The Stringer” is an enticing one: One of the most powerful war photographs ever taken has been credited to the wrong man for half a century. The photo is that of Phan Thi Kim Phuc, her clothes ripped from her burned body as she flees a napalm attack in South Vietnam. One of four Associated Press photos from that war that won a Pulitzer, it’s credited with helping end the war after it was printed in newspapers around the world. AP photographer Nick Ut was credited with the photo and has told stories about that fateful day for generations, including how he helped save Phan after taking the shot. “The Stringer” makes a very convincing case that Nick Ut didn’t take the photo and that it was a local stringer named Nghe, someone who assisted the AP with photography that they would then buy and claim as their own. It was a common practice but likely never happened for a photograph as landscape-shifting as this one.

Nguyen centers a journalist named Gary Knight as he attempts to get to the truth about the “napalm girl” photo, having almost nothing to go on at first other than a few stories that had been told in journalist circles for years. It almost feels like the people who knew the truth were scared to speak up, and “The Stringer” flirts with a truly fascinating concept in that Ut’s profile and activism arguably helped end the war more than the image would have from an unknown stringer. It doesn’t give this idea much bandwidth before settling on the truth: Even if credit wasn’t given then, and even if Ut used his platform provided by the photo for good, it should be given now.

“The Stringer” builds to a scene of forensic investigation that is just phenomenal as a team of French experts takes photos and footage from that day to prove near-conclusively who took the shot. There were other photos that day in which Nghe, Ut, and Phan can be seen, allowing for a digital recreation of where everyone likely was when the photo was taken. It’s truly fine filmmaking journalism, and it makes the assertion by the filmmakers that the AP continues to ignore and deny this story all the more frustrating. In an era when the very institution of journalism is in decline, it’s almost comforting to see people like Knight fighting for its validity.

Update: After the publication of this dispatch, the AP reached out to clarify that that “In keeping with our news values of accuracy, accountability and transparency, we stand ready to review any and all evidence.” They also provided a link to this statement, that I believe it is only fair to include here. This is clearly a story that’s still being told.

Finally, there’s the subtly moving “FOLKTALES,” a gentle film with emotional power that truly snuck up on me. We’ve become so accustomed to non-fiction films about young people hinging on melodrama or controversy that the nuanced humanity of the latest from the great Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady almost takes a resetting of expectations. There’s no “major drama” in “FOLKTALES,” just the shared journeys of three young people trying to chase the best versions of themselves in a part of the world that most people would call inhospitable. It turns out that tearing down the trappings of the modern world and returning to a form of living in which men and women have been partaking for thousands of years can reset your brain and provide clarity that our cluttered lives so rarely offer. It will make you want to jump on a dog sled.

“FOLKTALES” is the story of three young people at the Pasvik Folk High School in Norway, north of the Arctic Circle. It’s sort of an extension of high school, something people can do after that level of education and before being thrust into the cruel world of adulthood. Bjørn Tore, Hege, and Romain are all looking for something, even if they don’t know exactly what. The incredibly vulnerable Hege struggles with the death of her father years earlier; both Romain and Bjorn seem to be socially insecure, making their eventual friendship all the more moving. It sounds incredibly clichéd, but I came to honestly care about all three of these young people, perhaps seeing some of my own high school-age son in them. And myself.

Ewing and Grady don’t manufacture or force anything, giving their film the tone of the peaceful setting in which it takes place. It’s a soothing experience that alternates raw conversation with gorgeously shot sequences of the landscape and the dogs who practically serve as therapy animals for these people. Dog lovers shouldn’t miss this one. Honestly, no one should.