My penultimate dispatch from Sundance 2026 features the strongest collection of films I’ve covered so far. Don’t believe me? Well, Sundance agrees. Each film in this dispatch is a prize winner, nabbing the Grand Jury Prize (“Shame and Money”) and Acting Ensemble (“Lady”) in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition, and a Special Jury Award for Civil Resistance (“Everybody to Kenmure Street”) in the World Cinema Documentary Competition. Each one of these films is also a deeply political work, touching on economic disparity and immigration.
There isn’t a single false beat in director German–Kosovan filmmaker Visar Morina’s anti-capitalist venture “Shame and Money.” This is the kind of austere yet hard-hitting film that reveals the apathy of a system without relying on melodramatic speeches or explanatory dialogue. Morina’s film is a confident, smart, and tightly calibrated work.
The film follows a Kosovar dairy family whose life is upended with the selfish younger brother (Tristan Halilaj) of Shaban (Astrit Kabashi), sells the farm’s cows and absconds to Germany with the profits before the rooster even crows at dawn. This family is forced to uproot their once simple life for a far more fragile existence in the city. There, they find a tenuous refuge with Adelina (Fiona Gllavica), the sister of Shaban’s wife Hatixhe (Flonja Kodheli), and Adelina’s husband Alban (Alban Ukaj). To find some brief stability, the family’s elderly matriarch uses her last gold lira as collateral on a new apartment. Hatixhe works with her sister caring for her sister’s rich in-laws. Shaban takes janitorial work in his brother-in-law’s club, clearing bottles and dishes. None of that effort is enough to make ends meet, so Shaban begins looking for odd jobs, with many other men, on the side of the road. It’s an act that puts him at odds with his brother-in-law, who wants his family to maintain their reputation.
See, to the industrious Shaban there’s no such thing as shameful work. There’s only work. And the job that supports your family should never be condemned. As such, Shaban begins to see that many haves in his life are indicative of a dishonest system intent on crushing the disadvantaged rather than uplifting. Kabashi translates this disgust not through overt rage, but through helpless glances and transfixing moments of disassociation that gives his instances of physical exasperation a firm impact.
Morina also deftly employs the family’s varied physical settings to tell their story. Their living areas, which regress from their warm, spacious farm to a cramped shed behind a mansion, adds tactile contours to capitalism’s effect on their lives. And while the camera is often stationary, there’s one free-floating scene, which moves from Kabashi’s signature agonizing expression to a statue dedicated to Bill Clinton, that is politically vital in its piercing camerawork.
What’s immediately clear is this family can only survive if they’re willing to step on the few who are below them. Unlike “Parasite,” in fact, which “Shame and Money” makes a winking reference to, there is no dreamlike vision of better days. There is only the bitter fight until the next day, and the next, and the next.
From the beginning, the world hasn’t made much sense to Lady. When we first see her, our vantage point is inverted. The camera skims over water toward a dock where a young Lady and her friend Pinky look toward the sea and us toward their heads, which are hanging upside down. On this day, Lady will see a sight that’ll permanently scar her. Fast forward some years later and Lady (Jessica Gabriel’s Ujah) is a cab driver. She owns her own car, which offers her economic protection and keeps her isolated from the world. Pinky (Amanda Oruh), who’s been out of Lady’s orbit for two years, returns. She’s a sex worker with a proposition. Her pimp needs a new driver to transport Pinky and her coterie to parties thrown by johns. Lady begrudgingly takes the job in order to finance a dream emigration to Freetown, Sierra Leone.
“Lady,” by writer/director Olive Nwosu, is an ambitiously told Lagos-set feminist narrative about a woman finding her voice in a world that has so often worked to silence her. Though Lady isn’t a shrinking violet—she often argues with the other male cab drivers—she isn’t necessarily comfortable in her own skin. For reasons that we learn about later, she often looks at Pinky and her fellow sex workers, like the frank Sugar (Tinuade Jemiseye), with judgemental eyes. She doesn’t understand how or why these women would find freedom through a profession that requires them to be at the sexual behest of men.
Similarly, she finds even less sense in the country’s political turmoil. Not only does she ignore pleas from the other male cabbies—who are being hit hard by rising fuel costs due to the curtailing of fuel subsidies—to protest. She also disregards the many reports delivered via radio from DJ Revolution and television newscasts. While Ujah’s affecting performance quietly builds Lady’s political awakening, one wishes Nwosu used the film’s news audio more organically, such as slowly moving the sound of the newscasts from the background to the foreground rather than it bluntly blaring for much of the film. Conversely, the director does display a pinpoint use of sound when Lady sees Pinky and the others at work, everything because woozy and abstract to the point of slipping into another dimension.
Despite that dreamy creative approach, “Lady,” even with its dark cinematography, is quite clear-eyed with regard to acutely explicating Lady’s own traumas. Nwosu’s writing of this character and the film’s further ensemble both delicately reveal Lady’s difficult past and offers a sense of solidarity that propels the rebellious narrative toward its touching conclusion. With a keen mixing of archival news footage, real political issues and an empathetic eye—Nwosu’s “Lady” is a vibrant and invigorating debut feature whose intelligent narrative calibrations make for a galvanizing picture of sisterhood.
On May 13, 2021, the first day of Eid al-Fitr, authorities were dispatched by the U.K. Home Office to the Pollokshields district of Glasgow to arrest two men of Indian descent. These officers detained the men in a van for supposed violations. In this diverse neighborhood, which is greatly populated by Muslim and South Asians, the van proved to be an evident siren of danger. Rather than allowing it to drive away with the men inside, many of the residents banded together to stop the vehicle in its tracks. It would stay on Kenmure Street for eight hours as the tiny defiant group grew into a protest that numbered over a couple thousand.
Felipe Bustos Sierra’s “Everybody to Kenmure Street” is a spirited and imperative portrait of collective action whose urgency painfully speaks to now. In his approachable documentary, Sierra first roots the 2021 rebellion to the mixed legacy of Glasgow. While a montage shows the many political stands the city has taken: from the anti-apartheid movement that treated Mandela as hero to Black Lives Matter—it doesn’t shy away from the fact that Glasgow, like many other European and American cities, was built on the backs of the enslaved. That heritage is both threaded through the visual language, which leans on the aforementioned montages, but also by way of talking heads, who are well aware of the city’s checkered, though often politically fervent history.
Through recollections via sit-down interviews with those who were witness to Kenmure Street, Sierra efficiently thrusts viewers back toward the moment when scrappy tactics and community-based solidarity ruled the day. Some of the participants have their testimonies read by others: Executive producer Emma Thompson portrays a brave soul who slid their body under the van, while Kate Dickie gives voice to an off duty nurse. Others who do appear as themselves, like activist Aamer Anwar—he negotiated the two men’s release—recall the events fondly. With great dexterity, Sierra also pulls these memories into the orbit of the kinetic footage taken from that day. When combined with the tangible emotions of the participants, these incredible pieces of video take on greater gravity and vigor.
Conversations and images about stopping an authoritarian government ceasing the profiling and harassing of people of color and immigrants, of course, bears harrowing parallels to the inhumane tactics carried out by a goose-stepping force like ICE in America. In that sense, seeing the organized and empowered opposition to the U.K. Home Office provides a necessary roadmap for defying those who would cravenly pull humans from their homes and maliciously kill dissenting people in the streets. From beginning to end, “Everybody to Kenmure Street” is a crucial documentary capable of sparking an uprising.
