While experiencing the final Park City edition of the Sundance Film Festival, it felt almost fitting that there was little to no snow on the ground. For what had become a rite of passage for festival newcomers to underpack warm clothes, slip on black ice, and suffer the wintry consequences, the weather and terrain (while still in the sub-freezing temperatures) were a non-factor in comparison to years past. As the festival moves on from its home of 40+ years, so too do the decades of lessons learned about how to navigate Utah’s winters, which have slowly but surely looked different as a result of climate change.
With the lack of snow, environmental conditions were top of mind in the atmosphere and in the lineup of movies. As the effects of climate change burrow deeper into the consciousness of the general public, storytellers are increasingly tackling stories about our planet in both fiction and nonfiction.
The Buck Lab for Climate and Environment at Colby College and Good Energy, a nonprofit story consultancy for the age of climate change, released a report in 2024 detailing the results of a simple test that evaluates whether climate change is represented or omitted in any narrative. It asks two straightforward questions: Does climate change exist in the story? Does a character know about it?
It’s a Bechdel test for climate change in modern media. While the 2024 report states that only 9.6% of the 250 films passed the Climate Reality Check, it also acknowledges that climate change was present in twice as many films released during the second half of the decade examined (2018 to 2022) compared to the first half (2013 to 2017). This indicates that filmmakers are increasingly acknowledging and representing climate change and its related consequences, and are succeeding in doing so. Movies that answered yes to one of the two above questions were found to perform 8-10% better at the box office than those that failed the test.
I have often found that, alongside the results of this study, festivals that program emerging stories and filmmakers are more likely to engage with narratives that directly address environmental issues, or present them indirectly through the film’s backdrop and worldbuilding. At Sundance 2026, this was primarily evident in documentaries.
Here’s a look at the most prominent films of the festival that pass the Climate Reality Check.
Time and Water, dir. Sara Dosa
There are scales of space and time that are easy for the human mind to comprehend. The size of the bodies we occupy, the breadth of our family units, the length of our anticipated lifetimes. Some scales remain nearly unfathomable, so far beyond the scope of our limited perspective that we can’t even begin to grasp their weight. Geologic history, planetary evolution, and generations beyond our immediate family fall into this category. But there are ways to navigate and understand these scales. Similar to how archaeologists uncover fossils on Earth that reveal past species and civilizations, glaciologists study the preservation of history frozen in glaciers.
That idea forms the foundation of Sara Dosa’s Time and Water. The Oscar-nominated director of Fire of Love (2022) returns to the nonfiction stage with an archival meditation on Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason’s personal and professional efforts to reconcile these competing scales. Magnason’s extensive home-video archive is paired with sweeping images of his Icelandic homeland, merging the familial with the geologic. Through this union, Dosa offers audiences the means to process what the death of a glacier means to the planet by grounding it in a grief we recognize–the loss of a family member.
It’s a ravishing spiritual sequel to Fire of Love, with Dosa once again conflating human relationships and memories with the phenomena of the natural world. The way she slips in and out of personalized home video footage capturing his intergenerational memories and footage of contemporary Iceland is symphonic. As Magnason revisits the lives of his grandparents and their journeys onto the island’s glaciers, the film draws a stark comparison to how significant those same glaciers have melted and receded. In human terms, this transformation spans only a few generations. In geologic time, it represents catastrophic change occurring at a never-before-seen rate.
As we witness Magnason mourn the deaths of his grandparents, he is simultaneously tasked with writing a eulogy for the first death of a glacier. It’s ultimately delivered with such grace and urgency that it registers as deeply personal. You feel you have lost someone close to you, too.
Sara Dosa’s achievement is a rare articulation of the collision of time scales and emotional registers. Time and Water performs the remarkable feat of scaling down planetary warming, an abstraction often considered too vast for us to comprehend, and translates it through the emotional language of grief. If all the effects of climate change were processed in this way, we would have a far greater sense of urgency to develop a solution.
The Lake, dir. Abby Ellis
Where Time and Water taps into the intimacy of loss, grief, and personal connections to the Earth’s history, The Lake traverses the science and politics of environmental decay much closer to home for the local Utah crowd. No shortage of environmental documentaries outline scientific or ecological problems at hand, but far fewer examine the intersectionality of climate issues, as well as political, social, public awareness, and bureaucratic problems all at once.
The science of climate change (while acknowledging major advances in data modeling in recent years) has been publicly available for decades. The data is clear. It explicitly states that if we stopped burning fossil fuels tomorrow, stopped exploiting nonrenewable resources tomorrow, and cared for natural ecosystems such as lakes and forests, the planet would stop warming. What continues to delay action is not a lack of evidence but the failure to respond appropriately through corporate lobbying, political ideology, and institutional red tape, which has postponed action and accelerated our planet’s ecological disruption.
Abby Ellis’s direction grounds these principles in the specific crisis of the Great Salt Lake’s depletion. Employing a fly-on-the-wall style, she follows scientists Ben Abbott and Bonnie Baxter as they conduct their scientific and data inquiry into how dust is being swept up from the drying lakebed and dispersing carcinogenic particles into nearby communities. Ben Abbott’s eloquent ability to navigate the space between science, faith, and advocacy amid concerns about data bias is the crux of the film and an inspiration for anyone in the climate activism community.
Ellis also doesn’t shy away from capturing the policymakers tasked with addressing the crisis and securing funding to mitigate the damage. Governor Spencer Cox and Great Salt Lake Commissioner Brian Steed are at the epicenter of what becomes a complex web of bureaucratic hurdles and political inaction. Despite this, Abbott mounts the urgency and intensifies the advocacy in response to the lake’s impending collapse.
The documentary underscores a critical truth: ecological degradation is almost always salvageable (sometimes fully restorable) if addressed swiftly and properly, following scientists’ recommendations. But at our current pace of fossil fuel consumption and sociopolitical polarization on climate, the windows for success stories are narrow and rapidly shrinking. It requires immense coordination and collaboration amongst countless stakeholders. Unfortunately, these windows are closing far more quickly than solutions are being implemented.
As Abbott and Ellis make clear, there are no precedents for the successful restoration of a salt lake that reaches this stage of collapse. Every comparable case has failed. The Lake offers an urgent glimpse inside this real-time problem just miles from Sundance’s doorstep. It’s presented with a clarity and confidence that all Utahns should be watching.
Nuisance Bear, dir. Gabriela Osio Vanden and Jack Weisman
The final climate-conscious documentary to explore is Gabriela Osio Vanden and Jack Weisman’s Nuisance Bear, which synthesizes the ethical concerns raised by the previous films into a single, focused case study. The directorial pair observe collisions between polar bears and humans in Churchill, Manitoba, a relationship they have been studying for over seven years, going back to the Oscar-shortlisted Documentary Short of the same title.
By extending from a short to a feature, the film offers a more immersive glimpse into the human treatment of wildlife as spectacle and how even small ripples of human encroachment can have massive consequences. The primary messaging comes through the narration of Inuit community member, Mike Tunalaaq Gibbons, who is a critical addition to the documentary after the short employed a dialogue-less approach. His storytelling is so vibrantly clear, impassioned, and heartbreaking as he recounts how tourism in the “Polar Bear Capital of the World” and non-native settlement at large have diminished Inuit culture and warped the human relationship to the Manitoba land.
In talking with the film’s editor for The Rolling Tape, Andres Landau, on deciding to structure around the Inuit narration, he states, “We tried a lot of archival footage, but we realized right away, especially after listening to Mike [Tunalaaq Gibbons], for a long time, and him really opening up to Jack and Gabriela and telling his story about the bear and the human, we all came to the same realization at the same time. We started exploring around that storyline, and everything made sense to craft it with that structure.”
All of the life lessons on our interconnectedness with nature are rooted in the knowledge of Indigenous peoples, whom we have encroached, shamed, ostracized, and relocated for the entirety of colonial history. The film outlines, with quiet empowerment, how, before White encroachment, there was a harmony between humans and animals that has been permanently fractured. Animals aren’t nuisances to be managed. They are responding to the altered environments we’ve forced upon them. Humans relocate and encroach on their habitats, but they’ve never had a chance to claim what’s theirs, much in the same way as colonial history enacted upon Indigenous land.
Nuisance Bear is a quiet portrait of those principles, but an essential one nonetheless. Although somber, particularly in its rapturous scene of airlifting the sedated bear to its new location, it’s a moving catalyst for reckoning with the irreparable harm we have inflicted on Indigenous culture and land. Gabriela and Jack offer a call to action to listen to Indigenous knowledge and validate their beliefs and way of life; we’ve always had the answers to our ecological crisis right in front of us.
Reviews Courtesy of Danny Jarabek
Feature Image Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by Archival Materials Courtesy of Andri Snær
Magnason