Sundance 2025 Features Lineup

As for the provocative subject matter, Nicole Sperling notes in the New York Times that “the Sundance lineup suggests politics are on the mind of this year’s filmmakers.” Sperling points to Cherien Dabis’s All That’s Left of You, which tells the story behind a Palestinian teen’s confrontation with Israeli soldiers, and Amber Fares’s Coexistence, My Ass!, a film built around a stand-up set by Israeli comedian and activist Noam Shuster Eliassi. Mstyslav Chernov (20 Days in Mariupol) follows a Ukrainian platoon on a mission to liberate a strategic village from Russian occupation in 2000 Meters to Andriivka.

Closer to home, Kim A. Snyder’s The Librarians maps the struggle for essential freedoms in the wake of book bans in Texas and Florida, and Sam Feder’s Heightened Scrutiny focuses on ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio, the first known transgender person to make oral arguments before the Supreme Court. Barry Levinson and Robert May’s Bucks County, USA is a series tracking two fourteen-year-olds who won’t allow their opposing political beliefs to put an end to their close friendship.

Bucks County, USA “offers a perspective that is enriched by the exploration of these two individual girls, their friendship, the connection to their families who are on different sides of the red and blue divide,” Sundance director Eugene Hernandez tells Mark Olsen. “And so it really invites greater understanding and consideration about what’s in front of us in this country.”

There will be music in Park City. When Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson brought his debut feature, Summer of Soul, to Sundance in 2021, he won a Grand Jury Prize and an Audience Award. A year and several more awards later, Summer of Soul won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature. Piecing together concert footage from the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival and fresh interviews, the film spotlights such major acts as Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, and in one standout set, Sly and the Family Stone. In Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius), Questlove will delve deeper into the band’s influence and impact.

Films Boutique has just picked up international sales rights to Georgi M. Unkovski’s first feature, DJ Ahmet, the story of a fifteen-year-old from a remote village in North Macedonia who finds refuge in music. Elegance Bratton’s Move Ya Body: The Birth of House centers on innovative producer Vince Lawrence, and Amy Berg’s It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley chronicles a promising career cut short when Buckley drowned at the age of thirty, having completed just one widely admired album.

Sundance 2025 will see the return of Ira Sachs, who won a Grand Jury Prize for Forty Shades of Blue (2005), and Andrew Ahn, who debuted his first feature, Spa Night (2016), at the festival. Sachs’s Peter Hujar’s Day stars Ben Whishaw as the renowned photographer and Ahn’s The Wedding Banquet is a remake of Ang Lee’s 1993 cult favorite. James Schamus, who cowrote the original, has cowritten the new one with Ahn, and the cast features Lily Gladstone, Kelly Marie Tran, and Bowen Yang.

“It’s a funny film,” Sundance director of programming Kim Yutani tells IndieWire’s Anne Thompson. “There’s a warmth to it that is based around how people form queer families. It has incredible performances by the two matriarchs of the film, Joan Chen and the grandmother from Minari, Yuh-jung Youn. It’s lovely.”

In 2017, the New Yorker’s Richard Brody revisited the only feature Mary Bronstein had directed at the time, Yeast (2008), an “exhilarating meditation on performance and identity” that “advances to a resolution that is as surprising as it is transcendent.” Bronstein is finally back with If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, starring Rose Byrne as a woman dealing alone with her child’s mysterious illness and, in supporting roles, Conan O’Brien and A$AP Rocky. The film tracks “a downward spiral of motherhood,” notes Sundance’s Charlie Sextro, who immediately adds that it’s “also very funny—very darkly . . . bizarrely . . . uncomfortably funny.”