Top 10 Anti-establishment Sundance Films
The very idea of independent cinema is anti-establishment. Making a film free of Hollywood’s influence, and without the benefit of its financial resources, can be a truly revolutionary act. But some indie films go farther than the rest to critique, satirize, or outright demolish the status quo. These ten movies brought counterculture to the masses.
10. CHICAGO 10 (2007)
The true story of a bunch of iconoclastic activists and their 1969 trial over the protests they staged during the 1968 Democratic National Convention became an iconoclastic documentary by filmmaker Bret Morgen, which blended archival footage with animated dramatizations of the original court transcripts.
9. FRAT HOUSE (1998)
This infamous documentary uncovered the sleazy practices in one of the cornerstones of the American establishment: the college fraternity. Filmmakers Andrew Gurland and Todd Phillips chronicled the sadistic rituals at several university frat houses -- though this Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner never aired as intended on HBO after Gurland and Phillips drew accusations of their own sleazy practices, like paying their subjects to reenact hazing scenes in order to give their film salacious footage.
Author: Matt Singer
8. THE RED CHAPEL (2010)
A filmmaker and two comedians from Denmark head to North Korea, allegedly in the interest of a performance and a cultural exchange program. In fact, the whole tour is an ingenious ruse to sneak a camera north of the MDL and document life under one of the most restrictive and secretive regimes on the planet. North Korean officials may not have appreciated the joke, but the 2010 World Cinema Jury awarded director Mads Brügger a prize for his mad courage.
Author: Matt Singer
7. AMERICAN DREAM (1991)
Returning to the subject of the American labor movement more than a decade after her landmark documentary HARLAN COUNTY, U.S.A., Barbara Kopple turned her camera on a meatpackers strike against the Hormel Foods Corporation. There are layers of "the establishment" here -- not only the ownership of the company, but also the national leadership of the union, who did not support the strike.
Author: Matt Singer6. AMERICAN PSYCHO (2000)
While Christian Bale's Patrick Bateman chopped his way through his co-workers and assorted prostitutes, director Mary Harron sliced her way through this brilliant satire of 1980s consumer culture based on the novel of the same name by Bret Easton Ellis. It has never been hipper to be square.
Author: Matt Singer5. CRUDE (2009)
Director Joe Berlinger took on Big Oil in this documentary about a $27 billion lawsuit brought by 30,000 Ecuadorians against Chevron for the environmental problems they claimed were caused by the company's Lago Agrio oil field. teBerlinger's anti-establishment tale eventually put him in the position to take on the establishment himself, as Chevron later tried to force him to hand over all 600 hours of his raw footage.
Author: Matt Singer
4. THE COVE (2009)
The 2009 Audience Award winner for Best Documentary and eventual Best Documentary winner at the 82nd Annual Academy Awards is credited with raising awareness of the practice of dolphin hunting in Japan. Director Louie Psihoyos and his crew fought with the local authorities to expose this brutal tradition to the world -- and continued to fight with the local authorities for several years in order to screen the film for Japanese audiences.
Author: Matt Singer
3. THE TIMES OF HARVEY MILK (1984, shown in 1985)
One of the first great films in the history of Sundance was this inspiring and devastating portrait of the late Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man elected to substantial public office. Director Rob Epstein's documentary about Milk showed how an outsider can be an agent of change within the system without sacrificing the ideals that got them there.
Author: Matt Singer2. THE CORPORATION (2004)
This provocative documentary charts the development of the modern corporate entity and proposes the theory that if corporations were people, their behavior would get them classified as psychopaths. As you might imagine, the business world was not particularly crazy about the film. Sundance audiences were significantly more favorable -- they gave it a World Cinema Audience Award for Documentaries.
Author: Matt Singer1. NO END IN SIGHT (2007)
With the War in Iraq still raging -- years after President George W. Bush declared "Mission Accomplished" -- director Charles Ferguson revealed the systemic poor planning (or total lack of planning) that characterized the United States' occupation. Ferguson's film, which won a Special Jury Prize at the festival, made its argument against the Bush Administration foreign policy with stunning clarity and, in some small way, brought us a little bit closer to seeing that still-unseeable end.
Author: Matt Singer
