One of the great things about living in Utah is having no excuse not to catch a few movies at Sundance every year. Half of the movies at Sundance won't get distributed making this an extremely unique opportunity. Often the movies that I don't make it beyond the festival are the ones that touched me the most because they came from such a unique perspective.

Last night I saw two documentaries: Bullets in the Hood and The Education of Shelby Knox. Both feature young people who see problems in their community and work to make change.

In Bullets in the Hood, young people in a housing project in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn take a critical look at gun violence. During the course of the project, a friend is shot by a cop for no reason. The filmmaker Terrence Fisher shows the community coming together around this tragedy as the city of New York does nothing to punish the police officer. Terrence was at the screening and made the comment that kids in his community don't have role models. Hopefully they'll see him for what he is: an amazing role model bringing a voice to his community. You may not get to see this film, but I bet we'll see more of Terrence's work in the future.

In The Education of Shelby Knox, we meet an amazing young woman named Shelby Knox. At the beginning of the film, we see Shelby take a pledge to remain celibate until marriage at her Baptist church. Over the course of the film, we see Shelby get involved in a youth group advocating for comprehensive sex education in a city with some of the highest teen pregnancy and STD rates in the country. Ultimately, she breaks with the group when they choose to tackle less controversial issues and choose not to get involved with the gay students also fighting the school district. In short, we see many of the controversial social debates going on at a national level being played out in the life of one girl.

To me, these documentaries both represent the best of independent film. They portray the perspectives that we don't normally see but are at the center of huge debates. Only a tiny percentage of the population will ever see these two extraordinary films, but some voice is better than no voice and I can hope that one day the reach of such films will equal that of the latest and greatest blockbuster.