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16 Films We’re Anticipating at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival

Mad Bills to Pay (or Destiny, dile que no soy malo)

The penultimate edition in its long-running Park City location, the Sundance Film Festival began today, and, as I note every year, the event is a bellwether when it comes to an assessment of the American independent film scene. The acquisitions scorecard will influence the decisions of future film investors, the films premiering here will be eagerly and instantly viewed by festival programmers the world over, and, we hope, promising new directorial careers will be launched. And that’s in addition to perhaps the largest goal, which is for films here to make bracing, uplifting, healing, disturbing, entertaining, provocative and necessary statements about the world we are living in today.

Filmmaker‘s editorial team has surveyed the schedule and come up with a list of 16 films based on various forms of reconnaissance we think are must-sees. Check them out below, beginning with one we were particularly happy to see in the program because we spotlit the director in our most recent 25 New Faces list. And check back all week for interviews, responses to our Sundance Question, and more.

Mad Bills to Pay (or Destiny, dile que no soy malo). Joel Vargas’s debut feature, which will proceed directly from Sundance to the Berlinale for its international premiere, expands on last year’s short film May It Go Beautifully for You, Rico, which landed the director on our 25 New Faces list. Of that medium-length short, a Pardo di Domani best director winner at Locarno, I wrote that “Rico (Juan Collado) hawks nutcracker cocktails (a mixture of liquor and fruit juice heavy on the latter) on the beach and lives at home with his mother (Yohanna Florentino) and sister (Nathaly Navarro). The teenager also has a freshly pregnant girlfriend, Destiny (Destiny Checo), who moves in with the family and who Rico drafts to join his illegal hustle, but a run-in with the law derails their already dubious occupation. Shot in carefully locked-off shots that train a careful eye on both a specific Bronx milieu and faultlessly naturalistic performances.” — Vadim Rizov

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. It’s been 17 years since Yeast, Mary Bronstein’s MiniDV-shot feature debut, premiered at SXSW. Many of the abrasive comedy’s collaborators—such as Greta Gerwig, the Safdie brothers and Sean Price Williams—have since broken out into the cinematic mainstream, and it now appears that Bronstein’s star may rightfully be on the rise. With A24 already set to distribute, Bronstein’s second feature follows Linda (Rose Byrne), a single mother whose life has been thrown into complete tumult. Her child is currently battling a mysterious illness, she finds herself connected to a missing person and, to make matters worse, her relationship with her therapist has devolved into abject embitterment. Conan O’Brien, A$AP Rocky, Danielle Macdonald, Ivy Wolk and Daniel Zolghadri co-star; returning collaborators include Josh Safdie and husband Ronald Bronstein, who directed Mary in his 2007 indie breakout Frownland, as producers. — Natalia Keogan

Peter Hujar’s Day. “A Warholian gem” is how artist and filmmaker Moyra Davey described Linda Rosenkrantz’s interview-based book Peter Hujar’s Day upon its 2022 publication. Davey is referring to both artists’ flair for quotidian note-taking — Warhol would record in his diaries eating at Burger King while Hujar, in his minute recounting of his activities on December 18, 1974 to Rosenkrantz, preferred McDonalds. But while Ira Sachs, making a new feature quickly on the heels of his 2023 Sundance premiere, Passages, dutifully sticks — mostly — to the text of Rosenkrantz’s book, he profoundly finds new meanings and valences within as he reenacts the interview with a group of extraordinary collaborators, among them actors Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall, DP Alex Ashe, production designer Stephen Phelps and editor Affonso Gonçalves. — Scott Macaulay

Predators. Cinematographer-editor-director David Osit increasingly moves towards the center of the thematic frame in his follow-up to Mayor, his Emmy-winning portrait of the mayor of the Palestinian city of Ramallah. Here, a triptych leaps from To Catch a Predator to its contemporary copycats, and finally to a sitdown with host Chris Hansen himself, in a densely self-questioning work. Among its many on-schedule concerns are what happens when entertainment (including this very film itself) is tasked with the work of public service. — VR

OBEX. A collaboration between director Albert Birney and co-writer, co-producer and co-editor Pete Ohs, OBEX unfolds circa 1987 and is entrenched in the era’s technological aesthetic. Birney plays Conor Marsh, an antisocial recluse who lives his life via screens. He crafts digital portraits from picture references for paying clients, then unwinds after a long day by watching one of his many VHS tapes. His only companions are his adorable dog Sandy, an unseen woman named Mary who delivers groceries to his doorstep once a week and his expansive media collection. His newest addition, a beta computer game called OBEX, initially seems like a dud—but the software’s strange power soon presents itself through cryptic printer messages, glowing specters and the disappearance of Conor’s beloved pet. A score from Animal Collective member Josh Dibb sets the mood for this eerie adventure between physical and digital realms. — NK

Rabbit Trap.There are many movies about making films and fewer about making albums. In debuting director Bryn Chainey’s folk horror picture Rabbit Trap, Dev Patel and Rosy McEwen play London musicians retreating to Wales to record their new long player, with the resulting sounds unlocking magic in the surrounding countryside. Given the prominence of music in the film’s description, it’s great to report that a strong composer is on board, electronic musician Lucrecia Dalt, whose work overall draws on “ideas rooted in Colombian mythology to German New Wave cinema” and whose work can also be heard in the recent On Becoming a Guinea Fowl. — SM

Middletown. Many films at Sundance are in dialogue with contemporary events in ways we wish they weren’t. While the fires burn in California, including at a lithium battery plant, in addition to loss of property and life there’s a degradation of air quality as cancerous chemicals leech into the air. The latest from Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine uses as its starting point a 30-year-old student-made documentary, Garbage, Gangsters, and Greed, that dealt with toxic waste in the maker’s home town. Moss and McBaine have gathered the footage and the subjects, bringing the latter to a soundstage to create  “something wonderful and terrifying,” the further details of which remain until the film’s premiere here in Park City. — SM

The Perfect Neighbor. Assembled mostly from bodycams and interrogation room surveillance cameras, Geeta Gandbhir’s immersive slow-burn is a portrait of a Florida neighborhood over two summers of increasing terrorization by Susan Lorincza, a neighbor who constantly called the police on the slightest provocation. Her fatal shooting of a neighbor is told through footage inverting the traditional purpose of the bodycam, showing everything but the crime to draw a richly textured suburban portrait building to Stand-Your-Ground-fuelled tragedy. — VR

Magic Farm. The sophomore feature from artist, writer and director Amalia Ulman (El Planeta) follows a haphazard film crew from New York City to Argentina in their misinformed quest to interview a bizarre local musician. Chloe Sevigny plays the host of a short-form documentary series that spotlights edgy trends in underseen pockets of the world, while Ulman, Alex Wolff and Joe Apollonio comprise her stymied production team. Simon Rex is their collective employer, who has his own hot-button issues to deal with. Also selected for Berlin, the film is a forthcoming MUBI release. — NK

Sorry, Baby. From the producing team at Pastel — Adele Romanski, Barry Jenkins and Mark Ceryak — comes this Massachusetts-shot debut by Paris-born writer/director Eva Victor. Known for TV appearances in Billions as well as her X viral videos, Victor here also stars alongside Naomi Ackie and Lucas Hedges playing a college professor processing trauma over the course of five years. — SM

Seeds. Debuting doc director Brittany Shyne’s Seeds is a portrait of what may very well be the last in a long line of generational Black farmers in rural Georgia; one in which Shyne’s camera serves as both portal and means of preservation. By quietly and patiently embedding with two extended families in the small town of Thomasville, Shyne is able to capture everything from the languid rhythm of daily work, from harvesting cotton to repairing machinery; to a feisty elderly woman sharing sweets with her young granddaughter in the backseat of a car; to a touching moment of a sturdy octogenarian soothing his tiny great-grandchild to sleep.” — Lauren Wissot

The Virgin of the Quarry. Two short stories by contemporary Argentianian gothic-ish short story writer Mariana Enriquez are the basis for this genre-leaning feature by Laura Casabe. The biggest draw for me is that the screenplay was written by the excellent Argentinian filmmaker Benjamín Naishtat, whose Puan is one of my favorite films of recent years; it’s his first (at least credited) time as a screenwriter-for-hire, which is interesting since his work is also emerging from the more cryptic arthouse realm into greater populism, and it’ll be interesting to see how he approaches a horror-adjacent assignment. — VR

Opus. Ayo Edibiri stars as a journalist turned final girl in this feature debut from Mark Anthony Green, who himself boasts a longstanding relationship with GQ as a writer and editor. Invited to visit the remote desert estate of Moretti (John Malkovich), a music icon who vanished from the public eye decades ago, Ariel (Edebiri) soon fights for survival amid a select group of rabid fans and fellow writers partly comprised of Juliette Lewis, Rosario Dawson, Tony Hale and Murray Bartlett. Opus is already set for a theatrical release via A24 on March 14, just about six weeks after its Park City premiere.— NK

Pee Wee as Himself. With recent works Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project and Spaceship Earth testifying to his skill with archival material, documentary director Matt Wolf here delves into another rich archive — the many television appearances of Paul Reubens in his Pee Wee Herman persona — and, drawing on 40 hours of original and intimate interviews, puts it in dialogue with Reubens himself. The two-part work is screening in Sundance’s episodic section — SM

The Thing with Feathers. Author Max Porter was a bookseller, fiction editor at Granta, and psychoanalytic novel before he channelled Emily Dickinson and Ted Hughes to write his first novel, the worldwide success, Grief is a Thing with Feathers. A spare work of magic realism in which a human-sized crow visits a grieving family to guide them through their days (a year of magic thinking indeed!), the work was an international literary phenomenon and was adapted into a play directed by Edna Walsh and starring Cillian Murphy. Now, another great British actor, Benedict Cumberbatch, steps into the lead role in the film adaptation, which marks the dramatic feature debut of director Dylan Southern, previously a chronicler of indie sleaze in documentaries Meet Me in the Bathroom and Shut Up and Play the Hits. — SM

The Librarians. After spotlighting the subject of gun violence, gun control policy and school shootings in Newtown and Us Kids, veteran documentary director Kim A. Snyder shifts her focus to another urgent issue and one we’ll be contemplating seriously in the days ahead: censorship and book banning. Here, Snyder focuses on the FReadom Fighters, a group of Texas librarians combating book banning efforts in their state. In an interview with Variety, Snyder said, “When you hear all of these librarians who have really different types of personalities and are all very different people, all say that they are truly afraid that they can be arrested, that someone is going to come and kill them, you just kind of can’t get over it. It would be horrible for any number of people like say activists like people like me in the space of fighting for gun rights, but librarians? It’s shocking.” — SM

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