Thursday morning, English students at Ridgeline High School were excused from their first few hours of school to watch a documentary from this year’s Sundance Film Festival in the Auditorium. 

The film seemed to be a big hit. Over one hundred students attended the viewing at Ridgeline.

For those who don’t know what the Sundance Film Festival is, it is an annual event in Salt Lake City and Park City, Utah. This week-long showing features indie documentaries, short films, and episodic content. This event first started in 1985 and, since then, has launched hundreds of films that have gone on to reach audiences worldwide. 

The film that was shown was a documentary about how fake news has been affecting the Native American politics. It went into detail about how each Native American tribe got to choose if they wanted to institute freedom of the press because they do not have to follow  all the same Constitutional laws that other U.S. citizens are required to. 

In the film, one of the Natives that was interviewed was elaborating on how only 5 of the 574 tribes recognized by the federal government had allowed for the freedom of the press. She explained how this posed many issues from a political standpoint, and how it made running for an office very difficult. 

A student, Ashton Macfarlane, was asked in an interview what he thought about the film, and he responded, “It was a really good movie, I thought that it was very interesting and would recommend that everyone watch it.” In the interview, he did admit to the film having a lot of “vulgar language” and some “inappropriate scenes.” Ian Dahle, another student that attended, also said that the language was a lot more graphic than he thought it would be. However, he agreed that, despite the language, he really enjoyed the film and thought that it was very well-written and put-together.