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- The 2025 Sundance Film Festival will feature 87 films from over 30 countries, with a majority being world premieres.
- Notably, 41% of the films are directors' first feature-length projects, highlighting emerging talent in the industry.
SALT LAKE CITY — The 2025 Sundance Film Festival schedule was released Wednesday. Maybe the most surprising part of the announcement: no director building out the U.S. and international fiction categories has been shown at Sundance before.
The lineup includes 87 feature films spanning more than 30 countries and territories, and six episodic selections.
"Every year, you get these new filmmakers who have never really had a light shine on them," senior programmer John Nein told KSL.com. Thirty-six of the features, or 41%, are the directors' first feature-length project, the Sundance Institute said in a press release. Among the 93 features and episodes, 89 are world premieres, the release says.
Programmers had the task of selecting features from 15,775 submissions from 156 countries and territories — over 4,000 of which were feature-length. The six episodic selections were chosen from 484 submissions, according to the release. Around 38% of total submissions came from the United States.
That number is down from the record-breaking 17,435 submissions programmers waded through in 2024.
"People are always interested in the bigger, high-profile films and the notable talent," Nein said — Jennifer Lopez and Diego Luna in "Kiss of the Spiderwoman," Benedict Cumberbatch in "The Thing with Feathers," and many others.
The film selections, which span the globe, also depict life in the western U.S., Nein said. Max Walker-Silverman's "Rebuilding," for example, is set in Alamosa, Colorado, and revolves around a rancher recovering from a wildfire. "Train Dreams," named the Salt Lake Celebration Film, is based on Dennis Johnson's novella of the same name.
It's an "amazing historical drama, a love story," Nein said. "It's set against the wilderness of the American West, but it's really in a period. Obviously, it's about the people who built the West, but kind of this reflection on being both amidst the grandeur of the world and sweep of history, but also having this small, ordinary life and trying to make sense of what that means."
There are also "a lot of really interesting filmmakers, (documentary) filmmakers, who are returning," according to Nein. Justin Lin, who made "Better Luck Tomorrow" and helped with big studio films like "Fast and Furious" and "Star Trek"; Bill Condon, who made "Gods and Monsters" and "Chicago"; and Ira Sachs, who most recently made "Passages."
"There's no way of characterizing this program because it's really a way for artists to kind of grapple with where we are in the world," Nein said.
How movies are selected
The selection process is "inherently subjective," Nein said. The competition element of the festival and the awards that follow help filmmakers with marketing and the opportunity to find distributors, but programmers never think of movies as "the best" or think of their work as part of a "competition."
When watching certain movies, Nein "can feel the confidence of the filmmaking voice, sometimes right off the bat. And you can also have a film that just grows on you," it's a different experience for every submission. "There are certainly films where you feel us a kind of sense of inevitability, like just something that you really love," he said.
With many films depicting the same type of subject matter, Nein says programmers have to keep an open mind while watching the hundreds of submissions, to see where it fits, taking into account the experiences of the whole team.
"We'd be the first to say that there are literally dozens, scores of films that are heartbreaking for some of us individually to see ultimately not included in the program," he said.
"It's a process and it's a series of decisions, just as making art is a series of decisions about who you include in your work and who you collaborate with."
The 11-day festival is set to begin on Jan. 23 in Park City, with additional showings in Salt Lake City until the festival ends on Feb. 2.
Beginning Jan. 30, more than half of the feature films will be available for streaming online, though no specific number was released.
"We're trying to find a balance of films that somehow tells the story of where artists are right now and what they're thinking about and what they're exploring," Nein said. "And that's where I think the range is really exciting."
An announcement regarding the decision of where the festival will be held beginning in 2027 is expected after the conclusion of this year's festival. The full 2025 program can be found here.
