Do you see a soccer star or a scientist in this black Brazilian boy? Courtesy of Sundance Film Festival

Marte Um never screams about racism or the daily indignities black workers endure. It instead simmers at what feels like a warm temperature that, though rising from scene to scene in its fourth final act, never erupts into a flame that, like Spike Lee's Do Right Thing, predictably lights the dynamite of revolution. Marte Um's director makes it clear on two occasions that revolutionary inspiration, which has been co-opted by TV pranksters and amateur rappers, might be as harmful to black workers as the power wielded by the obviously racist president.

I wanna go to their show. Courtesy of Sundance Institute

At first glance, I expected Rita Baghdadi's Sirens, which premiered at Sundance Film Festival this week, to be a conventional documentary about a darkhorse band with big hopes of making it big. As the only all-female metal band in Lebanon, Beirut-based Slave to Sirens is certainly an underdog if there ever was one. However, from the jump, the intimate and irresistible Sirens subverted my expectations of what a music documentary could be.

For starters, its first big set piece follows Slave to Sirens as they travel to the United Kingdom to play a stage at the famed Glastonbury Festival. By any measure, that opportunity is a pretty huge deal. Sure, they mostly play to dead grass with only a couple dozen people wandering over to lightly headbang to the band's brash music. It's a major moment that other documentaries might have built up to, but it's not what Baghdadi is interested in.

The bulk of the film explores the dynamic between two members of the band: Shery and Lilas, Slave to Sirens' guitarists. Quiet, observant Shery has lip piercings and long straight hair that falls in her face when she shreds the shit out of her v-shaped guitar. Passionate Lilas, on the other hand, is prone to mood swings, stomping off to her tent thinking their Glastonbury performance went poorly. Musically, both guitarists flow with one another, but their relationship as bandmates starts to fray as they secretly reel from a romantic breakup the rest of the band doesn't know about. Drama mama!

A very stressful ride. Courtesy Sundance

An expansion on director Carey Williams' 2018 short film of the same name, Williams has created a work that walks a very fine line between darkness and levity. It's a chaotic but straightforward experience disguised as a college buddy comedy, about three friends trying to do the right thing. It's not for everyone, but I think its ambition makes it still worth seeing.

The film centers on friends Kunle (Donald Elise Watkins) and Sean (RJ Cyler), who plan to have a wild night out by hitting all the Spring Break parties happening on campus at their school. They want to let loose after a long day—a day that included a professor saying the N-word multiple times, who then singled them out as the sole Black students in their class to see if they wanted to weigh in. This experience is the first of many calling attention to the faux progressiveness that Kunle and Sean encounter every day.

You can guarantee they are prayin' on it. Courtesy of Sundance

Adamma and Adanne Ebo’s Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul. is a riotous skewering of Southern megachurch culture in all its excesses, exploitations, and contradictions. Shot in a Guestian mockumentary style, the film switches between hilarious vignettes and high-emotion scenes, and at its center is a banner performance from Sundance all-star Regina Hall, who believably hits the movie’s odd beats to make it one of the best of the fest.

Hall embodies Trinitie Childs, the flustered first lady of Georgia's "Wander to Greater Pathways" megachurch. She wants to get her life back on track after a scandal causes a mass exodus of congregants, forcing the church to close down temporarily. See, word got out that young men accused her God-fearin’ self-involved pastor-husband Lee-Curtis (a pitch-perfect Sterling K. Brown) of sexual misconduct. And in an ill-advised attempt to stage their comeback, the cursed couple invites a documentary crew to follow them as they prepare for the church's first Sunday back.

Predictably, things go south.