Sundance 2025: The Cameras and Lenses Behind 26 Documentaries

Every year, IndieWire reaches out to the cinematographers behind the documentary films premiering at the Sundance Film Festival and asks them which cameras, lenses, and formats they used — and what creative decisions informed those choices. A documentary may need to have a low footprint or be nimble in a dozen different ways, with myriad budgetary and logistical constraints. The choices made by these directors and directors of photography are as fascinating for what the challenges trying to solve as the worlds they create.

The 2025 documentarians who responded to our survey have gone everywhere and done everything under the sun, from dog-sledding in the far north — in “Folktales” — to letting the camera behave like an extra puppy in an intimate portrait of a household, as in “Come See Me in the Good Light.” They surmount technical challenges, with the camera team behind “Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore” creating multi-camera set-ups and deploying remote monitors, audio transmission, and interpretation that made the whole American Sign language as much weight as any other, spoken language and “2000 Meters to Andriivka” integrating a variety of different camera types in order to capture both on-the-ground chaos and a bird’s-eye view of an active modern battlefield.

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Each one of the 26 respondents who brought documentary features to Sundance in 2025 has their own fascinating set of constraints they overcame to visually immerse us in the stories they’re telling. You can also check out our cinematography survey of 2025 Sundance narrative features.

Films appear in alphabetical order by title.

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