From Jan. 23 to Feb. 3, the Sundance Film Festival will draw tens of thousands of visitors—last year saw 72,840 in-person attendees—to Park City, Utah, as well as the state capital, Salt Lake City. Between both locations, a constellation of theaters and screening locations will present 88 feature-length films drawn from 33 countries, as well as shorts and episodic projects. This year, roughly half the movies will be available to screen online (from Jan. 30 to Feb. 2) through ticketed streaming times.
Sundance’s continued digital access doesn’t diminish the on-site experience. For the first time, Park City’s sloping and often snow-covered Main Street will become pedestrian only to minimize congestion between the Egyptian Theatre and central events. And throughout the film venues, certain highly anticipated premieres—like Ira Sachs’ Peter Hujar’s Day, Sophie Hyde’s Jimpa, Bill Condon’s Kiss of the Spider Woman, Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, Max Walker-Silverman’s Rebuilding—offer in-person-only first access to upcoming feature films.
Other films benefit from the enveloping Sundance experience. Midnight features—including Opus from Mark Anthony Green and starring Ayo Edebiri, and Bryn Chainey’s Rabbit Trap starring Dev Patel—marry the intensity of the horror genre with heightened opening-night emotions. Matt Wolf’s two-part episodic Paul Reubens documentary, Pee-wee as Himself, will be presented in its entire 205-minute format—to let attendees immerse themselves in the entire story among hundreds of other cinema obsessees.
It’s the banter in-between films, the smattering of cinematic activations, and the Beyond Film programming that perpetuate Sundance’s destination status. The former includes official events hosted by the Sundance Institute, like a conversation around the Power of Story, and Audible, who will host a talk between Olivia Colman and Steven Yeun at the Cinema Café, and welcome people into their Listening Lodge for conversations featuring Jon Hamm, Juliette Lewis, and André Holland.
Though you may catch buzzy debuts like Artopia, By Design, and Ricky online, an in-person cinematic experience arises in spaces like the Sundance ASCAP Music Café and the Sunrise Collective, a home for the Pan-AANHPI community on Main Street. This is furthered by events like IMDbPro Presents: Directors in Focus — A Panel of 2025 Sundance Film Festival Filmmakers, AMC+’s The Intersection of Indigenous Documentary & Narrative Storytelling talk, and the You Bet Your Asteroid NASA Has a Story to Tell conversation by NASA+. As the Sundance Institute considers three locations for the 2027 festival, one of which remains Park City in partnership with Salt Lake City, 2025 and 2026 might also be the last of this particular alchemical combination.
