Sundance doc looks at man behind the modern bulletproof vest

All here! Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard’s two daughters sleep in the same room as their parents.

Directed by Paula Eislet and Tonya Lewis Lee (Spike Lee’s producer and partner), the documentary “Aftershock” chronicles the dismal maternal mortality rate that women of color face in the United States medical system. The statistics are shameful, pointing to a systemic racist indifference, and the documentary chronicles the staggering number of times that expectant mothers entering into hospitals simply do not come out alive due to a lack of care and sensitivity.

TikTok is an undeniable force in our society. It has the power to launch music careers, house the homeless, and unite people worldwide.

Julia Child knew her way around a sauce the way Leonard Bernstein knew his way around a sympathy, the way Patrick Mahomes knows his way through a defense. That is to say, with panache.

Production company MUBI has acquired Julie Ha and Eugene Yi’s documentary “Free Chol Soo Lee” that premiered last week at Sundance, the company said in a release.The film has been acquired for North America, UK, Ireland, Latin America, German, Austria, Italy and Turkey and will release theatrically in 2022 in the U.S., with plans for other regions coming later.The documentary is about a movement in the 1970s in San Francisco, where a 20-year-old Korean immigrant Chol Soo Lee gets racially profiled and convicted of a Chinatown gang murder. Lee is sentenced to life and fights to survive until a journalist takes up his case and ignites a social justice movement in the Asian American community.

Wyatte Grantham-Philips editor“Free Chol Soo Lee” has been acquired by global distributor, streamer and production company MUBI.The documentary, which premiered last week at the Sundance Film Festival, will come to U.S. theaters in 2022, with release plans in other territories (Latin America, Ireland, Germany, Austria, Italy, Turkey, the U.K.

Angelique Jackson Netflix has acquired worldwide rights to the Sundance award-winning documentary “Descendant,” by filmmaker Margaret Brown (“The Order of Myths,” “Be Here to Love Me: Townes Van Zandt,” “The Great Invisible”). Higher Ground, President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama’s production company, will present the Participant feature alongside Netflix later this year.The film follows members of Africatown, a small community in Alabama, as they share their personal stories and community history as descendants of the Clotilda, the last known ship carrying enslaved Africans to the United States.

including here at TheWrap), but has drawn fire on social media for the fact that the film calls the men “terrorists,” and because the filmmaker herself is not Muslim. One typical tweet by writer Jude Chehab of Turkish news website TRT World says: “When I, a practising Muslim woman say [the film’] is problematic, my voice should be stronger than a white woman saying it’s not.”Smaker, who spent five years making the film, told TheWrap that the movie challenges assumptions about people Americans regard as terrorists, while also offering a never-before-seen perspective into the men who embraced the ideology of groups like al Qaeda.

In one of Syrian-born artist Mohamad Hafez’s stunning 3D pieces, a figurine of the Virgin Mary stands before an ornate portal, her hands joined in prayer. The building around her, rendered in plaster, paint, rusted metal and found objects, is blasted to ruins.

poisoned Russian dissident Alexei Navalny premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on Tuesday. Called “Navalny,” it’s a no-holds-barred indictment of Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin, and insists that Navalny’s close brush with death was the result of a secret state-run operation to assassinate him.“As I became more and more famous guy, I was totally sure that my life became safer and safer because I am kind of famous guy — and it will be problematic for them just to kill me,” Navalny, 45, says in the film. “I was very wrong.” The doc, heading to HBO Max, was added at the last minute to the Sundance slate just as Putin had stationed more than 100,000 troops along the Ukrainian border.

At first glance, actor-writer-director Cooper Raiff’s “Cha Cha Real Smooth” might look like your typical cutesy and whimsical Sundance dramedy, about a twenty-something college graduate learning a valuable life lesson and experiencing a bit of a delayed coming of age. While that’s not an inaccurate description of Raiff’s disarmingly lovely film (programmed in this year’s US Dramatic Competition), what feels miraculous about “Cha Cha” is: it doesn’t come with even an ounce of that cringe-inducing Sundance fancifulness, a brand that many love to hate.

The 2022 Sundance Film Festival obviously has so much to offer. Big premieres from indie auteurs, world cinema, documentaries, films for kids, and movies that are receiving so much acclaim right now, you’ll be hearing more from them later in the year upon regular theatrical release.

Lisa Kennedy Every now and again, a documentary filmmaker finds a bona fide star to pin the meaning of her film on, a figure so compelling she leaves a comet trail of thoughts and feelings after the movie’s end. Isabel Castro’s “Mija” boasts two: music manager Doris Muñoz and singer Jacks Haupt. Make that three, including the writer-director herself.

Addie Morfoot ContributorThis year at the Sundance Film Festival, three feature documentaries — Paula Eiselt and Tonya Lewis Lee’s “Aftershock,” Reid Davenport’s “I Didn’t See You There” and Isabel Castro’s “Mija” — share in common a $10,000 grant provided by the Points North Institute and CNN Films’ American Stories Documentary Fund.Launched in 2020, the fund underwritten by CNN has dispensed a total of $100,000 in grants to emerging U.S. filmmakers working on 10 documentary projects that highlight pivotal moments in America. Eiselt and Lewis Lee’s “Aftershock,” and Davenport’s “I Didn’t See You There” are two of nine films in the Sundance U.S.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film CriticHe’s a cha cha real smooth talker. He’s 22, tall and handsome with a beard, but not a scruffy hipster beard — more like a post-millennial, post-ironic traditional beard, which sets off features that are finely chiseled in a Middle American corporate way. (When he grins, he looks like Donny Osmond.) He’s just out of college but has no idea what he wants to do.

American tourists spooked out by what they see on their visit to a European country will always be a valid premise for a film. The same goes for movies concerned with voyeurism, whether our protagonist is the one watching or the one being watched — though they usually are both, as is the case in Chloe Okuno’s “Watcher.” Playing in the U.S.