The Sundance Lineup 2025
Good evening: This article contains the 2025 Sundance Film Festival program lineup.
Enjoy!
THE INDUSTRY NEWS
Welcome to Sundance 2025.
While there are plenty of high-profile actors in festival films this year, like Benedict Cumberbatch, Josh O’Connor, and Carey Mulligan, what I love about Sundance is that the team makes a herculean effort to feature first-time filmmakers. This year, 41% of all features were made by first-timers.
There’s a bit of oddity in that of the 87 features that were selected; no narrative film has major studio distribution.
I also see that no films meditate on AI. This lack of thematic interest is not only in major opposition to the studios, who put out AfrAId (Sony) and Atlas (Netflix) + bought up the AI spec script Alignment for $3 M but also last year’s Sundance slate, which included Eternal You and Love Machina.
Let’s get into it:
Most films playing at Sundance are looking for distribution, hoping to strike it big like these indies:
Sundance 2024
$17 M, It’s What’s Inside, Netflix
$15 M, My Old Ass, Amazon MGM
Sundance 2023
$20M, Fair Play, Netflix
$20M, Flora and Son, Apple
Sundance 2022
$15M Cha Cha Real Smooth, Apple
Sundance 2021
$25M, CODA, Apple
Sundance 2020
$17.5M, Palm Springs, Neon/Hulu
A trio of documentaries premiering at Sundance 2025 already have distribution lined up:
Apple picked up Deaf President Now! yesterday.
Here’s the official synopsis:
During eight tumultuous days in 1988 at the world’s only Deaf university, four students must find a way to lead an angry mob — and change the course of history.
The film is co-directed by Davis Guggenheim (dir: An Inconvenient Truth, Waiting for Superman). Apple was the studio behind Guggenheim’s latest doc Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie.
Hulu is distributing SLY LIVES! (aka The Burden of Black Genius).
Official synopsis:
An examination of the life and legacy of Sly & The Family Stone — the groundbreaking band led by the charismatic and enigmatic Sly Stone — captures the band’s rise, reign, and subsequent fadeout while shedding light on the unseen burden that comes with success for Black artists in America.
Questlove directs. He also partnered with Hulu for his previous film, Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) (2021).
Nat Geo is distributing Sally, which looks fascinating:
Sally Ride became the first American woman to blast off into space, but beneath her unflappable composure was a secret. Sally’s life partner, Tam O’Shaughnessy, reveals their hidden romance and the sacrifices that accompanied their 27 years together.
Nat Geo is a good home for the film as their linear program tends to be filled with space programming. The director, Cristina Costantini, previously worked with them on her doc Science Fair (2018).
Conclusion: At least for the time being, the big studios and streamers are cautious about acquiring films in this uncertain marketplace. All three of these distributors had already worked with the directors before. We’ll see how the landscape evolves as we move closer to Sundance in January.
One of the more high-profile projects this year, The Wedding Banquet is coming from the distributor Bleecker Street.
It stars Lily Gladstone and Bowen Yang and is a remake of Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet (1993). Produced by the legendary James Schamus, former CEO of Focus Features and producer of the original Wedding Banquet (1993).
Killer’s on the dance floor first look.
From Dreamgirls to Spider Woman. Director Bill Condon (Dir: Dreamgirls, Mr. Holmes) has his first film at Sundance in over 26 years, a remake of Kiss of the Spider Woman.
The cast is very strong:
Diego Luna
Jennifer Lopez
Here’s the synopsis:
Valentín, a political prisoner, shares a cell with Molina, a window dresser convicted of public indecency. The two form an unlikely bond as Molina recounts the plot of a Hollywood musical starring his favorite silver screen diva, Ingrid Luna.
Condon got his start at Sundance, debuting Gods and Monsters (Star: Ian McKellen and Brendan Fraiser) in 1998.
Here’s a trailer for the original Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985) starring Raul Julia and William Hurt.
Another high-profile director returning to Sundance is Justin Lin (dir: Fast and The Furious 3, 4, 5, 6 and 9) with his latest film, Last Days.
Here’s the fast synopsis:
Determined to fulfill his life’s mission, 26-year- old John Allen Chau embarks on a dangerous adventure across the globe to convert the uncontacted tribe of North Sentinel Island to Christianity, while a detective from the Andaman Islands races to stop him before he does harm to himself or the tribe.
Lin got his start at Sundance, debuting Better Luck Tomorrow in 2002. Actually, the way John Cooper (former Director of Sundance) tells it, that film had already been passed on until he convinced the entire team to take another look. For that insider story cue up our John Cooper podcast to 36:50:
https://theindustry.co/p/001-how-to-get-into-sundance
THE ACTOR SPOTLIGHT
Benedict and the Dance. Benedict Cumberbatch stars in The Thing with Feathers. It’s a semi-rare Sundance appearance for the actor whose last film at the festival was The Courier (2020 film) and before that, Four Lions (2010), where he had a small role.
Here’s the synopsis for the new film:
Struggling to process the sudden and unexpected death of his wife, a young father loses his hold on reality as a seemingly malign presence (a crow) begins to stalk him from the shadowy recesses of the apartment he shares with his two young sons.
Cumberbatch plays the dad. It’s interesting that he recently had a role in the Apple TV+ series Eric, which was about losing his son. In that series, he also spoke with a magical presence, a giant blue fuzzy monster that his son drew (trailer).
The crow in The Thing with Feathers will be voiced by David Thewlis, who played a hedonistic philosopher in Mike Leigh’s Naked and was, of course, excellent as Lupin in Harry Potter.
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Andre Holland’s heart. The Moonlight actor (oldest version of Kevin still), who starred as a painter in this year’s Exhibiting Forgiveness, leads a new film, Love, Brooklyn.
Here’s the official synopsis:
Three longtime Brooklynites navigate careers, love, loss, and friendship against the rapidly changing landscape of their beloved city.
Holland wears his heart on his sleeve in every performance (Moonlight clip, Exhibiting Forgiveness trailer), so even though this synopsis sounds pretty generic, it’ll be wonderful to see him in this new role.
Double Double Chloë Sevigny. It’s no shock that Sevigny is in two Sundance films this year. She’s prolific. She pops up in everything from American Psycho to Bones and All and her predilection towards the macabre always elevates whatever she’s in.
Here are her two Sundance 2025 films:
Co-Stars: Alia Shawkat, Callum Turner
Dir: Hailey Gates (Uncut Gems)
Prod: Luca Guadagnino (Queer, Challengers)
Synopsis:
When an aspiring actress in a military role-playing facility falls in love with a soldier cast as an insurgent, their unsimulated emotions threaten to derail the performance.
Synopsis:
A film crew working for an edgy media company travels to Argentina to profile a local musician, but their ineptitude leads them into the wrong country. As the crew collaborates with locals to fabricate a trend, unexpected connections blossom while a pervasive health crisis looms unacknowledged in the background.
We can’t wait to see her in these!
Tidbits:
Scoot McNairy (Killing Them Softly, Blood for Dust) stars in East of Wall about a rebellious horse trainer who has lost her husband (McNairy) who finds refuge by providing wayward teenagers a safe haven on her broken-down ranch in the Badlands.
McNairy in a Western is textbook typecasting, but he fits into these landscapes of barren degradation so well!
Carey Mulligan on an Island. She co-stars in The Ballad of Wallis Island, a film about an eccentric lottery winner, Charles, who lives on a private island and starts to have strange musical fantasies. No word on who Mulligan is playing, but if she starts singing like she did in Shame (clip), count me in!
Olivia Colman is back at Sundance with Jimpa. She stars as Hannah the mom to a non-binary teen. John Lithgow plays a gay grandpa. The first look photo of Colman with Lithgow looks very sweet.
Josh O’Connor (Challengers) plays a cowboy who loses his family ranch to a wildfire in Rebuilding. The film is produced by Best Picture Oscar-winner Dan Janvey (Nomadland, Beasts of the Southern Wild).
Allison Brie and Dave Franco get back together again in Together. Brie and Franco, who are married and serve as producers, play a couple who move to the countryside when a supernatural encounter begins an extreme transformation of their love, their lives, and their flesh. Do I smell The Substance 2025?
DOCUMENTARY
In Ira Sachs, we trust. He won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance back in 2005 with Forty Shades of Blue. Since then, he has released Sundance favorites Little Men (2016) and Passages (2023).
Now he’s back with the documentary Peter Hujar’s Day.
Here’s the synopsis:
A recently discovered conversation between photographer Peter Hujar and his friend Linda Rosenkrantz in 1974 reveals a glimpse into New York City’s downtown art scene and the personal struggles and epiphanies that define an artist’s life.
Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall play the artists. So, thinking this is going to be heavy on recreation, leaning into Sachs’s wonderfully intimate style.
Colonoscopies for all! That’s pretty much the message of Andre is an Idiot.
Here’s the scoop:
Andre, a brilliant idiot, is dying because he didn’t get a colonoscopy. His sobering diagnosis, complete irreverence, and insatiable curiosity, send him on an unexpected journey learning how to die happily and ridiculously without losing his sense of humor.
Thanks to director Anthony Benna for meeting this subject with humor. And to boot, Joshua Altman, the producer, is a director on Showtime’s scintillating Couple's Therapy.
Mstyslav Chernov returns with another tale of tragedy and triumph in Ukraine with his new film, 2000 Meters to Andriivka. He is the filmmaker behind last year’s 20 Days in Mariupol, which won Sundance’s World Cinema Documentary Competition and the Oscar for Best Documentary.
Here’s the plot of his new doc:
Amid the failing counteroffensive, a journalist follows a Ukrainian platoon on their mission to traverse one mile of heavily fortified forest and liberate a strategic village from Russian occupation. But the farther they advance through their destroyed homeland, the more they realize that this war may never end.
Here’s a bleak and beautiful first-look image.
Tidbits:
Ryan White, director of The Case Against 8 (2014), Ask Dr. Ruth (2019) returns with Come See Me in the Good Light. About two poets, one with an incurable cancer diagnosis. It’s billed as being funny, though. To make sure comedian Tig Notaro produces.
From Jesus Camp to Folktales. The directing duo, Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady (Jesus Camp) are back at Sundance for Folktales, which is about teenagers who go to school in Arctic Norway. Their work non-judgementally examines insular communities.
Ben does fiction. Ben Mullinkosson co-directs his first fiction film, Serious People (his previous work was the outstanding Mubi doc The Last Year of Darkness.)
Predators is a documentary on the wild and popular television To Catch a Predator.
Sundance is getting a doc on Marlee Matlin, Not Alone Anymore. This will be great as Matlin is a cinema icon who shines in Children of a Lesser God, West Wing, and even those roast battles.
INDIE FILMMAKER SPOTLIGHT
From Sing Sing to Train Dreams. Ok, this is an exciting one. And I love it when I see indie filmmakers level up. And Kazaam! It happened big this time for Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar.
This is the pair behind A24’s Sing Sing. For that film, Bentley served as the lead writer and Kwedar was the director and co-writer. Well, now they’ve flipped, and Bentley is the sole director of Train Dreams. Kwedar and Clint both co-wrote the film.
It’s got one of the strongest casts at the festival:
Joel Edgerton
Felicity Jones
William H. Macy
Teddy Schwarzman (head of Black Bear) came in as the production company. That’s a good sign, as they financed the final lump of Sing Sing about a week before the film shot. For that hilarious and heart-pounding story, check out our podcast interview with Bentley and Kwedar:
https://theindustry.co/p/a24-director-greg-kwedar-sing-sing
Here’s a gorgeous first look photo of Felicity and Joel intertwined. Congrats gents!
A24’s four projects:
Great folks involved:
Producer: Josh Safdie (Uncut Gems)
Producer: Eli Bush (Uncut Gems, Lady Bird)
Cast: Rose Byrne, A$AP Rocky, Conan O’Brien
Synopsis:
With her life crashing down around her, Linda attempts to navigate her child’s mysterious illness, her absent husband, a missing person, and an increasingly hostile relationship with her therapist.
Also a great cast:
Ayo Edebiri (The Bear)
John Malkovich
Juliette Lewis
Synopsis:
A young writer is invited to the remote compound of a legendary pop star who mysteriously disappeared 30 years ago. Surrounded by the star’s cult of sycophants and intoxicated journalists, she finds herself in the middle of his twisted plan.
Collin Creighton is producing, which spells good news. He served as Director, Original Film at Netflix, overseeing Okja (2017) and The Irishman (2019). Also, he was very nice to me during my internship back in 2012, giving me tips on how to survive my time at a production company.
Here’s a first look at Edebiri in the film, and she looks bewildered.
Synopsis:
Preeminent West African curator and scholar Funmilayo Akechukwu’s magnum opus, The Resonance Field, leads her to the heart of the Atlantic Ocean, drawing a journalist into a journey that shatters her understanding of consciousness and time.
The Legend of Ochi
If you haven’t seen the trailer by now, stop what you’re doing and prepare to be just wowed by the adorable creatures. Cast: Helena Zengel, Finn Wolfhard, Emily Watson, Willem Dafoe.
In Miranda Bailey, we trust. This producer, whose credits include Swiss Army Man just finds the weirdest and most wonderful type of projects. I LOL’d hard at her new one, By Design:
A woman swaps bodies with a chair, and everyone likes her better as a chair.
Juliette Lewis stars (if you’re keeping score, this is her second at the festival). Couldn’t be more excited for this weird one.
Another Swiss Army Man producer, Lawrence Inglee, is bringing Rabbit Trap to the festival.
Synopsis:
When a musician and her husband move to a remote house in Wales, the music they make disturbs local ancient folk magic, bringing a nameless child to their door who is intent on infiltrating their lives.
Inglee was just minted Partner / President Of Production of Elijah Wood’s production company SpectreVision, which has been supplying Sundance with midnight favorites like this ever since Mandy (2018) burned a cosmic hole in my cerebrum.
Dev Patel stars in Rabbit Trap.
Tidbits:
Alex Russell, who served as a supervising producer on Beef and The Bear, is making his directorial debut, Lurker.
Impact Partners has two projects at Sundance:
Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore
Previous projects include Nat Geo’s Sugarcane (2024), Union (2024), and the incredible Icarus (2017).
Best synopsis goes to Director/Screenwriter Evan Twohy’s Bubble & Squeak:
Accused of smuggling cabbages into a nation where cabbages are banned, Declan and Delores must confront the fragility of their new marriage while on the run for their lives.
Produced by Christina Oh (Ad Astra, Okja) and starring Steven Yeun, who literally played a satellite last year in Sundance’s Love Me and Dave Franco (his second Sundance film) this is going to be great!
Sorry, Baby has Oscar-winners Adele Romanski and Barry Jenkins (Moonlight) as producers.
Twinless centers on two young men who meet in a twin bereavement support group and form an unlikely bromance. It’s just a great synopsis. And, of course, hopefully, it leans on Shakespeare’s twin tale, The Comedy of Errors.
INTERNATIONAL NEWS
French icon Isabelle Huppert (The Piano Teacher, Elle) loves starring in Asian cinema. Her newest is Luz, a film from Hong Kong/China.
Here’s the synopsis:
In the neon-lit streets of Chongqing, Wei desperately searches for his estranged daughter Fa, while Hong Kong gallerist Ren grapples with her ailing stepmother Sabine in Paris. Their lives collide in a virtual reality world, where a mystical deer reveals hidden truths, sparking a journey of discovery and connection.
Huppert previously starred in A Traveler’s Needs by director Hong Sangsoo. The film won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize in Berlin.
A great film coming out of Turkey/France/Poland/Canada is The Things You Kill.
Synopsis:
Haunted by the suspicious death of his ailing mother, a university professor coerces his enigmatic gardener to execute a cold-blooded act of vengeance.
Director/Screenwriter: Alireza Khatami.
WELCOME TO HELL. That’s more or less the idea behind Columbia/US/Spain’s Rains Over Babel.
Synopsis:
A group of misfits converges at Babel, a legendary dive bar that doubles as purgatory, where La Flaca — the city’s Grim Reaper — presides. Here, souls gamble years of their lives with her, daring to outwit Death herself.
Director/Screenwriter: Gala del Sol.
With a great poster. The film is going to be doused with brimstone and neon.
FESTIVAL INFO
In-person tickets to Sundance can be purchased here. Online here.
Sundance runs Jun 23 - Feb 2nd.
Download the Sundance program here.
Written and Edited by Gabriel Miller.
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