Three students in UCLA School of Law’s Documentary Film Legal Clinic won a round of applause from movie industry insiders in a packed theater at the Sundance Film Festival on Jan. 27, where they attended the premiere of The Cost of Silence, a documentary about the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

During an onstage Q&A session that followed the screening in Park City, Utah, director Mark Manning pointed out the UCLA Law contingent — Michelle Banayan ’21, Graham Fenton ’20 and Keegan Hawkins ’21, plus clinic director Dale Cohen and associate director Daniel Mayeda ’82 — and thanked them for their legal support in making the film, including vetting its complex journalistic issues. Later, audience members circled the students to learn more about the innovative UCLA Law clinic that had brought them to the festival that, every January, is the center of the motion picture universe.

“For students to get the opportunity to see the film in front of an audience for the first time, and to recognize the impact that their work had, was pretty gratifying for all of us,” Cohen says.