This article appeared in a special January 31, 2025 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. The Stringer (Bao Nguyen, 2025)As I was writing this report from Sundance 2025, the festival announced the winner of its Grand Jury Prize in the U.S. Actors playing wives must walk several paces behind their on-set husbands, but the burqas they wear are Afghan, not Iraqi. Images already afford us a veneer of distance from violence as it unfolds; images about those images offer us a safe enough vantage point to engage yet walk away unscathed. Another Sundance nonfiction highlight, Geeta Gandbhir’s The Perfect Neighbor, questions the significance we vest in spectacle as something revelatory—even protective.