Category: News

From 1980s rural Arkansas (Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari) to Los Angeles’s Koreatown neighborhood (Andrew Ahn’s Spa Night) to 1910s Hawaii (Kayo Hatta’s Picture Bride)
and beyond, Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander filmmakers have covered
a lot of ground over the years.
To celebrate these filmmakers and their
work during
Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month in the United States (and Asian Heritage Month
in Canada!), we’ve dipped into our archives to put together a list of
coming-of-age stories and intergenerational family dramas that have
played the Sundance Film Festival or gone through Sundance Institute
programs over the years.
In this genre-spanning (but certainly not exhaustive) list, you’ll find LGBTQ+ romances, heartfelt dramas, immigrant stories, and so much more.

Fiction or nonfiction, beginner or auteur, U.S. or international — wherever you find yourself in your creative journey as an independent storyteller, the Sundance Institute has an artist support program for you.

On Sunday evening in Los Angeles, the longest award season in film history came to an end with a couple of monumental firsts at the 2021

At the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, Carey Mulligan’s fearless performance in Emerald Fennell’s dark and daring feminist thriller Promising Young Woman elicited no shortage of dropped jaws at the feature’s world premiere. And on Thursday night at Film Independent’s virtual Independent Spirit Awards, Mulligan was awarded Best Female Lead for her turn as Cassie, a “suspiciously unambitious” med-school dropout on a righteous quest for vengeance. (Fennell — previously known for her work on TV’s Killing Eve — was also awarded Best Screenplay for her debut feature.

Ed. note: This year’s Sundance Ignite x Adobe Short Film Challenge is now open. If you’re an emerging filmmaker ages 18 to 25, submit your short film by April 6 for a chance to be one of 2022’s Sundance Ignite fellows.

To our Sundance community —
After 10 deeply rewarding years, I have decided that it is the right time for me to step down as CEO of the Sundance Institute. Leading this incredible organization through a volatile era in media with the help of such a passionate and talented group of colleagues, artists, audiences, board members, partners, friends, and donors has been one of the greatest joys of my life. As I work with the team and the Board of Trustees to prepare for my departure at the end of this summer, I am confident that Sundance is thriving and poised to begin a transformative new era.

Early Monday morning, 2021’s delayed awards season picked up more steam with the unveiling of the nominees for the 93rd annual Academy Awards. Priyanka Chopra (star of the 2018 Festival film A Kid Like Jake) and Nick Jonas (who was in the 2016 Festival film GOAT) went live to announce the nods across all 23 categories, and we want to congratulate all of the Sundance-supported projects that are up for awards. In total, Sundance-supported projects received 31 nominations (including four out of eight Best Picture nominations).