Festival Spotlight events feature exclusive conversations with the creators behind work that screened at the Sundance Film Festival, designed to share advice and insights on the creative process. You do not need to have seen the work to participate.


Join Sundance Collab and some of the artists whose films premiered in the 2025 Sundance Film Festival’s World Cinema Documentary Competition category for a discussion around the art and craft of nonfiction filmmaking.


The World Cinema Documentary Competition category showcases nonfiction feature films from emerging talent around the world. The 10 films in this category in 2025 highlighted some of the most courageous and extraordinary filmmaking today.


Panelists included directors Violet Du Feng (The Dating Game), Maia Lekow and Christopher King (How To Build A Library), and Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni (Cutting Through Rocks). All three films received support from the Sundance Institute during their production.

Sara Khaki
Sara Khaki is a documentary director, producer, and editor dedicated to telling stories that promote gender equity. She is a Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Award winner, World Cinema Documentary and Visions Du Reél Audience Award winner for her feature documentary CUTTING THROUGH ROCKS, which follows the first elected councilwoman of a rural Iranian village. The film has been called “a deftly shaped work of cinematic nonfiction” by Indiewire and “one of those profound vérité documentaries that are only possible through the patience and perseverance of the filmmakers” by POV Magazine. more...
Mohammadreza Eyni
Mohammadreza Eyni is a director and producer whose career and cinematic approach aims to bridge boundaries, elevate underrepresented voices, and connect diverse perspectives globally. He is a 2025 Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Award winner in the World Documentary competition for his feature documentary CUTTING THROUGH ROCKS, which has become an audience favorite at Sydney, Hot Docs, Visions Du Reél international film festivals, among others. His cinematic approach has been heralded as “uniquely propulsive,” “practically magical” (Variety) and “precisely lensed” (Indiewire) as well as “delivering simple moments into cinematic poetry” (Hammer to Nail.) He was named as one of the top five cinematographers to watch at Sundance in 2025. more...
Christopher King
Christopher King is an award-winning filmmaker originally from Melbourne, Australia, who has lived and worked in Nairobi, Kenya, since 2007. Co-directing with wife Maia Lekow, their first feature, The Letter, was Kenya‘s official submission to the 93rd Academy Awards in 2021. more...
Maia Lekow
Maia Lekow is a renowned Kenyan musician and filmmaker. Currently performing internationally with her band Maia & the Big Sky, Lekow fuses her music with a fascination of people and culture to make films as a documentary director, producer, composer, and sound recordist. more...
Soheil Rezayazdi
Moderator | Digital Course & Event Producer
Soheil Rezayazdi is a Digital Course & Event Producer at the Sundance Institute, where he produces multi-session courses, master classes, filmmaker Q&As, and other digital programs for Sundance Collab. Prior to Sundance, Soheil served as the Nonfiction Programs Manager at the Gotham Film & Media Institute. He oversaw the Gotham’s core documentary programs: the Documentary Feature Lab, the Spotlight on Documentaries project market, and the Documentary Development Initiative in partnership with HBO Documentary Films. Soheil has worked with emerging filmmakers since 2015, when he began a seven-year tenure at the Columbia University MFA Film Program. At Columbia he managed the Columbia University Film Festival (CUFF), the Dr. Saul and Dorothy Kit Film Noir Festival, and the Carla Kuhn Memorial Speaker Series. more...

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