Debt, slavery, racism, imprisonment, poverty, surveillance, war: these constitute some of our nation’s most pressing Big Issues, but too often they remain abstract concepts, easily set aside or ignored. But this year’s Festival documentary features are bringing the personal into the political, grounding ephemeral ideas in the very real, tangible experiences of people. “Many of the films in this new wave of [personality-driven] pieces are breaking news that we are not getting from mainstream journalism,” Sundance Senior Programmer Frilot said about the trend. “These stories are outright overlooked by our news corporations today, yet the filmmakers feel compelled to take these issues up in a way that shows why it’s so important to understand these issues in a very personal way.”

Trouble the Water offers one great example of this trend. Viewers topple straight into the raging hurricane that destroyed New Orleans in August 2005 in this gripping film by Tia Lessin and Carl Deal. While the filmmakers might easily have interviewed dozens of experts, listed statistics, or documented the still ravaged 9th Ward, instead they start with tremulous, grainy video footage shot by 24-year-old Kim Roberts, an aspiring rap poet who happened to pick up a video camera hours before the storm made landfall. She talks to the kids on her block, urges an intoxicated man to get up and find shelter, and rides her bike through the neighborhood, camera bouncing on the handlebars while she narrates. “I’m showing the world that we did have a world before the storm came,” she says presciently at one point, “’cause people are going to die out here.” Then she adds, “Anyway, we’re getting hit, this is on its way.... It’s me, Kold Madina, reporting live. We’ll be bringing y’all more footage very shortly. Here we go.”

“What makes that moment work is that we all know what’s going to happen,” said Deal, a producer on Fahrenheit 9/11, “and we can’t warn her. She’s going through the neighborhood, but she doesn’t know yet what’s really coming.” Added Lessin (supervising producer, Fahrenheit 9/11, Bowling for Columbine), “It’s like a horror film, or a thriller, and you’re watching it happen. What we tried to do with the rest of the film was to preserve the hard-edge quality of that footage.”

The filmmakers retain that edginess, mainly through Kim and her husband Scott as they struggle to survive the storm. We witness firsthand the neighborhood’s terror as the water surges and people are trapped. We see men carrying babies and children to safety. And we hear the rising despair in voices as emergency calls are ignored. The couple does survive, and as soon as possible, they leave, eventually ending up in Memphis, before returning to New Orleans to pick up their lives again. Rather than being a tragedy, or a much-needed indictment of racism and the neglect for our most needy, the film ultimately becomes a portrait of an incredibly resourceful couple.

“It’s really a coming of age story,” said Lessin, who added that she likes it when people think of the film as a film rather than a documentary. “We avoided voice-over and interviews. People were inundated with the authoritative take, and we wanted instead to tell the story from the inside-out, not the outside-in.”

Katrina Browne also tells a story from the inside out, tracing her family’s heritage back to its roots in the slave trade. More than 10,000 Africans were brought to the U.S. and sold as slaves by the DeWolf family. Browne, who has a Masters degree in theology, invites other family members to join her on a quest to uncover this history by traveling as a group to Ghana, then to Cuba, retracing the route of slaves bought and sold by their ancestors. Nine relatives join Browne, and what ensues is a gripping attempt by each participant to wrestle with guilt, grief, and atonement.

Browne, a first-time filmmaker, recounts the journey through voice-over, and we experience the events primarily through her point of view. What makes all of this so effective is Browne’s steady, generous, and thoughtful guidance, as well as her own heartfelt desire to understand this history and her responsibility to it. “Aristotle actually thought that the emotional connection to characters in Greek tragedies led to a cathartic experience and clarification of values that could help people become better citizens,” she explained. “Democracy and theatre were invented at around the same time in Ancient Greece, and it’s believed that that is no accident!” Browne wrote about Greek tragedy in her Masters thesis, and Traces of the Trade enacts a form of catharsis, leading people through an emotionally wrenching experience that culminates in a better understanding of racial politics in America, through the very specific experiences of one family.

Rutgers professor Hasan Elahi also considers racial politics in his artwork, which he describes as an effort to “bridge the human and virtual worlds,” centering on “geopolitical conditions and individual circumstances.” His Tracking Transience: The Orwell Project, featured at this year’s New Frontier on Main, began when Elahi was investigated by the FBI as a terrorist. Elahi responded to the ensuing FBI surveillance by offering himself up to be surveilled by voluntarily wearing a tracking device; viewers can follow Elahi’s activities in real time on the artist’s website, and as such, Elahi’s life and movements becomes a means to enact the effect of the political on the personal.

Perhaps one of the most difficult topics to tackle from a personal perspective is the national debt, the subject of Patrick Creadon’s film I.O.U.S.A, which details the history of American overspending across more than 200 years. The film is based on extensive research, much of it found and cataloged by the film’s associate producers Theodore James and Kate Incontrera.

While all of this data makes a convincing case, it is not particularly cinematic. “We obviously didn’t want this film to be wall-to-wall data,” explained Creadon. “Nor did we want it to play out like C-SPAN on steroids. We began filming in January 2007, and once we latched onto Comptroller General David Walker – 60 Minutes refers to him as ‘the nation’s top accountant’ – and Bob Bixby, who runs a non-partisan group in Washington called The Concord Coalition, we felt we had found our heroes,” said Creadon. “The two of them, along with several other people who appear in the film, provide a face to the enormous struggle of trying to address and fix the financial crisis we now find ourselves in.”

Edet Belzberg also places a face on a volatile issue, focusing on the Army’s Sergeant Usie, an award-winning recruiter in the town of Houma, Louisiana. “It was the height of the war, and I felt extremely disconnected to what was going on,” explained Belzberg, describing the impetus behind the film. “I was so dissatisfied by seeing images of soldiers who had died with just a few sentences about their lives. I wanted to know more.”

Belzberg finds more when she meets Usie and his recent recruits. Her often devastating film follows the lives of four high school students who sign up for the Army, undergo basic training, and then go off in different directions, with several landing in Iraq. “Sergeant Usie feels that he’s giving these kids something they couldn’t otherwise attain,” explained Belzberg. “It’s coming from a true place, and he’s giving them encouragement, belief in their potential, and, to a certain extent, love. The tragedy is that they get this only by joining the Army.”

Many other Sundance Film Festival projects use the personal to understand the political, whether in Marc Evans’ chronicle of the plight of Mumia Abu-Jamal, accused of the murder of a Philadelphia police officer and now on death row In Prison My Whole Life, or even the conflicting accounts in Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired of the events that led Polanski to flee the United States. In each case, though, we get a story that is very different from the one found in mainstream journalism. As Kim Roberts says in the opening moments of Trouble the Water, “In all the footage I’ve seen on TV, nobody ain’t got what I got.”