Your Own Personal Sundance 

• Courtesy Photo

• Jemal Countess
• Sundance senior programmer John Nein

Sundance Film Festival 2025 interview: Programmer John Nein
Veteran programmer discusses choosing festival films
By Scott Renshaw

Sundance Film Festival senior programmer John Nein spoke with City Weekly on Dec. 11, 2024 about the just-announced festival program. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

City Weekly: Over the course of the 20-ish years that you've been a programmer, what have you seen change the most in terms of the way the programming team approaches their task?
JN: You know, it's one thing that beautifully hasn't changed that much. It's a very mission-driven sense of programming that is in many ways non-hierarchical, meaning ... this group of people each approach films in different ways—they bring different backgrounds, different perspectives. And what we hope to do is have conversations about the films that allow us as a group to feel like we know what it is that is being represented by the film, what it's speaking to, how it represents a new voice or a new story or something we haven't heard. ... So, that sense of uplifting new stories, new voices, and the way that the group approaches that? That actually hasn't changed.

CW: Having different perspectives is obviously part of the strength of a team. But I'm sure there are also times when you as an individual think, "Why can't you all just see this movie the way I see it?"
JN: Absolutely, it happens to every one of us. And because we have such a tightly-curated program, that means films that you love ultimately don't make it in. I do feel that sometimes we all probably have a film where we tried our best to convince our colleagues of what was special to us, but there's a real respect amongst our group. Every film has its moment, has a chance to be discussed, and I think in the end, we all accept that the group wisdom works.

CW: It's tempting, especially in a time that feels tumultuous, to look for "big picture" trends. Is that sort of a fool's errand, considering the simple logistics of how long it takes a film to get made, that chasing timeliness just doesn't work?
JN: I think you're right to point out that there's sort of a time lag, that movies take time to get made. In many cases, the most interesting work doesn't necessarily deal with things literally, but somehow has this way of expressing something we all sense, but aren't able to articulate. ... I don't think any of us can help but stand back and say, "What does this tell us about where we are?" You do sense, of course, that we're talking about things that are maybe not limited to one year; they're part of what's happening over the course of many years—films that are about resilience, or working people dealing with hardship, dealing with struggle, ... dealing with loss in some way, recognizing the fragility of our lives in the world. Does that surprise me in the time we're living in? No, not really.

CW: Is geographical diversity one of the things you look at, in terms maybe of not having too many urban-set stories?
JN: It is, amongst many, many other things, so it ends up being a balance. But yeah, you want to see stories that represent all aspects of our lives in the world. And by the world, I mean the world. So one of those geographic diversities we look for is international, looking for stories from places where we've never seen stories before. ... There are times when we're very much aware that we're showcasing a film from an area that does not have quite as much room in the spotlight. And that's true in the United States as well. That's always been an important part of American independent cinema, this idea of regionality, and that we're not just seeing stories set in New York and Los Angeles.

CW: There are so many options when it comes to deciding which films "from the collection" will be showcased in a festival. What was the thinking behind deciding on El Norte and Unzipped for 2025.
JN: One of the things I have loved seeing is how well repertory cinema is doing all across the country—knowing that those films are really finding new audiences, in some cases audiences who have never seen the film before but are really curious and thirsty to take in these older films. El Norte we are programming because we are celebrating the Sundance Feature Film Program and its founder, Michelle Satter—the screenwriting and directing labs that were the birth of Sundance, they came before the festival—and El Norte was developed at the very first Sundance lab in 1981. Gregory Nava's film about a brother and sister who flee political violence in Guatemala and come to the United States [is] very relevant nowadays as well, but it's really interesting to see it play over a context of more than 40 years as we think about immigration. [The Isaac Mizrahi documentary] Unzipped, which will have its 30th anniversary in a new digital restoration, was really a fashion doc before fashion docs were fashionable. ... It was then followed by many, many other fashion docs, some of which we played, that popularized this sense of fashion as art, but I think at the time, it was totally groundbreaking.

CW: What is sort of your final thought on how potential attendees should look at the program?
JN: People will always look at the program and see notable names ... and there are also the doc subjects [that are familiar]. I think those things always catch the headlines, and we're glad they do. But I always try to push people toward taking a risk. Take a risk on a film you don't know, on something where maybe you don't know the star, because there's so much incredible work in the program.

• Sundance Institute
• Jimpa

Programming your own personal Sundance
Blocs of 2025 Sundance Film Festival movies for a variety of different interests
By Scott Renshaw

The wonderful thing about the Sundance Film Festival is also one of the challenging things about it: You don't know what you're going to get. From the fact that many of the entries are world premieres to the reality that most of the filmmakers don't have an established track record, you're always going in a bit cold when you're buying your tickets, or deciding to stand in that wait-list line.

Still, there are at least some general ways to program a personal festival that might be most up your alley. Here are a few blocs of four or five features that fit generally within a similar area of potential viewer interest—with the caveat that we've seen none of them, and there's a lot of educated guesswork going on at this point.

For the star-watcher. Let's face it: Some folks do like to get a glimpse of celebrities while hanging out at a film festival. While the 2025 lineup isn't chockful of paparazzi-bait, there are definitely a few options for those who want to make sure their oddball indies feature at least a couple of familiar faces. Bill Condon (Chicago, Dreamgirls) directs the film adaptation of the stage musical version of Kiss of the Spider Woman, starring Diego Luna and Jennifer Lopez. Ayo Edebiri (The Bear), John Malkovich and Juliette Lewis headline Opus, a midnight movie offering about a writer invited to the estate of a long-vanished pop star. Olivia Colman plays a woman taking her non-binary child to visit her own gay father (John Lithgow) in Jimpa. Alison Brie and Dave Franco are a couple whose relationship faces a supernatural challenge in Together.

• Sundance Institute
• Sly Lives!

For the music-lover. Sundance loves documentaries about musicians and music scenes, and this year is no exception. Tejano music legend Selena Quintanilla gets a profile in Selena y Los Dinos. Another musician who died too young also gets a documentary study in It's Never Over, Jeff Buckley. Move Ya Body: The Birth of House explores the origins of "house music" from the underground nightclubs of Chicago. Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius) explores the impact of fame on Black artists through the life and legacy of funk pioneer Sly Stone. One to One: John & Yoko focuses on 18 months in New York City that changed the lives of the celebrated artistic couple.

• Sundance Institute
• Bubble & Squeak

For the comedy fan. Sure, Sundance covers a lot of serious, heavy subjects, but quirky humor isn't hard to find. Bubble & Squeak sends a married couple into a fictional foreign country, smuggling an unexpected banned substance: cabbages. In one of the oddest loglines of the festival, a woman (Juliette Lewis) is transformed into a chair in By Design. Stand-up gets mixed with an explosively controversial topic as comedian Noam Shuster-Eliassi explores the Israeli/Palestinian conflict in Coexistence, My Ass! A film crew meaning to travel to Argentina ends up in the wrong country, and tries to manufacture a cultural trend in Magic Farm. Two men become friends at a bereavement support group for people who have lost twin siblings in Twinless.

• Sundance Institute
• Sugar Babies

About the virtual world. The complexities of people juggling their IRL and virtual identities remain a rich vein for storytellers to mine. In OBEX, an isolated man becomes obsessed with a computer game. A zombie apocalypse has an impact on a podcaster's audience in Didn't Die. A Chinese-American "cam girl" navigates her professional and family lives in Bunnylovr. The documentary Sugar Babies profiles a young woman in rural Louisiana trying to make a living enticing male patrons. And the Chinese documentary The Dating Game follows young men of the "one child policy" generation navigating their demographic disadvantage both on dating apps and in the real world.

• Sundance Institute
• Rabbit Trap

Scary stuff. The Blair Witch Project, Saw, The Witch, The Babadook—Sundance has a great track record of introducing horror classics. In The Thing With Feathers, a widowed single father (Benedict Cumberbatch) finds the family apartment seeming to host a malevolent entity. A musician and her husband move to a remote house in Wales, disturbing the ancient folk magic in Rabbit Trap. Fairy tale legend gets a body-horror twist in The Ugly Stepsister. A gravedigger tries to resurrect the man of her dreams, Frankenstein-style, in Dead Lover. And the psychological thriller The Things You Kill finds a university professor coercing his gardener into an act of violence.

• Paramount+
• Lolla: The Story of Lollapalooza

Sundance 2025 Preview – Episodic
A look at 10 years of Sundance giving a showcase to episodic stories
By Bill Frost

The Sundance Institute's Episodic Story Lab—an extension of its Feature Film Program designed to help writers learn how to develop and sustain stories and characters over multiple chapters—was launched in 2014. It's about creating TV shows without invoking "TV"; "Episodic" sounds more elegant and Sundance-appropriate.

This year's Episodic program entries include Bucks County, USA (a five-part docuseries about a pair of teen Pennsylvania friends navigating polarizing political beliefs); Hal & Harper (an eight-episode family drama starring Mark Ruffalo, Betty Gilpin, and Lili Reinhart); and Pee-Wee as Himself (a two-part documentary about the late Paul "Pee-Wee Herman" Reubens). The 2025 Episodic Pilot Showcase, which presents the first episode of a potential series, will screen the world premieres of Bulldozer and Chasers, with both dramas being made available to the public to stream online. The debut installment of an Australian docuseries, Never Get Busted!, will also screen its world premiere as part of the Episodic Pilot Showcase.

These series may eventually make their way to a cable network or streaming service—more likely the latter, since cable isn't taking the same financial risks it did 10 years ago. It's also possible that you've already seen previous Sundance Episodic premieres like these:

Penelope (2024; currently streaming on Netflix): Filmmaker/actor Mark Duplass bankrolled Penelope himself, and co-wrote all eight episodes with frequent collaborator Mel Eslyn, who also directed. The series follows 16-year-old Penelope (Megan Stott), who, disenchanted with the tech and pace of society, leaves home to start a new life in the wilderness. It's a YA-adjacent story with an indie-film vibe that Duplass felt compelled to make. "There's a system in place for independent film, but there's not in television," he told Deadline. "We're going to have to do this in TV, or else this stuff's going to die."

Lolla: The Story of Lollapalooza (2024; currently streaming on Paramount+): When Jane's Addiction frontman Perry Farrell launched Lollapalooza in 1991 as a touring festival featuring wildly disparate underground musical acts, the industry thought he was crazy. That sentiment hasn't changed—just ask his former bandmates—but the weird and wiley Lolla inspired countless oddly-named music fests. It also eventually got too big and mainstream, as Farrell admits; he even denounced his festival over the inclusion of metal titans Metallica in '96. As a rock-doc, Lolla: The Story of Lollapalooza pulls no punches.

• Hulu
• Quarter Life Poetry

Quarter Life Poetry (2019; currently streaming on Hulu): Samantha Jayne's Quarter Life Poetry began as an Instagram thread, morphed into the book Quarter Life Poetry: Poems for the Young, Broke & Hangry, and then premiered at Sundance in 2019 as a series of nine five-minute vignettes. This may not seem like enough time to tell a story, but every episode—each focused on a different anxiety—is masterfully complete in its brevity. Some installments are musical, some are fantastical, and most are painfully accurate about corporate office mundanity (if you know, you know). You'll never email your boss again.

Wild Wild Country (2018; currently streaming on Netflix): There are cult documentaries, and then there's Wild Wild Country, a genre benchmark that went on to win an Emmy and inspire an episode of the mockumentary comedy series Documentary Now! The six-part series chronicles the arrival of religious guru Bhagwan Rajneesh and his disciples near the small Oregon town of Antelope in 1981. Locals and the press painted Rajneesh's commune as the next Jonestown and a threat, but they established their own government, stockpiled guns and had loud sex all night—what's more American than that?

• Max
• The Jinx

The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst (2015; currently streaming on Max): If the jaw-dropping finale of The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst hasn't been spoiled for you over the past 10 years, you're in for a true-crime treat. New York real estate heir Robert Durst was suspected of being involved in the 1982 disappearance of his wife, the execution-style murder of a journalist in 2000, and the death of his neighbor in 2001. Durst skated on the first two and was acquitted of the third, but he kept talking to documentarians, sealing his fate. Part Two, a 2024 follow-up docuseries, is also a great watch.

Other past Sundance Episodic series: Willie Nelson and Family (2023), Gentefied (2020), P-Valley (2020), Work in Progress (2019), State of the Union (2019), Wu-Tang Clan: Of Mics and Men (2019), and O.J.: Made in America (2016).

• Jovelle Tamayo
• For the first time, Park City’s historic (and congestion-prone) Main Street will be closed to vehicle traffic during the 2025 festival.

Sundance Film Festival 2025 “How To” FAQ
The basics for experiencing this year’s festival
By Scott Renshaw

Even if you're a veteran of Sundances past, there are always at least a few things that change in the logistics. Here's a quick-and-dirty look at how to attend the 2025 festival.

Q: I don't have tickets yet. Is it too late?
A: Definitely not. While most festival passes are sold-out—and some screenings' individual tickets, which went on sale Jan. 16—there will still be some individual festival tickets available at $35 per person per screening. Waitlist tickets are also an option, though availability is always dependent upon demand. You can join a waitlist for a specific screening either through the official festival app, or at the Sundance website. Visit festival.sundance.org/how-to-fest/attend-in-person for full details on the waitlist process.

Q: What about virtual screening options?
A: Select films from the festival program will be available for online screening at festival.sundance.org beginning Thursday, Jan. 30. Those tickets also went on sale Jan. 16, so availability was unclear at press time. Purchase allows on-demand access through Sunday, Feb. 2, so you will not be required to watch your movie at a specific time.

Q: What should I know about attending in-person screenings in Park City?
A: It's always an adventure. Weather conditions and traffic patterns on specific days—it's very hard to get around during weekday commute hours, or onto Main Street during the opening weekend—can have a huge impact, so give yourself plenty of time to get where you need to be, understanding you should always try to be at your screening venue at least 30 minutes before scheduled showtime. Festival shuttles will generally be your best option, though it can actually be faster to walk between certain venues. There is shuttle-serviced free parking at the Richardson Flat Park & Ride (3345 E. Richardson Flat Rd.), but limited paid parking around Park City and no vehicle parking at festival venues.

Q: What about SLC screenings?
A: There are only two SLC venues this year—the Broadway Centre Cinemas and Rose Wagner Center. Both are easily accessible from the Gallivan Center TRAX stop, and only a 10-15 minute walk between them. If parking downtown, you can easily choose one spot and not have to move, though the parking at the Broadway Centre itself will not validate for a full day.