Broward Premiere / USA / 2025 / English / 93 min / Documentary, Teens
Director, Producer: Charlie Sadoff, Gabriel London; Producers: Keith Brown; Contact: charlie@mightypics.tv
SYNOPSIS – Immutable is a feature documentary that follows a group of students from the Washington Urban Debate League as they fight to find their voices in a world that too often tries to silence them. Against the backdrop of a city marked by inequality—and in the lingering shadow of the COVID pandemic—these young debaters confront daily challenges that range from housing instability to neurodivergence. For some, debate is a path to college. For others, it’s a lifeline.
We meet them at summer camp, where their journey begins—not just to win tournaments, but to sharpen arguments that reflect their own lives. One girl, autistic and fearless, demands the world see people with special needs as whole. Others argue for economic policy reforms while navigating poverty themselves. As multiple seasons unfold, Immutable captures the grit, intellect, and heart of students who are determined to not only become top-tier debaters but to to change the course of their lives.
Director Biography – Charlie Sadoff is a producer, director and editor whose most recent film Against All Enemies premiered to critical acclaim at the 2023 Tribeca Film Festival, went onto to win multiple best documentary awards and after its release in 2024 was the number one ranked doc on the Apple TV charts. Documentaries he has produced include The Mind of Mark Defriest which premiered at Hot Docs and aired on Showtime, Dream Riders (Sheffield Doc Fest, Discovery), the 10 part series The Rites of Autumn for ESPN and multiple docs for History and CBS Sports. Charlie seeks projects that can help affect meaningful change and Cut Poison Burn (Mill Valley) and The Harvest (IDFA, Epix) from executive producers Eva Longoria and Academy Award winners Shine Global both screened on Capitol Hill as part of efforts to move legislation. The Definition of Insanity, which he wrote and produced for PBS in 2020 is currently being used to help cities around the world change the way people with mental illness interact with the criminal justice system. Charlie has served as a judge for the Emmy Awards and a guest lecturer at the graduate school of journalism at Columbia University. He has won multiple Golden Trailer, Cynopsis Social Good, Promax Gold, BDA and film festival awards.
Gabriel London is an award-winning documentary filmmaker whose films have tackled major policy issues of the day from mass incarceration to climate change. Gabriel won the Albert R. Broccoli best film award for his first prison documentary, Turned Out, and went on to collaborate with Human Rights Watch on the first nationwide study of prison rape. The resulting films, No Escape: Prison Rape in America, received the Soros Criminal Justice Award and were instrumental in the passage of Prison Rape Elimination Act. Gabriel has made intimate documentaries with notable talent, including Drew Barrymore’s film on voting, The Best Place to Start, and Snoop Dogg’s autobiographical story, Youth Authority: California. Gabriel’s most recognized work, The Mind of Mark DeFriest, won a number of awards at film festivals and went on to help reduce the title subject’s sentence by over 70 years, before being aired on Showtime. In 2020, Gabriel directed The Definition of Insanity, which aired on PBS and has been used as a tool for mental health reforms nationwide.
Director Statement
Basketball. Football. Music. Dance. For many young people, talent in one of these activities is the ticket to escaping challenging circumstances – be it poverty, violence, or failing schools –
to play on a bigger stage. We have all seen these stories, in both fiction and nonfiction, play out on screens big and small. But there is another activity for young people, less famous for its transformative capacity, but no less powerful: debate. Debate teaches skills that empower both the privileged and the underprivileged, the private schooled and the public educated, to
square off in contests that test their skills and intellect. In a polarized world, evermore divided between haves and have-nots and where facts blur into fiction, debate offers young people
superpowers to reach beyond the status quo and to thrive in so-called ‘elite spaces.’ They learn to use evidence to argue either side of a given issue and to work as a team. Through debate, young people develop the emotional tools, intellectual insights and confidence to not just score points in competition, but also to alter the seemingly immutable facts of their lives.