[Pictured: Doppelgängers³]
By Stephanie Ornelas
The sun is shining, the brisket is smoking, and cinephiles are making their way to Austin, Texas, for the 2024 South by Southwest (SXSW) Film & TV Festival, which kicks off tomorrow and runs through March 16. Since we love seeing projects with ties to Sundance Institute impact wider audiences, we’re thrilled that 23 Sundance-supported films are gracing the program this year.
Audiences were introduced to several of the projects listed below during the 2024 Sundance Film Festival back in January. Other films that received support through Institute labs, including Robie Flores’ The In Between and Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian’s Doppelgängers³, will be presented for the first time in Texas.
So, settle in with a plate of barbecue or some breakfast tacos and explore the 23 projects with connections to Sundance Institute screening at SXSW, from provocative documentaries to sinister horror films. If you’ll be in attendance, be sure to add these titles to your screening schedule. And to learn more about the programs and initiatives mentioned in this list, click here.
Black Box Diaries — 2024 Sundance Film Festival, 2023 Documentary Film Program
Logline: Journalist Shiori Ito embarks on a courageous investigation of her own sexual assault in an improbable attempt to prosecute her high-profile offender. Her quest becomes a landmark case in Japan, exposing the country’s outdated judicial and societal systems.
The Bleacher — 2024 Sundance Film Festival
Logline: The disappearance of her sock at a local laundromat sends a fragile Rita over the edge. Hellbent on finding it, she searches deep and gets sucked into a washing machine, entering an otherworldly cycle from which she may never escape.
Bug Diner — 2024 Sundance Film Festival
Logline: A dissatisfied marriage, a secret crush, and workplace fantasies come to a head in a diner run by a mole with a hot ass.
Dìdi (弟弟) — 2024 Sundance Film Festival, 2023 Feature Film Program, 2022 Sundance Institute | The Asian American Foundation Fellowship
Logline: In 2008, during the last month of summer before high school begins, an impressionable 13-year-old Taiwanese American boy learns what his family can’t teach him: how to skate, how to flirt, and how to love your mom.
Doppelgängers³ — 2019 Producers Program, Sundance Institute | Sandbox Fund
Logline: Doppelgängers³ draws on the experience of diasporas to challenge the commercialisation of the moon. Through encounters with doppelgängers and meetings with scientists, visionaries and cultural inventors, Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian and her doppelgängers offer an experimental vision and template for a future diaspora beyond Earth.
Dream Creep — 2024 Sundance Film Festival
Logline: A couple awakens in the night to sounds emanating from an unlikely orifice.
EVERY LITTLE THING — 2024 Sundance Film Festival
Logline: Amid the glamour of Hollywood, Los Angeles, a woman finds herself on a transformative journey as she nurtures wounded hummingbirds, unraveling a visually captivating and magical tale of love, fragility, healing, and the delicate beauty in tiny acts of greatness.
Ghostlight — 2024 Sundance Film Festival
Logline: When a construction worker unexpectedly joins a local theater’s production of Romeo and Juliet, the drama onstage starts to mirror his own life.
Girls Will Be Girls — 2024 Sundance Film Festival
Logline: In a strict boarding school nestled in the Himalayas, 16-year-old Mira discovers desire and romance. But her sexual, rebellious awakening is disrupted by her mother who never got to come of age herself.
I Saw the TV Glow — 2024 Sundance Film Festival
Logline: Teenager Owen is just trying to make it through life in the suburbs when his classmate introduces him to a mysterious late-night TV show — a vision of a supernatural world beneath their own. In the pale glow of the television, Owen’s view of reality begins to crack.
The In Between — 2019 Documentary Film Program
Logline: Following the death of her brother, filmmaker Robie Flores returns to her hometown Eagle Pass on the Texas/Mexico border, wanting to turn back time. She collides with unruly experiences of adolescence — quinceañeras, Rio Grande river excursions, teen makeovers and beyond — that invite her to soak up the details of the home her brother adored and she ignored.
It’s What’s Inside — 2024 Sundance Film Festival
Logline: A pre-wedding party descends into an existential nightmare when an estranged friend shows up with a mysterious suitcase.
Kneecap — 2024 Sundance Film Festival
Logline: There are 80,000 native Irish speakers in Ireland. 6,000 live in the North of Ireland. Three of them became a rap group called Kneecap. This anarchic Belfast trio become unlikely figureheads of a civil rights movement to save their mother tongue.
Love Machina — 2024 Sundance Film Festival
Logline: Futurists Martine and Bina Rothblatt commission an advanced humanoid AI named Bina48 to transfer Bina’s consciousness from a human to a robot in an attempt to continue their once-in-a-galaxy love affair for the rest of time.
Matta and Matto — 2024 Sundance Film Festival
Logline: In a time when all interpersonal closeness is forbidden, the hourly hotel Vaip offers wondrous rooms where guests snuggle up to devices built with great skill and let themselves fall into the perfect illusion of human touch.
The Moogai — 2024 Sundance Film Festival
Logline: A young Aboriginal couple bring home their second baby. What should be a joyous time takes a sinister turn as the mother starts seeing a malevolent spirit she is convinced is trying to take her baby.
Never Look Away — 2024 Sundance Film Festival
Logline: New Zealand–born groundbreaking CNN camerawoman Margaret Moth risks it all to show the reality of war from inside the conflict, staring down danger and confronting those who perpetuate it.
Omni Loop — 2018 Catalyst Forum, 2017 Screenwriters Lab, 2017 Feature Film Program Latinx Fellowship, 2017 Producers Program, 2017 Mark Silverman Honoree
Logline: For years, Zoya Lowe has been traveling back in time, reliving the final week of her life without variation — until one day, something unexpected happens, and she seizes the chance to do everything she ever wanted.
Penelope — 2024 Sundance Film Festival
Logline: Feeling out of place in modern society, a 16-year-old is drawn into the unknown wilderness, where she begins forming a new life for herself.
The Rainbow Bridge — 2024 Sundance Film Festival
Logline: Tina and her elderly dog MeeMoo discover a clinic promising human-to-pet communication. However, two sinister doctors uncover a bond between them so strong, it transcends time and space. They might be the key to something greater, but at what cost?
Sasquatch Sunset — 2024 Sundance Film Festival
Logline: A year in the life of a singular family.
Say Hi After You Die — 2024 Sundance Film Festival
Logline: A grieving woman believes her deceased best friend has come back to visit her… as a porta-potty.
Shé (Snake) — 2024 Sundance Film Festival
Logline: Fei is the top violinist in her elite youth orchestra. When another Chinese violinist arrives to challenge her place, Fei’s internal demons take external form. They whisper to her, urging her to be the best, no matter the cost.
