Sundance 2025: Awards for films about a resentful son and a bike-riding woman

The Sundance Film Festival (January 23-February 2) includes two titles involving Iran. One is Terrestrial Verses co-director Alireza Khatami’s Turkey-set thriller The Things You Kill, while the other is a documentary about a motorbike-riding village councilwoman in rural Iran.

Both films won awards at Sundance on Friday, as did the Indian movie Sabar Bonda, about the relationship between two men in a village in Maharashtra. Rohan Parshuram Kanawade’s Marathi-language feature debut won the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic prize.

In its citation for Sabar Bonda, the jury stated: “This is the great modern love story. To say it’s an honor to award this tender film is an understatement. We cried, we laughed, and we wished to be loved in the same way. It is exactly what the world needs right now. This authentic point of view opens the door to an intimate language we all understand. We feel the humming heartbeat of the main character’s inner life, and when it bursts, it wraps us with its sweetness.”

The Things You Kill: The never-ending cycle of violence

From the highs of the terrific Terrestrial Verses (2023), Alireza Khatami settles down somewhere in the middle with The Things You Kill. Khatami’s new movie is set not in his native land but in Turkey.

The Things You Kill is styled on recent Turkish realist dramas that…

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