Almost 100 new indie films were screened during the 41st edition of the Sundance Film Festival, which began on Thursday, January 23, and ended on Sunday, February 2, in Salt Lake City and Park City, Utah. After awards were announced on Friday, January 31, additional screenings of the winners were held on Saturday, February 1, and Sunday, February 2.

It seems almost miraculous that the festival was able to continue as planned despite the devastating fires in Los Angeles. At least one of the festival organizers, Michelle Satter, lost a home, as did many workers from the entertainment industry. With luck, indie film productions and sales will contribute to LA’s recovery.

The impacts of the recent disasters will continue to be felt for a long time. In case you would like to make a donation to help victims of the fires, we have gathered some links to relief organizations.

Festival organizers posted the list of award winners. IndieWire kept track of the films with distribution deals. Although we weren’t able to attend the festival, we’re here to give you an overview of the star-studded juries and tell you about some of the films that sound intriguing.

Here are our highly subjective selections from Sundance 2025! As you know, we have never claimed to be normal – but our highlights may interest you, too, if you share our eclectic taste!

The Juries

Many of the celebrity filmmakers spotted at Sundance – for instance, by Vogue and GQ – were stars of new films or members of the distinguished festival juries. The composition of the juries was announced just about a week ahead of the festival. We’re listing jurors for the six feature film competitions.

The members of the U.S. Dramatic Competition Jury were American director Reinaldo Marcus Green (King Richard), South Korean-Canadian playwright and director Celine Song (Past Lives), and Iranian-American actor Arian Moayed (Succession).

The members of the U.S. Documentary Competition Jury were American producer and director Steven Bognar (American Factory, A Lion in the House), Higher Ground President and former Showtime executive Vinnie Malhotra (We Need to Talk About Cosby, The Fourth Estate, The Hunting Ground), and Firelight Media President/Co-Founder Marcia Smith.

The members of the World Cinema Dramatic Competition Jury were Cannes Semaine de la Critique Artistic Director Ava Cahen, Kenyan director Wanuri Kahiu (Rafiki), and Oscar®-winning actor British actor Daniel Kaluuya (Judas and the Black Messiah, Get Out).

The members of the World Cinema Documentary Competition Jury were Mexican Film Institute General Director Daniela Alatorre, former Participant Media Executive Vice President of Marketing Laura Kim, and Oscar®-winning Scottish director Kevin Macdonald (One Day in September).

The sole member of the NEXT Innovator Award Jury was American actor Elijah Wood (The Fellowship of the Ring). Through his company SpectreVision, Wood produced Rabbit Trap starring Dev Patel, which premiered at Sundance out of competition.

The jurors for the Alfred P. Sloan Prize, which goes to a feature film on the subject of science or technology, were last year’s Sloan Prize-winning directing duo, Andrew Zuchero and Sam Zuchero (Love Me), two-time Sloan Prize winner Michael Almereyda (Marjorie Prime, Tesla), astrophysicist Nia Imara, AI researcher Dr. Monica Lopez, and documentary producer Nicholas Ma (Won’t You Be My Neighbor?).

The Films: Main Competitions

The complete lineup of films was announced on December 11, 2024.  Several titles caught our eye in each of the major competition categories.

U.S. Dramatic

We noted several films about an endlessly interesting topic – forbidden love – in the U.S. Dramatic Competition.

After playing a minor role in Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers (2024), Hailey Gates made her feature directorial debut with the postmodernist satire Atropia, written by Gates and produced by Guadagnino.

During a military war game held near Los Angeles, an Iraqi American actress named Fayruz (Alia Shakwat) falls for a soldier-participant (Callum Turner), who has been assigned to play an Iraqi insurgent.

New talent Katarina Zhu is the director, writer, and lead actress of Bunnylovr, Zhu’s feature directorial debut. The film follows Chinese American sex worker Rebecca (Zhu) through a difficult time in her life, when she seeks to escape a disturbing client (Austin Amelio) and reconcile with her ailing father (Perry Yung).

Plainclothes, a feature debut by Carmen Emmi, is set in the 1990s in Syracuse, New York. Undercover detective Lucas (Tom Blyth) falls in love with an older gay man (Russell Tovey), whom he had planned to entrap and disgrace.

U.S. Documentary

We were drawn to films from the U.S. Documentary Competition that profile groundbreaking figures from the entertainment industry.

Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore by Deaf actress and writer Shoshannah Stern (Supernatural, This Close) investigates Matlin’s inspiring career, from when she made history as the first Deaf person to win an acting Oscar® (Children of a Lesser God, 1987) to her performance in the Best Picture Oscar®-winner CODA (2021) and beyond.

After telling the story of talent agent Doris Muñoz in Mija, selected for Sundance in 2022, music documentarian Isabel Castro is back with Selena y Los Dinos, an intimate portrait of the superstar and her family.

Finally, Tadashi Nakamura, who directs the Watase Media Arts Center at the Japanese American National Museum, reflects on the career of his father, “the godfather of Asian American media” Robert A. Nakamura, in Third Act. The film shares the moving story of the elder Nakamura’s ongoing battle against Parkinson’s disease.

World Cinema Dramatic

Maybe it’s because we could use a vacation (always), but we were drawn to stories of friends on a journey, whether literal or metaphorical. There were many films on that theme in the international dramatic lineup, but we confined ourselves to three examples.

Amel Guellaty, whose photographs have appeared in Elle France and other magazines, made her feature directorial debut with Where the Wind Comes From. It is a coming-of-age story about two Tunisian friends, Alyssa (Eya Bellagha) and Mehdi (Slim Baccar), who take a cathartic road trip to the island of Djerba.

Auspiciously, Sabar Bonda (Cactus Pear), the feature directorial debut by Rohan Parashuram Kanawade, was workshopped at the 2022-2023 Venice Biennale College Cinema, when it was still called Arms of a Man. In the completed film, Anand (Bhushaan Manoj) falls for a farmer (Suraaj Suman) while Anand is visiting a small Indian village for his father’s funeral.

The Hong Kong-born director Flora Lau presented her first feature film, Bends, in the Cannes 2013 Un Certain Regard lineup. Her second feature, LUZ, stars Isabelle Huppert and Xiao Dong Guo as parents reunited with their adult children in a mysterious virtual reality.

World Cinema Documentary

A variety of interesting topics are featured among the international documentaries, but we particularly noted films about the devastating global conflicts of recent years.

At Sundance in 2023, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Mstyslav Chernov showed his Ukraine war documentary 20 Days in Mariupol, which went on to win the 2024 Oscar® for Best Documentary Feature. This year, Chernov brought 2000 Meters to Andriivka, a film about the Ukrainian army’s efforts to reclaim a tiny yet important northern village from Russian forces.

Another film about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Mr. Nobody Against Putin, shows the war’s impact inside Russia, focusing on a primary school in the Ural Mountains. A teacher named Pasha tries to oppose the militarization of the school and the recruitment of his students in this clandestinely filmed documentary from David Borenstein, the director of Dream Empire (2016) and Can’t Feel Nothing (2024).

The Israel/Palestine conflict is approached from a distinctive angle in Coexistence, My Ass! This documentary, directed by New York-based Lebanese Canadian filmmaker Amber Fares, follows Israeli comedian-activist Noam Shuster Eliassi, who used to work for the United Nations!

NEXT Innovator Award

The NEXT Award goes to an innovative or experimental film by a rising auteur. This year’s NEXT section had eight titles. We picked two that seemed totally bonkers – in the most appealing way.

Amanda Kramer won the Outfest Grand Jury Award in 2022 for her third feature, Please Baby Please starring Demi Moore. Here’s the unusual premise of Kramer’s latest film, By Design: “A woman swaps bodies with a chair, and everyone likes her better as a chair.” As Vogue quipped, “It just doesn’t get more Sundance than that.” We think both Kramer and Sundance should take the remark as a great compliment!

Gala del Sol, credited in previous work as Natalia Hermida, draws on the literary and cinematic tradition of magical realism in her feature debut, Rains Over Babel. Saray Rebolledo plays La Flaca (The Skinny One), a personification of Death. The patrons at her dive bar, which symbolizes Purgatory, roll dice against her in hopes of saving their tortured souls.

The Films: Premieres and Midnight Selection

Finally, we’re covering a few films that screened out of competition. Because? We simply couldn’t resist! We think you’ll see why.

Many of the films in the Premieres section featured well-known performers or rising stars. We’re particularly excited about adaptations of two classics.

Bill Condon’s Kiss of the Spider Woman is a film version of the 1993 Broadway musical, not a remake of Hector Babenco’s 1985 film. (All are based on Manuel Puig’s 1976 novel.) Diego Luna and Tonatiuh play the Argentinian cellmates, political dissident Valentín Arregui and accused sex offender Luís Molina. Jennifer Lopez plays the Hollywood idol Ingrid Luna, featured in Molina’s stories.

Meanwhile, in Andrew Ahn’s adaptation of Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet (1993), a gay man named Min (Han Gi-chan) and a lesbian woman named Angela (Kelly Marie Tran) agree to a sham marriage. Their real partners, Chris (Bowen Yang) and Liz (Lily Gladstone), are drawn into the comic chaos when Min’s grandmother (Oscar® winner Youn Yuh-jung) arrives from Seoul to throw a traditional wedding party.

We found even more performers we love among the Midnight lineup, a section for films that specialize in chilling horror or Wednesday Addams comedy.

In Mark Anthony Green’s feature debut Opus, Ayo Edibiri (The Bear) plays a journalist investigating the popstar Moretti (John Malkovich). Moretti’s disappearance 30 years ago turns out to be even more troubling than it had long seemed.

Another feature debut, Michael Shanks’ Together, is a body horror film starring a real-life married couple, Dave Franco (The Disaster Artist) and Alison Brie (Community). As Tim and Millie discover, saving their relationship will require much, much more than moving from the hectic city to an idyllic town.

Thank You, Sundance!

As you can see, the Sundance Festival once again curated a terrific program, unearthing new talent and showcasing debuts from promising first-time directors, as well as bringing back established filmmakers. We hope our highlights will inspire you to learn about all the wonderful films from Sundance 2025!

Please join us in thanking the organizers for their excellent work! We hope you will support these indie films by seeing them in theaters or watching them on streaming platforms as soon as they are released!