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

Aside from the starry, flashy documentaries usually floating around the festival scene, the 2025 Sundance Film Festival also offers a large selection of nonfiction films from around the world. These range from movies smuggled out of Russia to cinema centered on a musical movement born right here in Chicago, but the best attack the political from an angle increasingly relatable from across any aisles: healthcare.

So far, the best doc of the fest has been GEN_ (B+), Gianluca Matarrese’s intimate look at the daily work done by Dr. Maurizio Bini at his fertilization and gender-affirming care facility in Milan. Matarrese stays out of the film’s way, shooting patient meetings, procedures, and staff interactions without ever inserting himself. The fly-on-the-wall feeling is enhanced by the hazy close-ups that embrace obscured focus and out-of-frame heads in order to make us feel like we’re there in the room with them.

Once there, we don’t just share the room with Dr. Bini and those looking to change their lives with his help—we share their secrets, their dreams. We hope everyone who wants to get pregnant gets pregnant, we hope everyone who wants their body and governmentally recognized name to match how they see themselves finds the resolution they deserve. Bini isn’t just an empathetic, charismatic force, but a courageous one; his conservative Catholic country is cracking down on who can get what kinds of care, and Bini is willing to stretch the laws to the point that they snap.

It’s always easier to like a documentary with an angle you agree with or subject matter you’re personally invested in, but GEN_ succeeds even if it started life on third base. That’s mostly because, though the aesthetic approach is minimalist and focused, the star of the show is clear. Bini is soft-spoken, funny, curious, and compassionate. In a world increasingly hostile to those needing medical care of any kind, he’s always saying the right things with the same kind of eccentric warmth that makes Orna Guralnik from HBO’s Couples Therapy such a watchable screen presence. As he juggles everyone from older hopeful mothers to adolescents still figuring out their gender identities to construction workers insistent on rattling the walls while his team painstakingly attempts to perform microscopic injections, Bini is worth rooting for throughout. It’s a warm, reassuring film about what one expert can do, and it’s about as feel-good as documentaries get.

On the other side of the emotional spectrum, squarely in the “we all feel like shit, but we carry on” weepy camp, is Come See Me In The Good Light (C+). Spoken word poet Andrea Gibson is dying of terminal ovarian cancer, cancer that they’ve been battling for much longer than their diagnosis ever expected. Their girlfriend and fellow poet Megan Falley supports as best she can, stuck in the limbo between attempting to appreciate every moment and realizing that this very attempt has, to an extent, trapped them both. Gibson’s always-renewing lease on life keeps them pressing forward, though as the film tracks the pair as they navigate life’s end and death’s inevitability, the blanketed sadness and twee subjects make it even harder to swallow. 

But of course one should expect exposed-nerve emotions from a tragic doc about a dying poet. Gibson’s readings form the backbone of director Ryan White’s wide-eyed style, and appreciating their work becomes a big part of appreciating the doc itself. When Gibson and Falley are just being themselves around each other, the little prickly things about love emerge more beautifully than in the breathy beats of these voiceover readings. Learning about Gibson’s ‘roid rage from their treatment, and Falley’s acceptance of it, is a more moving example of their care for one another than much of what the film finds in their shared profession. 

Aside from the more specific parts of the Gibson-focused doc—which does a serviceable job outlining their path from childhood to becoming the gay rock star of their poetry scene—there is a secondary, almost backgrounded portrait of the American medical system. Those with any experience dealing with a chronic illness, or a loved one living with one, will recognize the exhausting cycle of doctor visits, test results, and nervous waiting. They will look past the specific, and see the universal worrying about bills, about debt, about dying and leaving those closest to you saddled with your imbalanced account. Just brushing against this system is enough to salt your reluctant tears with rage.

The Dating Game (C-) scratches the surface of another fascinating and potentially infuriating system: online dating in China. The apps suck, the ratios are skewed, the conversations intolerable. And that’s in America, where we’re not recovering from a national policy that enforced a numerical imbalance between men and women. Violet Du Feng’s frustratingly surface-level film focuses on what it’s like for a couple of luckless schlubs looking for love in this environment. In particular, luckless schlubs banking everything on a dating coach named Hao. 

Hao operates with a classic pickup artist’s mindset. He’s all about negging, ignoring, pushing yourself on women, and massaging the truth to make yourself look good. His wife, also a dating coach, seems like she can barely put up with him, and only because she knows his bluster is all a façade. But Hao’s clients don’t know that. A little older, a little more awkward, a little less refined, a little broke—these men see themselves as having few options in a hyper-competitive dating scene, and yearn for connection.

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.