Sundance Film Festival 2026
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“Trojan Horse Filmmaking”: Adam and Zack Khalil on Aanikoobijigan [ancestor/great-grandparent/great-grandchild]
In 1990, a federal law was passed requiring the return of Indigenous human remains and sacred items to their rightful communities. More than three decades later, most of those ancestors are still waiting—boxed, catalogued, and stored in museum basements and university archives. In Aanikoobijigan, filmmakers Adam and Zack Khalil turn their attention to that unfinished work, following the long, often painful effort to bring ancestors home for proper burial. The film centers on a group of tribal specialists in Michigan who carry out this work day to day, navigating institutions built to hold on to what was never theirs. For […]
by Elissa Suh on Feb 5, 2026 -
What I Saw, Heard, and Felt as Sundance Bid Farewell to Park City—and Robert Redford
“What I’m saying is, if you want to go, I won’t stop you.” At the final Park City edition of Sundance last week, my 14th consecutive one, I contemplated this line from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid daily. That’s because a gorgeous, Western-style artwork painted on plywood by local artist Ryan Williams stood not far from The Library Theater, displaying the dearly departed Sundance Kid Robert Redford (who passed away last September at age 89) next to these famous words spoken by his character. The quote felt like a homegrown farewell steeped in bittersweet resignation, an ingenious marking of […]
by Tomris Laffly on Feb 4, 2026 -
“These Guys Don’t Miss”: Padraic McKinley on Directing Ethan Hawke and Russell Crowe in The Weight
When Padraic McKinley first received The Weight screenplay from producers Nathan and Simon Fields, he loved the atmospheric world it summoned forth. Original screenwriter Matthew Booi, along with Leo Scherman and Matthew Chapman, had created something special with this Western-adjacent Depression-era crime-thriller. But as a longtime editor across film and TV (Igby Goes Down, Dexter), as well as a producer with strong instincts about story and pacing, McKinley knew the screenplay still needed work. Ethan Hawke had a similar feeling about the original script. McKinley asked him to play lead character Samuel Murphy, an incarcerated man desperate to reunite with […]
by Tomris Laffly on Jan 27, 2026 -
“We Can Keep Living in a Glacial World”: Sara Dosa on Time and Water
A splendid yet elegiac homage to dying, receding, failing, yet magnificent glaciers, Sara Dosa’s Time and Water, a documentary produced with National Geographic and Sandbox Films, is awe-inspiring precisely because it makes you feel helpless to move. That’s what awe is, after all. The film makes use of a treasure trove of archival materials, some of it supplied by Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason and his family, who lived a lot of their lives recording them and raising posterity alongside the glaciers. Standing still with these images and sounds (in front of the largest screen only, please) and catching snippets of […]
by Ritesh Mehta on Jan 27, 2026 -
“What Is a Golf Course but the Gentrification of Land?”: Rafael Manuel on Filipiñana
In Filipiñana, tension often lives inside the image itself: a desiccated pine tree creaks against a bright blue sky; mangos left to rot on the branch. There is beauty here, but also decay. Rafael Manuel’s debut feature expands on his 2020 Berlinale-winning short (which is streamable courtesy of The Criterion Channel) to offer an extended yet precise parable about class, memory, and quiet violence in his home country, the Philippines—filtered through the microcosm of a golf course on the outskirts of Manila during a scorching summer day. The film follows Isabel (Jorrybell Agoto), a new tee girl, as she acclimates […]
by Elissa Suh on Jan 26, 2026 -
“A Lot of Disabled People Don’t Get to Take Big Risks”: Liz Sargent on Directing Her Sister in Take Me Home
Take Me Home is a film about a caregiver, and the spirit of caregiving infused the entire production. Writer-director Liz Sargent based the feature, her first, on her short of the same name, which premiered at Sundance in 2023. It stars Anna Sargent, her sister, as a woman with a cognitive disability who is the caregiver for her aging adoptive parents. In fact, this is a family of mutual caregivers whose routines are shattered during a central Florida heatwave. How Anna navigates her new emotional reality forms the story’s core, and in striving to locate her character’s need for autonomy, Sargent […]
by Ritesh Mehta on Jan 26, 2026 -
“It’s Like Funny Ordinary People”: Jay Duplass on See You When I See You
Twenty three years have passed since Jay and Mark Duplass made a seven-minute short titled This is John for $3—yes, three dollars—that premiered in Sundance in 2003 and effectively launched their careers. This year, Jay (who recently directed the intimately sweet The Baltimorons) is back in Park City as a director with See You When I See You, a darkly funny dramedy about coping with PTSD—and your family. “It feels excellent,” Duplass says about his return to the Utah mountains that’s hosting the Sundance Film Festival for the final time, before next year’s move to Boulder, CO. “Some of my […]
by Tomris Laffly on Jan 26, 2026 -
“We Will Be Passing Out Little NOT AI Buttons to Our Audiences”: Valerie Veatch on Her Sundance-premiering Ghost in the Machine
Until now, the Silicon Valley hype cycle has defined the terms of the artificial-intelligence debate, with advocates predicting universal affluence and the end of all diseases while critics worry that computers will steal not only our jobs but our creative pursuits too. Valerie Veatch’s Ghost in the Machine proposes a different possibility altogether: that “AI,” if you can even call it that, is just the latest in a long line of grift-y attempts by powerful, exclusionary white guys to remake the whole world in their own image. Connecting the dots between AI’s origins and such lamentable historical low points as the discredited […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jan 26, 2026 -
“Fake Stuff Makes Me Feel Sick”: John Wilson on The History of Concrete
The History of Concrete, John Wilson’s first feature-length film, is far stranger and more compelling than the title suggests—and a perfect continuation of his oft-meandering, always philosophical practice. Yes, there are novel factoids about Ancient Rome, the removal of gum from city sidewalks and the oldest concrete road in America, but the plot often shifts and transmogrifies, in true Wilsonian fashion, before circling back to the topic at hand. For some, this constant zooming—out, in, away entirely—can be frustratingly disorienting. For those who enjoy the visual approximation of falling down a (preferably weed-induced) Wikipedia rabbit hole, this is non-fiction at […]
by Natalia Keogan on Jan 24, 2026 -
“Her Work Expanded What Lesbian Representation Could Look Like on Screen”: Brydie O’Connor on her Sundance-debuting Barbara Forever
“It’s been my own life that I’ve put on the screen,” pioneering artist Barbara Hammer says in VO as we witness her striking poses, flexing muscles, and standing defiantly naked before her lens. “My life has been lived in film.” Indeed, the taboo-shattering lesbian/avant-garde filmmaker, who died of ovarian cancer at the age of 79 in 2019, left behind an archive comprised of 80 films, along with a treasure trove of unreleased footage, audio interviews, personal photos and more. It’s an extraordinary body of work, put to skilled cinematic use by Brydie O’Connor—who likewise collaborated with Hammer’s widow Florrie Burke […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jan 24, 2026
