By Lucy Spicer
One of the most exciting things about the Sundance Film Festival is having a front-row seat for the bright future of independent filmmaking. While we can learn a lot about the filmmakers from the 2026 Sundance Film Festival through the art that these storytellers share with us, there’s always more we can learn about them as people. We decided to get to the bottom of those artistic wells with our ongoing series: Give Me the Backstory!
In 2018, a high school sociology teacher in a small Tennessee town gave his students an assignment: to investigate a local cold case from 30 years prior. The students delivered, developing a profile for the serial killer — a profile that helped revive a decades-old investigation into a present-day hunt for a killer. The class and their research made headlines, leading to a podcast called Murder 101 in 2024. And now the project is at the center of a docu-series — also called Murder 101 — whose first episode will premiere as part of the Episodic Nonfiction Pilot Showcase at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.
Directed by Stacey Lee (The Secrets of Hillsong, Olivia Rodrigo: driving home 2 u), the series does more than rehash the story told in the podcast. “This was my first time exploring something in the true-crime genre, and I was immediately inspired by the ways a coming-of-age lens could refresh this oversaturated genre,” says Lee. “To me, it was an opportunity to set a new tone that is equal parts Dead Poets Society, Mindhunter, and Friday Night Lights. Where joy and gore, hope and heartbreak, youth and investigative rigor are portrayed in equal measure.” This new lens also sheds light on the state of the education system and teenagers’ willingness to face difficult subjects with curiosity and empathy.
Lee has always appreciated the eye-opening — and challenging — aspects of documentary filmmaking. “I got into filmmaking out of a mixture of curiosity, boredom, and naïveté. I was living in another country, working in another career, when I stumbled upon an interesting story with larger-than-life subjects and incredible archive materials. Naturally, armed with no experience, no technical skills, and no money, I set about — some would say recklessly — to make my first feature film,” she says. “Fortunately I had a circle of friends with enough enthusiasm to cobble together a crew, and over the course of the next two years’ worth of weekends, we hustled together something to share with the world. While testing, and not always fun, I caught the bug. Shortly after, my side hustle became my main hustle, and, a decade later, I finally started calling myself a filmmaker.”
She continues: “Since the beginning, being a documentarian has forced me outside my comfort zone; no two stories are the same, and so each project is a fresh opportunity to immerse myself in completely new points of view that help me better understand the complexity of the human experience.” Read on to learn more about Lee and how she immersed herself in the world of Murder 101.
