Let’s face it, all of January is the Sundance Film Festival. From packing and picking your personal schedule to traveling to the mountain to zipping between premieres on the mountain and on your computer, the start of this calendar year is jam-packed (as it should be!) with everything 2024 Festival.
That’s why we love seeing projects supported by Sundance Institute through our year-round artist programs, labs, grants, and fellowships in the Festival’s extensive program. This year you can be part of a filmmaker’s Sundance support system by checking out one of these 11 projects. Coming-of-age heartwarmers and gripping documentaries exposing societal injustices are only two of the innovative and collaborative pieces you’ll find here.
Learn about all the projects below and click here to learn more about the Institute’s year-round work that helped bring these stories to life. Single Film Tickets for the 2024 Sundance Film Festival are on sale now, so make sure to add these films to your schedule.
Directors: Dorottya Zurbó and Arun Bhattarai
Section: World Cinema Documentary Competition
2021 Sundance Documentary Film Grant
Available to watch in person and online
Amber is one of the many agents working for the Bhutanese government to measure people’s happiness levels among the remote Himalayan mountains. But will he find his own along the way?
The American Society of Magical Negroes
Director: Kobi Libii
Section: Premieres
2019 January Screenwriters Lab, 2019 Directors and Screenwriters Lab, 2019 the Lynn Auerbach Screenwriting Fellowship.
Available to watch in person
A young man, Aren, is recruited into a secret society of magical Black people who dedicate their lives to a cause of utmost importance: making white people’s lives easier.
Director: Sean Wang
Section: U.S. Dramatic Competition
2023 Directors and Screenwriters Lab, 2022 Sundance Institute | The Asian American Foundation Fellowship, 2020 Sundance Ignite x Adobe Fellowship and Lab
Available to watch in person and online
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.
Director: Juan Mejía Botero
Section: World Cinema Documentary Competition
2021 Sundance Documentary Film Grant – Sundance Institute | Luminate Fund
Available to watch in person and online
In one of Latin America’s most unequal countries, Francia Márquez, a Black Colombian rural activist, challenges the status quo with a presidential campaign that reappropriates the derogatory term “Igualada” — someone who acts as if they deserve rights that supposedly don’t correspond to them — and inspires a nation to dream.
Director: Daphne Matziaraki
Section: World Cinema Documentary Competition
2018 Sundance Documentary Film Fund
Available to watch in person and online
Unresolved historical injustices and climate change raise the stakes in a generations-old conflict between Indigenous pastoralists and white landowners in Laikipia, Kenya, a wildlife conservation haven.
Directors: Anirban Dutta and Anupama Srinivasan
Section: World Cinema Documentary Competition
2020 Sundance Institute | Sandbox Fund
Available to watch in person and online
In the dense forests of the Eastern Himalayas, moths are whispering something to us. In the dark of night, two curious observers shine a light on this secret universe.
Director: River Gallo
Section: U.S. Dramatic Competition
2021 Trans Possibilities Intensive
Available to watch in person and online
Unfolding over the course of Valentine’s Day in New Jersey, a young intersex sex worker must run from the mob after a drug deal goes sideways, forcing him to confront his past.
Director Scott Cummings
Section: NEXT
2016 Art of Non-Fiction Fund
Available to watch in person and online
An experiential portrait depicting Satanists in both the everyday and in the extraordinary as they fight to preserve their lifestyle: magic, mystery, and misanthropy.
Director: Julian Brave NoiseCat
Section: U.S. Documentary Competition
2022 Catalyst Forum, 2022 Sundance Documentary Film Grant
Available to watch in person and online
An investigation into abuse and missing children at an Indian residential school ignites a reckoning on the nearby Sugarcane Reserve.
Directors: Astrid Rondero, Fernanda Valadez
Section: World Cinema Dramatic Competition
2019 Morelia | Sundance Institute Story Lab
Available to watch in person and online
When a cartel gunman is killed, he leaves behind Sujo, his beloved 4-year-old son. The shadow of violence surrounds Sujo during each stage of his life in the isolated Mexican countryside. As he grows into a man, Sujo finds that fulfilling his father’s destiny may be inescapable.
Directors: Brett Story, Stephen Maing
Section: U.S. Documentary Competition
2022 Sundance Documentary Film Grant
Available to watch in person and online
The Amazon Labor Union (ALU) — a group of current and former Amazon workers in New York City’s Staten Island — takes on one of the world’s largest and most powerful companies in the fight to unionize.
