Social Justice Movies at the Sundance Film Festival

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Films With Talking Points

Robert Redford kicked off this year’s Sundance Film Festival on a more somber note than usual. His opening remarks at the festival he founded addressed the recent debate about the connection between films and violence in the wake of the tragic events in Newtown, Connecticut. Redford concluded that it is “not only appropriate, but overdue, to have a dialogue.”

It’s an axiom that films are a reflection of the culture we live in, and Sundance has long been the launching pad for discussions on tough issues facing society here and around the world. This year is no different. In relation to gun violence, the festival has programmed such films as Blue Caprice, a dramatic examination of the perpetrators behind the D.C. sniper shooting spree of 2002, Valentine Road, a documentary about the 2008 murder of 15-year-old Lawrence King at the hands of a middle school classmate, and the short Gun, which tells of the psychological impact upon a man who puchases a weapon after his home is broken into.

Aside from guns, the festival is playing host to a whole wave of films that uncover new truths about the social issues of our day.

Click through for ten social justice movies that aim to start meaningful conversations that will extend far outside the theater.

Photo: Lucas Jackson/Reuters

After Tiller

While many films fight for the creation of new laws to protect the citizenry, After Tiller asks simply to uphold laws already in place. Directors Lana Wilson and Martha Shane make their case for the continuing legality of a woman’s right to choose by profiling a quartet of physicians that still practice third-trimester abortions in wake of the death of Dr. George Tiller, who was killed in 2008 while attending church in Wichita, Kansas. A few of the After Tiller doctors are working well past retirement age to provide a safe procedure, and the film demonstrates that the issue of abortion is still a difficult one for all involved.

Blackfish

Theme park owners should be wary of films coming out of Park City this year. The festival’s most buzzed-about film has been Escape From Tomorrow, in which a family man who recently lost his job experiences Disney World in a whole new and terrifyingly surreal way before delivering the bad news to his clan. The owners of SeaWorld should also be ill at ease with the all-too-real documentary Blackfish from director Gabriela Cowperthwaite. The film makes a connection between killer whales held in captivity and the whales’ proclivity to demonstrate their killer nature on those that hold them captive. The 2010 death of SeaWorld trainer Dawn Brancheau is central to this investigation into the unnatural and unethical conditions in which we hold our fellow mammals.

Citizen Koch

To follow up their Grand Jury Prize win in Park City in 2008 for Trouble the Water, which chronicled the devastation of Hurricane Katrina through the prism of one particularly hard-hit couple, directors Carl Deal and Tia Lessin turn their attention to a similarly destructive force of nature: The Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision. The ruling allowed unfettered campaign spending from corporations. In their new documentary, Citizen Koch, Deal and Lessin examine one of the first major political events to be affected by the judgment in Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s fight against a recall effort in 2011. The filmmakers make no secret of their desire to see the ruling overturned, as evidenced by the Take Action section of the film’s website.

Dirty Wars

As a journalist, Jeremy Scahill has long gone to places others wouldn’t as the national security correspondent for The Nation. For Dirty Wars, on which he’s a writer and producer, Scahill ventured out into the covert wars being fought in such places as Somalia and Afghanistan and brought cameras with him. The intent of Dirty Wars is to show the true cost of the War on Terror, with its “kill lists” and “black” detention sites as part of standard operating procedures. Scahill reveals how practices shrouded in secrecy and done in the name of American safety are actually violating the very civil liberties the country was founded on, and are quite possibly putting us even more at risk. Sundance Selects picked up the film for distribution, meaning that the secrets will be out later this year.

Fire in the Blood

Current Best Documentary Oscar nominee How to Survive a Plague showed the power of activism to push for the creation of drugs to combat the HIV virus, and Dylan Mohan Gray’s documentary Fire in the Blood takes up the fight in demonstrating how pharmaceutical companies have limited the spread of treatment the world over in order to protect their profits by limiting access to low-cost AIDS drugs. Presenting interviews with Bill Clinton, Desmond Tutu and Joseph Stiglitz, among others, Mohan Gray takes a look at the toll corporate greed has taken on Sub-Saharan Africa in particular—and how lobbyists have successfully rallied against lowered costs for medicine even though it is now cheap to produce.

Fruitvale

Suggested to be a contender for top honors when the festival comes to an end this week, the directorial debut of Ryan Coogler recounts the final years in the life of Oscar Grant, a 22-year-old African-American who was the victim of a 2009 police shooting in the titular Oakland, California, neighborhood. The killing was captured on eyewitness telephones and posted online, which led to a public outcry. Rather than fit the tidy profile that was created upon his death by some in the media, the film paints a nuanced portrait of the young man trying to make a life for himself. Fruitvale’s cast includes Michael B. Jordan (Friday Night Lights), Forest Whitaker and The Help stars Octavia Spencer and Ahna O’Reilly. After scoring a distribution deal from The Weinstein Company, Fruitvale is likely to build upon the Sundance buzz toward an Oscar campaign later this year.

God Loves Uganda

Sure to make a compelling, if deeply disturbing, double bill with last year’s festival favorite Call Me Kuchu, which documented the incredible life and shocking death of gay activist David Kato in Uganda, Roger Ross Williams’s documentary God Loves Uganda outlines the influence of American Evangelical Christians in the region. The evangelicals—in an extreme case—are preceived as having stoked support for laws such as making homosexuality a crime eligible for the death penalty. Following the money and the missionaries, Williams looks at how the International House of Prayer, an Evangelical group from Kansas City, has done its best to undermine the efforts of the United Nations’ HIV-prevention program and create anti-gay sentiment from the streets to the Parliament.

Pit Stop

The frontlines on the battles for gay equality have been well-represented cinematically in recent years. Yen Tan’s drama Pit Stop takes a different tact. Instead of bringing the cacophony of a national debate to the screen, Tan shifts the focus to the quiet desperation of two gay men (Ben Heck and Marcus DeAnda), unknown to each other, living in a small, unidentified town in Texas where no anti-gay sentiment is necessary since no one of that sexual orientation would dare to go public with it. The film presents in moving fashion the families that the men have managed to construct around them as they carve out identities in a place where they’ll never truly be able to be themselves.

Wajma (An Afghan Love Story)

Star-crossed lovers have been in vogue since the days of Shakespeare; so no wonder plenty of films are focused on them at Sundance, particularly with ties to the Middle East. After scoring with the 2009 crowd pleaser Amreeka, Palestinian-American actress/director Cherien Dabis arrived at Sundance with May in the Summer, a comedy in which she stars as an author whose engagement to a Muslim is threatened by her born again Christian mother's vehement disapproval. Mom’s reaction might seem kind in comparison to Barkmak Akram’s drama Wajma. The Kabul-set film offers a rare glimpse at how tradition and religion still impact modern-day romantic relationships through the tale of a woman who incurs the wrath of her father by getting pregnant by a man who refuses to marry her.

American Promise

It was two years after their debut The Keeper played at Sundance before Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson embarked on this followup. That was in 1999. Still, the partners in filmmaking and in life needed the time to raise a child and, by extension, their next film, American Promise. The documentary follows their son Idris and his best friend Seun from kindergarten through high school in an effort to examine the barriers African-Americans still face when it comes to education, even when kids start out at the private Dalton School on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

Any social justice movies at Sundance this year that we missed? Talk about them in COMMENTS.

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