‘Ibelin’ Review: A Shattering Documentary About a Gamer’s Secret Life

Unlike other film festivals around the globe, Sundance has been ahead of the curve when it comes to telling LGBTQIA+ stories whether in narrative or documentary form. That was once again evident in 2024 with the festival selecting films such as “Layla,” “Sebastian,” “My Old Ass,” “Stress Positions” and “Ponyboi.” One NEXT slate selection that attempted to cross the lines of both documentary and drama is Jules Rosskam’s “Desire Lines.” Sadly, like many world premieres in its genre this year, it comes up disappointingly short.

Guy Lodge Film Critic In “Porcelain War,” a resilient Ukrainian couple divide their time between two seemingly antithetical pursuits: When enterprising Slava Leontyev isn’t training fellow civilian soldiers in the ongoing fight against Russia’s invasion, he and his partner Anya Stasenko are skilled ceramic artists, casting and painting dainty porcelain figurines inspired by local nature and folklore. If the title already suggests something pointed in that disparity, this emotive debut by Leontyev and American co-director Brendan Bellomo leaves nothing to chance in ensuring we get it: Porcelain, we are told, is “fragile but everlasting, and can be restored after hundreds of years.” Lest the point still be lost on us, the couple’s combined voiceover later offers a blunter paraphrase: “Ukraine is like porcelain — easy to break, but impossible to destroy.” The metaphor is clear enough, then; whether it’s quite complex enough to sustain a feature-length documentary is another question.

Filmmakers Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie deliver a multilayered film that invites audiences to confront questions about morality and justice, and to bear witness to the lasting intergenerational trauma of the Williams Lake First Nations (Secwepemc or Shuswap Nation) people from the residential school system which included forced family separation, physical and sexual abuse, and the destruction of First Nation culture and language. Drawing on their backgrounds in activism and journalism — as well as NoiseCat’s own personal connection to the story and community — the filmmakers deftly weave together multiple strands to form this compelling, heartbreaking narrative. 

built an empire around entertaining.“She is opening up about everything – nothing is off limits,” an unnamed source told NewsNation’s Paula Froelich.The project, already in the works for two years, will take a revealing look at the Instagram thirst trap queen’s personal life — her marriage to Andy Stewart, her relationship with her daughter Alexis and an infamous five-month stint in the federal pen for fraud. “She is sharing home videos, photos and is very involved,” Froelich told NewsNation’s “Morning In America” weekend host, Hena Doba.Emmy-winning journalist Alina Cho is producing the biopic.

Since helming the Academy Award-nominated “Winter’s Bone” in 2010, Debra Granik has enjoyed shifting between a further dabble into feature-length filmmaking (“Leave No Trace”) in addition to documentary work (“Stray Dog”), which, when coupled with her eclectic decades-strong filmography clearly showcases an overabundance of ability and flair for skillfully adapting to any subject that comes her way. Another comfortable entry on her resume exists in “Conbody VS Everybody, “a six-part docu-series with a concept unlike anything she’s tackled prior while continuing to demonstrate her knack for creating something compelling while also supremely relevant to this day and age.

It might come as a surprise to most that the skirmish between Russia and Ukraine has been active for nearly a decade. However, international headlines would raise awareness to new heights upon Russia’s invasion of its neighbor in February of 2022.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief The Europe-based International Coalition for Filmmakers at Risk has called for the immediate release of Myanmar documentary maker Shin Daewe. One of Myanmar’s leading female filmmakers, Shin Daewe (“An Untitled Life,” “Take Me Home,” “A Bright Future”) was arrested in Yangon in October after she had gone to collect a drone. After three months on remand she was tried by a military tribunal, inside the Insein Prison and without legal representation. She was sentenced to life imprisonment for violating Myanmar’s anti-terrorism law by possessing a drone. Myanmar is ruled by a military junta that seized control in February 2021 from a civilian government that it had previously backed.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic I will never forget the first time I saw Devo. It was October 14, 1978, and my college roommates and I were watching “Saturday Night Live.” The band, which I had never heard of (I would guess that was true of 98 percent of the people watching the show), came on in their yellow jumpsuits, stiff and mechanical, swiveling like angry androids as they performed their brutalist robo version of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” When the song ended, one of the band members shot up his hand in what looked kind of like a Hitler salute.

A formally rigorous and free-associative dive into a decade’s worth of political fighting in the Congo, from roughly 1955 to 1965, Johan Grimonprez’s “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat” is a fascinating and sprawling historical overview. Eschewing the usual mix of contextual talking heads, the Belgian filmmaker and multimedia artist instead adopts its narrative approach from the jazz that flows freely throughout the film and helps frame the political struggles of the Congo.

EXCLUSIVE: A two-part Netflix documentary from Louis Theroux‘s production biz will tell the story of the victims of a prolific UK cyberstalker and how they ultimately helped bring him to justice.

Lisa Kennedy In “Daughters,” a group of men gathers in a sunny, brightly hued prison meeting room. Each man wears an orange jumpsuit and has signed on for a 10-week course about fatherhood with life coach Chad Morris in directors Natalie Rae and Angela Patton’s entrancing documentary, debuting at the Sundance Film Festival. The body language in the room is instructive, not least because it will change over time.

It’s safe to assume that, were one to simply look at the film’s runtime or consider the basic concept surrounding the documentary “Daughters,“ there’s presumably much more to this than a simple film about a Father-Daughter dance organized for one particular group of incarcerated men and their children, separated by prison walls and an ocean of distance both physically as much as emotionally. Such dance events are commonplace; normally held annually as a way for fathers to bond with their young girls within a setting not unlike a homecoming dance or prom, most could be seen as little more than an excuse for a large group of children to burn off energy as they dash around a gymnasium to any number of DJ-provided pop hits, but there are equal parts undeniable connections made throughout the course of the evening as well as a memory both will, in all likelihood, forever cherish.

Clayton Davis Senior Awards Editor Variety Awards Circuit section is the home for all awards news and related content throughout the year, featuring the following: the official predictions for the upcoming Oscars, Emmys, Grammys and Tony Awards ceremonies, curated by Variety senior awards editor Clayton Davis. The prediction pages reflect the current standings in the race and do not reflect personal preferences for any individual contender.

Jodie Foster’s Clarice Starling once told Dr. Hannibal Lecter in the iconic film, The Silence of the Lambs, “Why don’t you look at yourself and write down what you see?”

Guy Lodge Film Critic The opening minutes of “A New Kind of Wilderness” promise some kind of documentary advertorial for off-the-grid living. Over idyllic shots of her hippy-hunky husband Nik and their three cherubic children camping, foraging for food and literally hugging trees in verdant Norwegian woodland, photographer Maria Vatne’s voiceover soothingly espouses the liberating virtues of “getting out of the rat race” and “being free and full of love.” It all looks wonderful, like “Swiss Family Robinson” updated for the era of Instagram cottagecore, and a cynic might say that it hardly seems sustainable.

Siddhant Adlakha By reputation, the Kingdom of Bhutan is the happiest country on Earth, but the “Agent of Happiness” seeks to explore that assertion. The documentary by Arun Bhattarai and Dorottya Zurbó follows the routine of 40-year-old Amber, one of 75 government workers hired to survey people’s happiness on a mathematical scale, and it details not only the lives of his interviewees, but also that of the agent himself.

Within minutes following the opening fade-in of “Gaucho Gaucho,” a trio of individuals can be seen dashing across a barren landscape, each sitting astride their own majestic-looking horse bathed in a sea of black and white with a South American backdrop beautifully framing the moment. It’s an appropriate setup to this documentary about gauchos, the colloquialism used to describe Argentinian cowboys and cowgirls, as the 84-minute runtime serves as little more than an exercise in striking photography mixed with a series of vignettes that’s as slice of life as one’s likely to find.

Rebecca Rubin Film and Media Reporter Netflix has acquired “Ibelin,” a documentary that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Benjamin Ree (“The Painter and the Thief”) directed the film, which centers on a Norwegian gamer named Mats Steen, who died of a degenerative muscle disease at the age of 25. According to the official logline, “his parents mourned what they thought had been a lonely and isolated life, when they started receiving messages from online friends around the world.” “Many of my favorite documentary films and series of all time have been distributed by Netflix,” Ree said in a statement.

Marta Balaga Norwegian documentary filmmaker Silje Evensmo Jacobsen wanted to follow a family living the dream. Instead, she witnessed them going through a nightmare. “Maria Vatne had this blog called ‘Wild+Free’ and I was fascinated by it.

HBO‘s anticipated documentary on Lil Nas X, titled Long Live Montero, has been released – watch it below.Released last night (January 18), the HBO trailer sees Lil Nas X – real name Montero Lamar Hill – at his most vulnerable and candid as he reflects on his career, and his struggles with coming out as a gay man to his family, as well as his rise to fame and more.“Some people think my music is dope. Some people see me as, like, this Satanic devil,” the rapper says to begin the trailer.