From ‘Joybubbles’ To High-Altitude Adventures, Doc Talk Previews Sundance Nonfiction Lineup With Programmers Basil Tsiokos & Sudeep Sharma

The Sundance Film Festival kicks off Thursday with a big slate of fiction and nonfiction programming. On the doc side, the festival will host the world premieres of two thrilling documentaries set in Pakistan: The Last First: Winter K2, directed by Amir Bar-Lev, and Hanging By a Wire, directed by Mohammed Ali Naqvi.
The latter film explores the dramatic effort to save a group of schoolkids stranded in a cable car in a remote area of Northern Pakistan after a high-tension wire snapped, leaving them dangling almost a thousand feet above a valley.

Bar-Lev’s documentary explores a disaster at an even higher elevation – 28,000 feet – where competing groups of mountaineers tried to reach the summit of the world’s second tallest mountain, Pakistan’s K2, in wintertime. Not everyone got off the mountain alive.

Thursday’s opening day of Sundance will see the premieres of several more documentaries, among them Utah-set The Lake (about the threat posed by a vanishing Great Salt Lake), Everybody to Kenmure Street, The History of Concrete, The Disciple, Paralyzed by Hope: The Maria Bamford Story and American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez.

On the new edition of Deadline’s Doc Talk podcast, we speak with Sundance documentary programmers Basil Tsiokos and Sudeep Sharma about the nonfiction lineup. They’ll tell us what films to look out for in competition and other sections, including NEXT and Premieres. Joybubbles is one that catches their fancy, a documentary with one of the most intriguing loglines of any film in the festival (it relates to a man who hacked into the telephone system by whistling).

Tsiokos and Sharma also highlight an AI-themed film in the NEXT section, and they reveal the beloved Sundance alums who are returning to the festival to serve as jurors for that competition. The programmers also share their emotions as Sundance prepares for its swan song in Park City, UT before the festival’s move next year to Boulder, CO.

That’s on the new episode of Doc Talk hosted by Oscar winner John Ridley (12 Years a Slave, Shirley) and Matt Carey, Deadline’s senior documentary editor. The pod is a production of Deadline and Ridley’s Nō Studios.

Listen to the episode above or on major podcast platforms including Spotify, iHeart and Apple.