Sundance Winner 'The Boys and the Bees' Finds a Home on POV Shorts
POV Shorts has acquired the documentary short "The Boys and the Bees," directed by Arielle Knight, in an exclusive deal reported by Deadline on 3 September 2026.
The film won the Short Film Jury Award for nonfiction at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, presented to Knight at the festival's short-film awards ceremony on 27 January 2026 and confirmed in the complete winners list on 30 January. That win qualifies the short for Academy Award consideration — a Grand Jury prize at Sundance counts as an automatic eligibility pathway for the Oscar documentary short category.
POV, which stands for "point of view," is television's longest-running showcase for independent nonfiction film, premiering 14 to 16 programmes each year on PBS. POV Shorts is its dedicated short-form strand. The acquisition puts Knight's film in front of a broadcast audience that festival shorts rarely reach.
"The Boys and the Bees" centres on brothers Carver Ray, age six, and Aaro Ray, age four, growing up on a farm in rural Georgia. Their parents, Eliza and Nehemiah Ray, are Black beekeepers who keep hives on the property. The Sundance programme describes the setting as an idyllic farm where the parents tenderly share their knowledge of life, love, and nature with their sons. The 2026 Sundance jury citation began: "This film is a beautiful and …" — the full text was published with the festival's complete award list on 30 January.
Knight produced the film alongside Sean Weiner, co-founder and co-director of Untitled Filmmaker Org, or UFO, a non-profit filmmaking organisation. "The Boys and the Bees" is a co-production of Knight's GoodKnight Films and UFO. Knight previously directed "A Song of Grace" in 2021 and contributed producing work to "Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project" (2023), "Beba" (2021), and "Sons of Detroit" (2025).
Two established documentarians joined the project as executive producers: RaMell Ross, the Oscar-nominated filmmaker behind "Hale County This Morning, This Evening" and "Nickel Boys," and Stacey Reiss, an Emmy winner whose credits include "The Andy Warhol Diaries" and "The Eagle Huntress."
Beyond Sundance, the short has built a substantial festival run. It won jury or audience awards at the Atlanta Film Festival, the Nevada City Film Festival, the Ouray Film Festival in Colorado, and Salute Your Shorts in Los Angeles. It also screened as an official selection at DC/DOX, the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, Sheffield DocFest in the UK, and the True/False Film Fest in Columbia, Missouri.
For a documentary short, that breadth of festival recognition is unusual — most shorts in the category play a handful of dates before finding a distributor, if they find one at all. The POV Shorts acquisition means the film moves from the festival circuit to a national PBS platform, where it will sit alongside the strand's annual slate of independently produced nonfiction.
