Today, the nonprofit Sundance Institute announced the 87 feature films and six episodic projects selected for the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, revealing a lineup full of bold independent storytelling. The Festival will take place from January 23–February 2, 2025, in person in Park City and Salt Lake City, Utah, with all of the competition films and more available online from January 30–February 2, 2025.
The 2025 Festival will kick off on Thursday, January 23, with premieres in Park City every day through the end of Tuesday, January 28. Additional showings will take place in Park City and Salt Lake City throughout the Festival until Sunday, February 2. Over 11 days, world debuts of projects across program categories will highlight fresh voices, entertaining stories, and groundbreaking works.
Beginning January 30, more than half the feature program will be available online for audiences nationwide to watch from home at festival.sundance.org. The curated online program will include all competition titles (U.S. Dramatic, U.S. Documentary, World Cinema Dramatic, World Cinema Documentary, and NEXT presented by Adobe), as well as additional selections from the feature, episodic, and Short Film Program presented by Vimeo.
“The Sundance Film Festival remains steadfast in its commitment to elevating unique and urgent voices in independent storytelling. Audiences can expect a 2025 program that showcases varied and vibrant filmmaking globally,” said Robert Redford, Sundance Institute Founder and President.
The lineup announced today includes 87 feature-length films representing 33 countries and territories. The 2025 program is composed of 36 of 87 (41%) feature film directors who are first-time feature filmmakers. Ten of the feature films and projects selected were supported by Sundance Institute in development through direct granting or residency labs. This year the film and episodic slate includes 89 (or 96%) world premieres.
Across the U.S. Dramatic Competition Program, which has previously seen such titles as One Night In Miami, CODA, Minari, and A Real Pain premiere, a star-studded range of first-look world premieres of groundbreaking new voices in American independent film will sweep the festival. Such highlights this year include Atropia, which details an aspiring actress in a military role-playing facility falling in love with a soldier cast as an insurgent, with their unsimulated emotions threatening to derail the performance, starring Alia Shawkat, Callum Turner and Chloë Sevigny; Bunnylovr, starring Rachel Sennott and Katarina Zhu, about a drifting Chinese American cam girl struggling to navigate an increasingly toxic relationship with one of her clients, while rekindling her relationship with her dying estranged father; and Twinless, a Dylan O’Brien vehicle about two young men meeting in a twin bereavement support group who form an unlikely bromance.
The U.S. Documentary Competition offers Festivalgoers a first look at world premieres of nonfiction American films illuminating the ideas, people, and events that shape the present day. Joining previous features as Three Identical Strangers, Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) and One Child Nation will be such titles as Andre Is An Idiot, about a brilliant idiot, Andre, who is dying because he didn’t get a colonoscopy. His sobering diagnosis, complete irreverence, and insatiable curiosity, send him on an unexpected journey learning how to die happily and ridiculously without losing his sense of humor; Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore, which sees Academy Award winning deaf actress Marlee Matlin reflect on her life and explore the complexities of what it is to be a trailblazer; Predators, an exploration of the scintillating rise and staggering fall of the television program “To Catch A Predator” and the world it helped create; and Sugar Babies, about an enterprising college scholarship recipient and burgeoning TikTok influencer who is determined to overcome the struggles and barriers defining her and her friends. Faced with limited minimum wage job options, Autumn devises an online sugar baby operation.
In the World Cinema Dramatic Competition, which focuses on narrative feature films from emerging talent around the world offering fresh perspectives and inventive styles, Sukkwan Island, DJ Ahmet, and LUZ are some of the titles premiering, joining prestigious productions as The Guilty, Souvenir, and Scrapper as previous entrants. Sukkwan Island, starring Tuppence Middleton and Swann Arlaud, centres on the remote titular island and the 13-year-old Roy, who agrees to spend a formative year of adventure with his father deep in the Norwegian fjords. What starts as a chance to reconnect descends into a test of survival as they face the harsh realities of their environment and confront their unresolved turmoil. DJ Ahmet, a joint production between North Macedonia, Czech Republic, Serbia and Croatia, tells of a 15-year-old boy who finds refuge in music while navigating his father’s expectations, a conservative community, and his first experience with love. And LUZ, toplined by Isabelle Huppert, focuses on the neon-lit streets of Chongqing, where the character of Wei desperately searches for his estranged daughter, Fa, while Hong Kong gallerist Ren grapples with her ailing stepmother Sabine in Paris. Their lives collide in a virtual reality world, where a mystical deer reveals hidden truths, sparking a journey of discovery and connection.
Nonfiction feature films from emerging talent around the world which showcase some of the most courageous and extraordinary filmmaking today are the focus of the World Cinema Documentary Competition, where Iranian councilwomen aiming to break long-held patriarchal traditions by training teenage girls to ride motorcycles and stopping child marriages (Cutting Through Rocks (وزاک یوللار)), a civil servant, a tea lady, a resistance committee volunteer, and two young bottle collectors reenacting their stories of survival and freedom through dreams, revolution, and civil war following their forceful exit out of Sudan (Khartoum), and a view into the life former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern (Prime Minister) are some of the highlighted narratives on hand.
Pure, bold works distinguished by an innovative, forward-thinking approach to storytelling populate the Next program. Unfettered creativity promises that the films in this section will shape the greater next wave in global cinema, as seen in previous entries as The Little Death, A Ghost Story, and Tangerine. Some of the highlights this year include the star-studded By Design, which stars Juliette Lewis, Melanie Griffith, Samantha Mathis, Robin Tunney and Udo Kier, about a woman who swaps bodies with a chair, and everyone likes her better that way; OBEX, about a new state-of-the-art video game whose user has to enter in order to save their dog; and Zodiac Killer Project, a documentary about a filmmaker describing his abandoned Zodiac Killer documentary and probing the inner workings of a genre at saturation point.
And joining such prestigious, acclaimed titles as Good Luck To You, Leo Grande, Promising Young Woman, Kajillionaire and The Big Sick in the Premieres program, a showcase of world premieres presenting highly anticipated films on a variety of subjects in both fiction and nonfiction, will be projects fronted by such names as Carey Mulligan, Rose Byrne, Conan O’Brien, Jennifer Lopez, and Molly Gordon. Mulligan will feature in The Ballad of Wallis Island, about an eccentric lottery winner and his dreams of getting his favorite musicians, Mortimer-McGwyer, back together. His fantasy turns into reality when the bandmates and former lovers accept his invitation to play a private show at his home on Wallis Island; Byrne and O’Brien are just two of the names in the ensemble If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, about a woman’s attempts to navigate her child’s mysterious illness, her absent husband, a missing person, and an increasingly hostile relationship with her therapist; Lopez’s turn in The Kiss of the Spider Woman is sure to generate awards buzz for the multi-hyphenate, starring alongside Diego Luna and Tonatiuh, the film tells of a prisoner recounting the plot of a Hollywood musical starring his favourite silver screen siren; and Oh, Hi!, starring Gordon, Logan Lerman and Geraldine Viswanathan, details a first romantic weekend for a couple going awry in the most unexpected fashion.
A program that’s birthed such genre classics as Love Lies Bleeding, Talk To Me, Mandy, and The Babadook, the Midnight Program offers everything from horror flicks and wild comedies to chilling thrillers and works that defy any genre, guaranteed to keep you wide-awake and on the edge of your seat. John Malkovich and Ayo Ediberi headline Opus, telling of a young writer’s invite to the remote compound of a legendary pop star who mysteriously disappeared 30 years ago. Surrounded by the star’s cult of sycophants and intoxicated journalists, she finds herself in the middle of his twisted plan; Rabbit Trap, from producer Elijah Wood, stars Dev Patel and Rosy McEwen as a musician and her husband whose music making disturbs local ancient folk magic, bringing a nameless child to their door who is intent on infiltrating their lives; and Together, with Dave Franco and Alison Brie, details the tested relationship of a couple and the supernatural encounter that begins an extreme transformation of their love, their lives, and their flesh.
And in the Episodic Program this year, episodes 1 and 2 of Bucks County, USA, a five-part docu-series about two 14-year-olds living in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, who are best friends, despite their opposing political beliefs, fighting to discover the humanity in “the other side” will premiere alongside the two-part documentary Pee-wee as Himself, a chronicle of the life of Paul Reubens, and the ensemble series Hal & Harper, starring Mark Ruffalo, Lili Reinhart, Betty Gilpin and Havana Rose Liu, about the evolution of a family.
For more information on the full program, screening dates and ticket sales, head to the official Sundance Film Festival page.
