From ‘The Stringer’ to ‘Move Ya Body,’ BIPOC Filmmakers Share the Untold Legacy of Their Communities in Sundance 2025 Documentaries
The documentary selection at this year’s Sundance celebrates the work of multiple BIPOC filmmakers shedding light on untold narratives of both celebrated and unduly neglected figures from their communities.
“For a long time, people from the global South, those who are historically underrepresented, have been telling stories about themselves in their own circles. But they haven’t had the opportunity to share it with the world” says Vietnamese-American director Bao Nguyen, whose revelatory documentary “The Stringer,” a last-minute selection, is having its world premiere at this year’s festival.
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Nguyen’s documentary follows the investigation into finding a man only known as “the stringer,” who was responsible for the indelible photograph of a Vietnamese girl running down a road on fire taken during the Vietnam War. In the film, as the journalists relentlessly work to track down the man, a decade’s worth of secrets and injustice carried out in foreign reporting are unraveled to ultimately give the photographer his rightful recognition.
“A someone who grew up hearing about the war from my parents I felt a responsibility and a privilege to be able to share this story to the world,” says Nguyen. “The story of a person who was discounted, whose narrative hadn’t been amplified.” Five decades since the end of the Vietnam War, Nguyen shares that through independent filmmaking storytellers like him are able to “claim our space to tell stories from a unique perspective — like this one that hasn’t been known by the public for 50 years.”
Similar to Nguyen, filmmaker Jesse Short Bull, from the Oglala Lakota Tribe in South Dakota, felt a personal connection to tell the story of Native American activist Leonard Peltier when his co-director David France brought the idea to him. “I realized that the 50th anniversary of Leonard’s imprisonment was coming up and I felt it was time to revisit this unfinished chapter of American history surrounding it — filling in the gaps around the less commonly known crimes of the FBI at that time against the Red Power Movement, and accounting for it,” says France.
In “Free Leonard Peltier” the filmmakers dig into the event — a 1975 shootout on Pine Ridge Indian reservation that killed two FBI agents in a crossfire — leading to Peltier’s conviction and the decades of dispute, injustice and mystery surrounding it.
“We wanted to confront this story as told by the people who witnessed it, and not tell it from the outside. We also wanted to answer why what happened when did, why the FBI came — and as we find out, it was to capture parts of the native land for uranium — two words I had never heard together before making this film: my homeland and uranium,“ says Short Bull, who grew up just miles away from the scene of the violence.
Ahead of the film’s premiere and to the surprise of the filmmakers and a new generation of native activists who have propelled the campaign for Peltier’s release, the activist was finally granted clemency by President Biden. “It is a powerful moment,”’” shares Short Bull, “and ‘Free Leonard Peltier’ has been our rallying cry in telling his story from the start.”
Keeping with the theme of uncovering BIPOC contributions and telling their stories from a new lens, documentaries “Move Ya Body: The Birth of House,” from director Elegance Bratton, and “Selena y Los Dinos,” from director Isabel Castro, offer an intimate insight into life of icons in House and Tejano music, respectively.
In “Selena y Los Dinos,” Castro’s unique access to the family archives of Selena Quintanilla, “the Queen of Tejano music,” allows the filmmaker to portray the singer’s story from a personal perspective. “My goal in directing this film was to make time to get to know Selena as a person — as a daughter, a sister, a girlfriend, a bandmate,” says Castro.
In 1995, Quintanilla was murdered by the president of her fan club. But Castro “didn’t want to fixate on the tragedy of her murder,” the filmmaker says. As a Mexican-American who grew up with Selena’s influence beyond her music, Castro says she “didn’t want the tragic fact to overshadow the beauty of Selena’s career, her family’s music and her legacy. That is the value of people of color like us telling stories of our own communities, of our culture — it imbues films with a different sense of meaning.”
As a queer, Black director, Bratton echoes Castro’s sentiments, unpacking the sweeping racial and cultural history behind the founding of House music in “Move Ya Body,” which follows the experience of Vince Lawrence in 1970s Chicago as a Black kid dreaming to be a dance musician. Lawrence produced the first House song with a few of his friends and hustled to get it heard.
“My mission in this film was to show how Vince did an incredible thing. He was my throughline because there have been other films made on this topic in recent years and he’s been in them, but nobody really knew what he did it; wasn’t told from this point of view and now I have a movie where he’s the center of it and through his life we understand everybody’s contribution,” says Bratton.
“Films about the legacy of people of color and their contributions to society are a roadmap for future generations,” asserts Bratton, adding, “historically, POCs have been blocked from having real political power in the Western hemisphere so our art, our sports, our intellect, our food, these become the ways that we get to understand that we have agency in this world. And this film is that as well.”
In their film “How to Build a Library,” husband-and-wife filmmaking duo Chris King and Maia Lekow also try to capture the story of a marginalized community confronting its history, but one that’s not that all that well-represented in film: “A creative and entrepreneurial Nairobi,” says King. In their documentary the two leading women — Shiro and Wachuka, working to revive a set of local libraries with a strong colonial heritage — represent that new Kenya.
“A lot of people in this country still are dwelling in the past of what had happened here,” says Lekow, “But I think the question now is how can we kind of take this future in our own hands and be able to create something with what we have and as a Kenyan woman myself it was inspiring to see these two women take charge and do that, and leave that new legacy.”
In line with taking control of one’s legacy, with “Third Act,” Japanese-American director Tad Nakamura, allows his father, filmmaker Robert A. Nakamura, “to tell his own story” as he documents the “father of Asian American media” in the final stages of his life battling Parkinson’s disease. The documentary is a heart-rending and candid documentary about identity, family and building community through art.
“Anyone else could make a biopic on my dad’s history and accomplishments. But I think I realized at a certain point that only I can make this specific film. I really leaned into that,” says Nakamura.
In deeply honest conversations with his dad, Nakamura is able to show that even revered cultural icons have struggled with internalized racism and shame. But Nakamura is a sincere believer in the power of films to counteract the lack of showing this nuanced truth and coming to terms with the dark history faced by such communities.
“My dad has always taught me it’s the most important to tell our stories for ourselves from within the community. Because I think by sharing our stories, we’re able to connect the dots with other communities, our own history and so feel more connected,” he says. “That’s why platforms like Sundance for independent film are so vital. So that hopefully this connection helps us fight injustice but also help us heal from what we’ve gone through.”
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