The final Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, will be full of nostalgia and discovery, to judge by the lineup that organizers announced on Wednesday.
The 10-day gathering in January will offer the 90,000 movie lovers who converge on the mountain town both a number of first-time filmmakers — 40 percent to be exact — and dozens of veteran directors, including Gregg Araki, Cathy Yan and David Wain, who are returning to showcase new work and relive their early successes at the festival.
The event lands at a time of great upheaval for Sundance and the larger movie industry it so often informs. This will be the last year the festival is held in the Utah town before it moves to Boulder, Colo., in 2027, and it will be the first year without the Sundance founder, Robert Redford, who died in September.
Add in the likelihood that the venerable studio Warner Bros. — which has employed many a director who got their start at Sundance, including the probable Oscar contenders Paul Thomas Anderson (“One Battle After Another”) and Ryan Coogler (“Sinners”) — will be sold to either Netflix or Paramount in the coming months.
“I’m going to maintain an optimistic outlook because our industry has always been tumultuous,” the Sundance Film Festival director, Eugene Hernandez, said in an interview. “Now this might be one of the most tumultuous moments; we’ll know in time. But I don’t think we watch any fewer movies. I think we just watch them differently.”
Hernandez said the upheaval also meant opportunities for independent artists as well as for art-house theaters and companies like Neon and A24, which are known for more adventurous fare. “At the same time,” he said, “there’s some films in our festival that studios and streamers will probably be interested in. So we have to continue to carve out a space for supporting the artist.”
In the U.S. dramatic competition, the programmers are particularly high on a set of films that in Sundance fashion strike coming-of-age themes, including “Josephine” from Beth de Araújo, a Brazilian American filmmaker whose movie went through the Sundance Institute writing and directing labs. Co-starring Channing Tatum and Gemma Chan, “Josephine” centers on an 8-year-old who witnesses a crime in San Francisco.
“Run Amok” is a hot title from NB Mager that co-stars Patrick Wilson, Margaret Cho and Molly Ringwald and follows a teenage girl who creates a musical about, as the programmers put it, “the one day her high school wishes it could forget.”
Two other U.S. competition films involve international elements: “Ha-Chan: Shake Your Booty!,” by Josef Kubota Wladyka, stars Rinko Kikuchi, the Oscar-nominated actress from “Babel,” in a story set in Tokyo, and “The Friend’s House Is Here,” from Hossein Keshavarz and Maryam Ataei, was shot in Tehran’s underground art scene.
The final Sundance in Utah is sure to prompt tearful farewells and heartfelt tributes, and the event will include a cast reunion of “Little Miss Sunshine” (2006). There will also be documentaries from Sundance veterans like Rory Kennedy (“Queen of Chess”), Liz Garbus (“Give Me the Ball!,” directed with Elizabeth Wolff) and Dawn Porter (“When a Witness Recants”).
Yet the programmers promise a lineup that will be full of laughs, too. Araki will be bringing “I Want Your Sex,” starring Olivia Wilde, Cooper Hoffman and the British singer-songwriter Charli XCX. Wilde will also be there with her own film, “The Invite,” which she also stars in, opposite Seth Rogen, Edward Norton and Penélope Cruz.
Charli XCX will be appearing in two other films: Yan’s “The Gallerist,” which also stars Natalie Portman as the title character, who’s hawking a dead body at Art Basel Miami Beach, and “The Moment,” in which Charli XCX plays a pop star on the rise.
And Wain will return 25 years after his “Wet Hot American Summer” debuted at Sundance, with “Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass,” starring Zoey Deutch as a Midwestern bride whose husband uses their “free celebrity pass,” throwing their relationship into chaos.
Nicole Sperling covers Hollywood and the streaming industry. She has been a reporter for more than two decades.
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