Against a backdrop of warped and befuddling federal action, devoting time to devouring as many Sundance films as possible has felt both indulgent and necessary. While Trump stocks his Cabinet with a spicy array of sexual predators, his administration takes aim at vulnerable populations. As they vow to erase the existence of transgender people, the legacy of Dobbs has left access to abortion and assisted reproduction in legal entropy across the land, with the leader of the Free World going to revolting lengths to rescind what scant freedoms seem to be left.
Films won’t fix any of this. What they can do is plumb the rocky depths of power to illuminate how our American tidal wave is of a piece with global currents. Five documentaries debuting at Sundance 2025 — three American, one Chinese, and one Italian — take a clear-eyed look at the subtle imbrications of gender, sex, and the law. Whether it’s catfishing clueless rich guys, catching sex predators on YouTube, or assisting a 50-year-old woman in conceiving a child, questions of legality often have little to do with morality, which in so many cases are battleship gray.
Sam Feder’s Heightened Scrutiny explores the dangerous rise in transphobic policy over the past four years. Following ACLU attorney Chase Strangio — the first openly transgender lawyer to argue a case in the Supreme Court — the film paints an endearing portrait of a young civil rights leader up against an increasingly hostile legal system. In the case of United States vs. Skrmetti, Strangio takes on Tennessee Senate Bill 1, which prohibits all gender-affirming medical treatments for minors. And yet anti-trans legislation is also in his “own backyard,” as the New York Public School system has recently passed anti-trans policies. In one of the film’s most moving scenes, a trans girl named Mila calls out the school board for staring at their phones when trans people speak out at a town hall. “I learned respect in kindergarten!” she says, standing up in front of the crowd, “You need to show respect.”
Crucially, Heightened Scrutiny exposes the extent to which mainstream media is responsible for perpetuating not only transphobic attitudes but vehemently anti-trans state and national legislation. Whether it be numerous op-eds in the New York Times or cover stories for The Atlantic, “the narrative production of trans life is being used to criminalize trans life,” says Strangio, adding “The coverage is creating the law, plain and simple.”
Across the pond, Gianluca Matarrese’s GEN_ reflects the ways in which trans rights can coalesce with access to fertility treatment and assisted reproductive technologies (ART). Reminiscent of Claire Simon’s 2023 Our Body, GEN_ is set in Milan’s Niguarda public hospital, one of the few in Italy to offer both gender-affirming treatment and in-vitro-fertilization. Comprised of interactions between the hospital’s anxious, often desperate, patients and its leading physician, Dr. Maurizio Bini, the film celebrates the humanity behind hormonal interventions. “Doctors are not proceduralists,” he explains to one couple seeking to conceive. “They sometimes have to make the decision between doing what is right and what is legal.”
Everyone from a leather-clad maschio with a low sperm count to a transmasc plumber in an Adidas jacket to a middle-aged woman who’s suffered three miscarriages seeks Bini’s assistance, but even more, his compassion. In one of the most moving, and unusual, scenes, a professional violist plays Mozart in the hospital corridor as embryos are implanting because Dr. Bini believes it could help them to “stick.” On his morning drive to work, he listens to right-wing pundits rail against fertility assistance as an affront to God, and a system in which children are “bought on the counter like groceries,” reminding us that the rise of conservatism is hardly specific to the United States. Yet regardless of religious identification, his patients pour in — many from remote, working-class communities.
Class is central to Rachel Fleit’s Sugar Babies, an uneven but poignant depiction of young women battling small-town poverty in Ruston, Louisiana. Billed as a glimpse into the rollicking world of TikTok “sugar babies” who flirt with, and sometimes scam, men they never meet in real life, the film is also an indictment of the economic conditions that would make this line of work seductive in the first place; the state has the lowest federally permitted minimum wage, at $7.25. Fleit follows plucky entrepreneur Autumn Johnson over four years of strutting her stuff online as a way to pay off her college tuition. Whether applying her own acrylic nails or choosing a selfie to send a stranger, Autumn is a master of both visual and textual rhetoric — starting her own “Sugar Babies” forum to teach other, mostly financially strapped, women how to make a quick buck. For the most part, Fleit avoids the trappings of both poverty porn and condescension; by the end of the film, Autumn and her crew feel like full-fledged characters who find solace in the unbreakable bonds of kinship.
If the men who appear in Sugar Babies toe the line between paternalism and predation, those at the center of Violet Du Feng’s The Dating Game are utterly hapless to the norms of courtship. Set in Chongqing, China,the documentary follows three bachelors who’ve traveled to the megacity for a seven-day “dating camp,” one of many measures addressing the fact that the country’s population comprises 30 million more men than women. Not unlike Autumn teaching women how to snare the attention of wealthy men, Coach Hao counsels the men on everything from their outfits and hairstyles to the art of texting on dating apps. Hao’s frank approach to improving the men’s chances to get a girlfriend is often hilarious; “just be your tattered self,” he retorts when an acolyte resists posting a hyper-posed photo to his profile. In the Q&A following the film, Du Feng emphasized that her goal was to laugh with the men, rather than at them, and the doc’s ability to do this was nothing short of marvelous. The men’s backstories of poverty, loneliness, and abandonment are as grueling as their desire for a companion is bracingly sincere — and their set of circumstances are highly specific to China’s economy and national policy. The draconian One Child policy harmed not only women and girls, but the boys and men who struggle in their absence.
In terms of empathy, David Osit’s Predators puts the viewer in an uncomfortable position — and that’s part of the point. Investigating the production of NBC’s To Catch a Predator, a reality show that trapped and exposed online sex offenders from 2004 to 2007, the film uncovers what wasn’t included in the hit show: men tearfully begging for therapy, 18-year-old “decoys” subjected to very real psychological and physical threat, a man shooting himself in his home to avoid being caught on camera. “Why was this show so popular?” Osit asks, counting himself as one of the millions who watched it regularly. But even more importantly, has this show — and the many copycat vigilante operations it spawned online — done anything to improve conditions for survivors of sexual abuse? While never exculpating the perpetrators, Osit insists on their rights as human beings, and brings our national obsession with the “true crime” genre into scrutiny, reflexively revealing his own complicity as both viewer and filmmaker.
What all of these documentaries share is a respect for their subject matter, as well as their viewers’ ability to glean multiple messages, not just one didactic conclusion, in an age when critical thought seems in short supply.
