Sundance 2026 – Jane Elliott Against The World ★★★★

Released: TBC (Sundance 2026)

Director: Judd Ehrlich

Some people, including this critic, think of Jane Elliott as an American heroine, but she’s relatively unknown outside of the USA. She garnered national attention when it became known that the day after Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination in 1968, she gave her third-grade class of entirely white students in the entirely white town of Riceville, Iowa a lesson in racism. The “blue eyes/brown eyes exercise” as it came to be called has in decades since given many white people their first experience of being discriminated against. But it also, and just as importantly, has given many white people a chance to reflect on if they want to be discriminatory or racist themselves. Over the years, Mrs Elliott, who is currently 92 years old and still very much with us, has remained one of the very few white Americans to have made a public career working against American racism. This thought-provoking documentary, which ties her work as an educator and advocate to some of the political battles being fought now, makes a firm case for Mrs Elliott’s importance to American history.  

The exercise, which I learned about from television as a kid myself, involved giving all the children with brown eyes in her class a collar to mark their status, and separating them for the day from the blue-eyed children. The ways in which participants react to this very simplistic depiction of segregation and racism is frankly breathtaking. This exercise was the forerunner of modern-day diversity training, which most people in corporate jobs are familiar with in some form, and Mrs Elliott eventually left her teaching career to focus on that. In the documentary the story of Mrs Elliott’s life and the history of her activism is entwined with a more recent battle. Temecula, California is where one of the first MAGA activists was elected to a school board, who immediately began both banning books and any discussions which might cause white people to feel uncomfortable. As some of Mrs Elliott’s grandchildren live in that town, she involved herself in the dispute, speaking at public meetings and offering public support to the local residents and schoolteachers working to throw out not only the bans but also that board member.  

Both of these threads of Mrs Elliott’s life make it very clear the high personal cost she has paid for saying that racism is wrong. People from her hometown appear on camera to talk about how the place is still feeling the aftermath of the initial exercise, which was over half a century ago. In that same small town where she was born and raised, her parents disowned her and still lost their business, and her children were bullied, isolated and occasionally beaten up. Interviews with two of her daughters and some of her other descendants make it very clear that the family appreciates her work, but dearly wishes it wasn’t a crusade. 

And director Judd Ehrlich makes sure we appreciate this about Mrs Elliott: she is adamant that the price she and everybody around her has paid because of her work has always been worth it. Black people never get a holiday from racism, and that means nobody should. Her work is not just about educating white people from a perspective that white people are more likely to listen to; it’s about giving white people the opportunity to stop being racist. This is of course not very easy; people will go through all kinds of contortions in order to maintain a positive outlook about themselves, and many people would rather do literally anything that admit they have caused harm, whether accidentally or purposefully. As Mr Ehrlich makes clear, through a variety of interviews with Mrs Elliott and her family as well as copious historical footage, her background and personality combined to turn her into someone with a righteous focus that nothing can diminish. Not her kids getting beaten up, not being disowned, not getting insane amounts of hate mail and death threats over the decades. (We learn early on that bitch actually stands for “being in total control, honey.”)  

But Mrs Elliott has always been first and foremost a teacher, who did that first her schoolroom exercise to give her students a chance to consider their actions and how they behave in the world.  And the impression the film makes is of a teacher whose most important lesson upended her life in ways nobody expected, but who decided to commit. That commitment remains both valuable and ongoing, and one hopes that Mrs Elliott enjoyed seeing her message brought to the Sundance Film Festival. This documentary is essential viewing for anyone who wants to think about what it means and what it takes to walk the talk.