The 41st annual Sundance Film Festival kicks off Thursday in Park City, Utah, with a heady slate of 90 feature-length films from around the globe. Each film will also screen in nearby Salt Lake City at least once during the festival, which runs through Feb. 2.
Long at the forefront of breaking the best and most daring in LGBTQ cinema, Sundance will bring the goods again, with 15 dramatic and documentary features on the exciting and largely upbeat roster.
“The list is really celebratory,” Sundance programmer Ash Hoyle said. “Sometimes the queer community, we’re so good at looking at and documenting our own histories and our own struggles — and that’s certainly at play with a lot of these, as well — but the tone this year is overwhelmingly really optimistic and really celebratory.”
Jennifer Lopez stars alongside Diego Luna in an extravagant musical remake of the 1985 queer classic “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” while Bowen Yang co-stars with Lily Gladstone in a reimagining of the 1993 gay favorite “The Wedding Banquet.”
A host of returning Sundance directors and LGBTQ audience favorites will also premiere their latest works, including Ira Sachs (“Peter Hujar’s Day”), Zackary Drucker (“Heightened Scrutiny”) and Elegance Bratton (“Move Ya Body: The Birth of House”).
Last year’s Sundance Film Festival premiered several of the year’s most acclaimed LGBTQ titles, including Jane Schoenbrun’s “I Saw the TV Glow,” which recently picked up nine Dorian Award nominations from GALECA, the Society of LGBTQ+ Entertainment Critics.
“I think this shows how audiences are craving something different and films that are in breaking the mold and filmmakers like Jane who are willing to take risks in their work,” said Sundance’s director of programming, Kim Yutani.
Fortunately for those who can’t attend the festival, more than half of this year’s LGBTQ titles will also be available for ticketed online screening starting Jan. 30.
Here are the LGBTQ features that will premiere this year:
“We’re starting off the festival on Day One with Sophie Hyde’s latest film,” Yutani said. “She’s had many films at the festival — most recently ‘Good Luck to You, Leo Grande’ — but this feels like her most personal film as she looks at intergenerational relationships, with a character who is a filmmaker played by Olivia Colman. Sophie’s own child, Aud Mason-Hyde, is one of the main actors, which adds another layer of things as a close personal story. It’s a really fun film — it’s set in Amsterdam; it’s John Lithgow as you’ve never seen him before.”
“Particularly exciting is Sam Feder’s new film that follows Chase Strangio, the ACLU lawyer who went to the Supreme Court for litigation this year,” Hoyle said. “It’s just one of many really prescient, urgent films that are in the festival this year. Really grateful for Sam’s voice in the program and being able to really meet the moment that we’re in in the U.S. this year.”
“This one is definitely one that’s already sort of buzzing around and people are going to be really excited by,” Hoyle said of the film about two young men who meet in a twin bereavement group and form an unlikely bromance. “Talk about daring — this is a film about messy dark queerness, with a really interesting angle. It’s funny, it’s sexy, and it’s actually one of a great number of films in U.S. Dramatic Competition this year that are written, directed and starred in by a singular voice, James Sweeney.” (available online)
“It has all the right elements, like the fun, starry cast [including Yang and Gladstone] and direction by Andrew Ahn — who made the beloved ‘Spa Night’ and ‘Fire Island,’ of course — and he co-wrote the script with James Schamus, who was the writer of the original ‘Wedding Banquet.’ It’s not a direct remake, but rather it uses the Ang Lee film as more of a launchpad to tell its own story.”
Already a 1985 queer film classic and a 1993 Tony-sweeping musical, “Kiss of the Spider Woman” is reimagined here as a movie musical by director Bill Condon (“Dreamgirls,” “Gods and Monsters”) with stars Lopez and Luna. “This film has such amazing performances and old-school Hollywood grandeur. We couldn’t be happier that this, too, will be one of the buzziest titles at the festival.”
“This doc by Elegance Bratton looks at the history of house music and its birthplace in Chicago and of course the queer Black community from which the scene erupted,” Hoyle said. “This film has an amazing cast of characters, folks who really touched and started the scene. And it’s really insightful around how some of the history of race in the city and gender politics played into the evolution of house music and which communities have taken it forward and of course gotten credit and financial success from it.”
This documentary feature from Zackary Drucker, who co-directed 2023’s “The Stroll,” explores the lives of two legendary transgender women: English model April Ashley and French singer Amanda Lear. “This is a really fun title that looks at two divergent lives and how they explore and foil one another in terms of how a person navigates queer community,” said Hoyle, who added that the film is a “fascinating story and a rich look at trans history.”
Hoyle said this narrative feature “feels so nuanced to a degree that it’s really not anything I’ve seen before. It explores gay male affinity spaces and how trans men do and don’t fit into those. It’s also a romantic love story, but it doesn’t shy away from the parts of love and infatuation that are really approximate to jealousy and to competition. As we hear more and more conversation around belonging and inclusivity, this is a film that is really complicating ‘What exactly does that mean? What does that look like? Where is that easy, and where is it really hard?’”
“Ira Sachs [‘Keep the Lights On,’ ‘Passages’] is one of the filmmakers who has played Sundance the most, if not the most,” Yutani said. “This one we were attracted to because it is so different from his other work. I think one of the exciting things about Ira is just how he continues to challenge himself and to work in almost different forms. This is an adaptation of an interview with the artist Peter Hujar, and it’s basically a monologue that Ben Whishaw delivers so exquisitely. This is just a special film that transports you to a different time, a different place, a specific place, and it’s just made with such a delicate touch.”
“This film is a gut punch,” Hoyle said. “It’s a beautiful portrait of the poet laureate of Colorado, Andrea Gibson, who’s a real talent and who’s navigating a really difficult cancer diagnosis with their girlfriend. It’s a beautiful portrait of their relationship and their sort of loving intellectual approach to the process of dying. And then, of course, it’s interwoven with their poetry, which is just relentlessly moving. This is not one to miss, but not one to attend without a full packet of Kleenex.”
This documentary about the life of astronaut Sally Ride “really has everything,” Hoyle said. “It’s got a queer love story, it has an analysis of the implications, and it’s a great way to track the way that being out has changed in the public eye over the years since Sally Ride’s career. It’s also a really incisive look at the culture at NASA, both around queer staff and female staff, in a way that’s just really, really eye-opening. We have here such a triumphant look at our own space program but especially at this time, when we’re seeing gender politics play out in that space so loudly.”
“This is a semi-autobiographical film about a young man who goes back to his hometown in India and is struggling to be true to his own identity with his family,” Yutani said. “The kind of pastoral gay story that it’s telling is a really special one. It’s probably one of the more explicit gay films I’ve seen out of India, too.”
This documentary feature “focuses on a doctor in Milan, Dr. Bini, and we have a very intimate look at how he communicates with his patients, quite a few of whom are dealing with their gender identity,” Yutani said. “If this film offers anything, it’s offering optimism and what medical treatment for all people could be. And it is truly extraordinary to see this doctor at work.”
“This is a period piece about the ’90s, a fun look back into very recent history about a plainclothes police officer who’s entrapping gay men in mall bathrooms and then ends up having an exploration of his own sexuality through the role play that he’s engaging in,” Hoyle said. “One of the things we responded to about this film is just how exquisitely it’s made. We were so excited to see a first-time filmmaker executing technically at the level that Carmen [Emmi] is in a first feature. It’s just beautifully made, really precise and really interesting narrative terrain.”
This feature film from Colombia is centered on a group of misfits who hang out a dive bar that doubles as purgatory, according to the film’s description on Sundance’s website. Yutani described it as a “very attractive film with kind of this weird goth punk feel to it” and said it “completely builds its own landscape that is just totally unique.”
