The final Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, is finally upon us. After a month-long process of Sundance selecting its new location, The Rolling Tape could not be more thrilled to have a team on the ground this year to experience the largest independent American festival in its original location before its move to Boulder, Colorado, in 2027.
It’s only right to have one final fest in Park City after its founder, Robert Redford, passed away in September 2025, and the buzz of the lineup reflects the overall significance of the event. This year, three contributors are heading to Park City: Danny Jarabek, Sara Ciplickas, and Cameron Ritter, who share their insights into the lineup and their most anticipated titles.
Danny Jarabek
As a first-time Sundancer and last-time Park City festival attendee, it’s an absolute joy to be joining the thousands of movie fans who have descended upon the Utah mountain town every January for decades. A staple of independent cinema, Sundance is a bucket list item I’m eager to check off, and the lineup is a great opportunity to continue celebrating emerging and independent voices in filmmaking. Continuing my press interest from Tribeca in 2025, covering environment and climate-based stories, there’s a handful of documentaries I’ll be seeking, including Nuisance Bear, The Lake, Time and Water, and Sentient, as well as some narrative films included below.
In the Blink of an Eye, directed by Andrew Stanton
A surefire sign of success for me in 2025 movies was a multi-storyline structure spanning a century or longer. Sound of Falling and Silent Friend were my favorite films I saw on the festival circuit, featuring three and four distinct timelines across 100+ years. I’m hoping to keep that streak of success alive with Andrew Stanton’s triptych-structured In the Blink of an Eye. The WALL-E and Finding Nemo director captures thousands of years at three distinct moments in human history to interweave ideas about love, loss, and connection to each other and our natural world. The film will be available on Hulu in February, but the description alone is worth the opportunity to witness Stanton’s work on the big screen. Add in Kate McKinnon, Rashida Jones, and Daveed Diggs, and this film skyrockets to the top of my Sundance most anticipated list.
Time and Water, directed by Sara Dosa
Sara Dosa catapulted through the Sundance documentary to the Oscar nomination pipeline in 2022 with her tragic but beloved presentation of Katia and Maurice Krafft’s love story with each other and volcanoes in Fire of Love (2022). She returns to Sundance this year with Time and Water, aiming to harmonize familial relationships with the volatile conditions of the natural world once again. Through the archives of Andri Snær Magnason, his writings detail the loss of his surroundings, grandparents, and glaciers alike. If Fire of Love was any indication, Dosa has a supreme ability to navigate the rawness of both human emotion and environmental phenomena cinematically.
Kogonada’s step into the studio system with Sony for his third feature, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey (2025), was a bumpy road to say the least, but in returning to Sundance, the video essayist turned feature director appears to be channeling the signature tone and style of his earlier work. Much more in the vein of Columbus (2017) and After Yang (2021), zi features a young woman haunted by visions of her future self, blending sci-fi and the supernatural in a fusion of romance, memories, and existentialism. If the recurring presence of Haley Lu Richardson in his first two films is any indication of good luck, Kogonada fans will rejoice in knowing the pair reteams for the Hong Kong-set film.
Sara Ciplickas
As this is my first Sundance festival, and the last in Park City, I am very excited to take a discovery route — opting to plan less and walk into more films blind. I find that many writers enter screenings with high anticipation or expectations, which ultimately affects their reviews — wanting to love something they really wanted to see or avoiding titles because the promotion or synopsis doesn’t necessarily pique interest. When I covered the Tribeca Film Festival in 2025, I chose to focus only on documentaries, setting a new challenge for myself to dive deeper into a genre I didn’t quite understand. I plan to continue that trend, focusing significantly on documentaries, as Sundance 2026 is heavy on this medium, and to continue championing and seeking out narrative features by women.
LADY, directed by Olive Nwosu
Director/Writer Olive Nwosu takes us to Lagos to follow a “strong woman in a man’s world” — an independent cab driver who meets a band of sex workers and forms a sisterhood. I am very excited to return to African cinema after one of my favorite films of 2025 came from Kenya. After seeing only a handful of narratives from Kenya and Nigeria, I am eager to see a perspective from the present, understanding the shared experiences of women globally.
Wicker, directed by Eleanor Wilson and Alex Huston Fischer
“A fisherwoman asks a basketmaker to weave her a husband.” From one sentence alone, I was ready to enter what sounded like a weird, wild ride. The combination of Olivia Colman, Alexander Skarsgård, and Peter Dinklage has me hooked. Colman has an innate ability to bring odd characters to life with empathy and kindness, and this film seems to capture all the heart and comedy of an outcast fighting societal norms. And I am always one to champion a romance led by a woman over the age of 25.
Barbara Forever, directed by Brydie O’Connor
Seeking out documentaries, it should be a fun, meta journey to learn more about filmmaker Barbara Hammer. O’Connor previously directed a documentary-short, Love, Barbara, in 2022, focusing on Hammer’s life through her partner, Florrie Burke’s, perspective. It will be interesting to see how she takes the same subject matter to create a more intimate experience of Hammer, utilizing mostly archive footage and Hammer’s own voice.
Cameron Ritter
This will be my second time on the ground in Park City for Sundance, and I’m honored to be a part of The Rolling Tape’s first accredited team to head to this prestigious festival. I’m hoping to focus my coverage on both the U.S. Dramatic Competition films, as well as looking at the reception of buzzier titles like I Want Your Sex and The Moment (big festival for Charli XCX!). I noticed last year’s festival was lacking in hits compared to prior years, so I’m looking for those in both expected and unexpected places.
One In a Million, directed by Itab Azzam and Jack MacInnes
One In a Million follows Isra’a, a Syrian refugee, and her family over a ten-year stretch in which they flee from Syria and settle in Germany. I was expecting this to be a pretty simplistic documentary, but I was pretty moved by its depth. It’s a film about family, tradition, cultural expectation, and struggling to assimilate into a new place. I’d highly recommend this doc if you want insight into the long-term impact of refugees who are forced to leave their home countries.
Once Upon a Time in Harlem, directed by William and David Greaves
A film fifty years in the making, Once Upon a Time in Harlem takes a look back on the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s through the eyes of the artists who lived through it. Filmmaker William Greaves and a small film crew, including his son David, orchestrated a party with these visionaries in 1972 and filmed their interactions reminiscing on the titans of the Renaissance and their own impacts on the Black experience in New York over the years. I found their discussions and just the overall wealth of insight and information to be particularly compelling, and it’s sure to make you take a deep dive into artists like Duke Ellington and Langston Hughes.
I Want Your Sex, directed by Gregg Araki
Ever since Licorice Pizza(2021), I’ve been holding on to an unprecedented amount of Cooper Hoffman stock, and he seems to deliver with each performance. This film will mark Araki’s first feature film in 12 years and boasts a cast featuring Olivia Wilde, Daveed Diggs, and emerging film star Charli XCX. I’m excited to see Hoffman tackle yet another role in which he pines for the affections of an older woman, and incredibly pumped to see Araki’s return to the big screen!
Courtesy of The Rolling Tape Team
Feature Image Still from ‘I Want Your Sex’ Courtesy of Sundance Institute