Festival is ready for what could be its second-to-last year in Park City.
The spectre of the Los Angeles wildfires will hang over proceedings when the industry convenes in Park City for the Sundance Film Festival this week. It remained unclear to what extent, if any, the ongoing catastrophe will have on attendance by executives and filmmaker teams from southern California, yet for sure it will be top of mind for everybody.
Sundance organisers have contacted attendees to ascertain how best to support their community, reflecting outreach efforts by studios, entertainment bodies and non-profits in the Los Angeles area.
The days ahead will be emotionally charged. Like many others, Michelle Satter, Sundance Institute’s founding senior director of artist programmes and a cherished figure in the industry who is due to be celebrated at the festival’s gala fundraiser on Friday, lost the home she shares with her producer husband David Latt to the fires.
Once the festival gets underway on January 23 and people find their rhythm and immerse themselves as best they can in the 41st edition, another issue is likely to figure in conversations. It is something the festival’s director and head of public programming was not overly keen to discuss on a call with Screen that took place before the wildfires erupted on January 7. Put simply: where will the festival take place in 2027 and beyond?
The 2025 and 2026 editions could be the last two to run in the Park City, Utah, hub that, for more than four decades, has hosted the US’ most celebrated film festival. Once Sundance’s contract with the city expires in 2026, it may stay in Park City as a secondary presence to an expanded base in Salt Lake City, or relocate to Cincinnati, Ohio, or Boulder, Colorado.
“There will be an announcement well after this year’s festival, in late winter, early spring,” Eugene Hernandez tells Screen, referring to the ongoing search that was implemented in early 2024, when concerns reached critical mass over rising costs for Park City attendees and the stress placed by the festival’s footprint on the small ski town during peak season.
“We have been focused on getting this programme in shape,” he adds of the 2025 edition, which at time of writing comprised 88 features from 33 countries and territories on top of sample shows in the Episodic section and dozens of short films.
Some 37 titles (or 42% of the feature line-up) hail from first-time filmmakers such as Nadia Fall, the UK playwright and incoming artistic director of London’s Young Vic theatre, who debuts Brides, in which two troubled teenage girls hatch an ill-advised plan to travel to Syria. “That’s the kind of discovery we like,” notes director of programming Kim Yutani. “Somebody who is expanding their creative endeavours.”
The 2025 roster has been culled from 15,775 submissions covering 156 countries or territories, including 4,138 feature-length films of which 2,547 were international. The total is less than 2024’s 17,435 submissions but above 2019’s pre-pandemic figure of 14,259. “Within the last five years, it doesn’t seem like much gets in the way of our filmmakers,” says Yutani. “Global pandemics, strikes…”
US buyers are extremely cautious these days. There were deals last year, but generally they are taking longer to consummate. Yet Hernandez feels good about the selection. “This is a programme that is ready to meet an audience and some of that audience are buyers and sellers who come from far and wide,” he says. Like Sundance’s world-class documentary selection, the offering of new American independent cinema tends to have a long shelf life. Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain, which played in 2024’s US Dramatic Competition, is a current Oscar and Bafta contender. Kieran Culkin recently won the Golden Globe for supporting actor.
This year’s star-studded Premieres strand includes Peter Hujar’s Day by Ira Sachs, a drama about the New York portrait photographer starring Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall. Further big names populate the section, with Olivia Colman and John Lithgow in Sophie Hyde’s Jimpa, and Benedict Cumberbatch playing a haunted widower in Dylan Southern’s The Thing With Feathers.
International outreach
Yutani notes the number of non-US films that permeate the overall programme, a by-product of international outreach and year-round travel by the programmers to major festivals, markets and workshops. “It’s [about] constantly laying that foundation,” adds Hernandez.
Yutani cites Georgi M Unkovski’s North Macedonian drama DJ Ahmet in World Cinema Dramatic Competition, and Rohan Parashuram Kanawade’s India-set LGBTQ+ story Sabar Bonda (Cactus Pears). Mstyslav Chernov, whose 20 Days In Mariupol won the best documentary Oscar in 2024, is back with another account of Ukrainian journalism and the war with Russia in 2000 Meters To Andriivka.
Running January 23-February 2, the festival begins three days after Donald Trump takes presidential office for the second time and the Sundance heads understand the championing of freedom of expression.
“There’s something about the voice of the artist that is so strong in this year’s programme,” says Yutani.
For Hernandez, Barry Levinson’s Episodic entry Bucks County, USA, about teenage friends in Pennsylvania with polar-opposite political beliefs, is a key selection. “No film better embodies what’s happening on the ground in our country from a purely humane level,” he says.
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