Why Sundance is still the best launchpad for Oscar-bound documentaries

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As the Sundance Film Festival winds down its final edition in Park City, Utah, this week, ahead of its move to Boulder, Colo., next year, its sway over the nonfiction field at the Oscars remains as steady as ever.All five current Academy Award nominees for documentary feature premiered at last year’s festival, with Sundance films winning the category six times over the last decade.“Sundance has been a kick-starter for my entire career,” says Ryan White, director of “Come See Me in the Good Light,” his fourth film to premiere at the festival.

The intimate portrait of Colorado poet laureate Andrea Gibson, who faces a terminal diagnosis with a spirit of resilience, needed the boost.“The lead words are poetry and cancer, and it’s a character-driven film about a non-binary person,” White says.

“It wasn’t the easiest film to get off the ground.” A similar challenge could apply to other nominees, including “Mr.Nobody vs.

Putin” and “Cutting Through Rocks,” which focus on everyday individuals taking on oppressive systems in Russia and Iran, respectively.“There are the types of films that can get lost because they’re not about a celebrity, and they don’t have these marquee descriptors.

Sundance does such an amazing job of discovering these diamonds.”The exposure at the start of the film festival season “gives you that one-year runway that allows you to play festivals all year long,” says White, who was back at Sundance to celebrate the end of an era.He also knows the pain of not making the cut.

“My first two films didn’t get into Sundance, and then my third one did.I’m always telling young filmmakers to use the Sundance rejection as fuel.”A festival berth was strong motivation for “Mr.

Nobody” filmmaker David Borenstein, who collaborated with his subject, a schoolteacher near the Ural Mountains named Pavel (“Pasha”) Talankin, ...