FILMS WE’RE QUEUING FOR AT SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL
Next week, Sundance will host its final film festival in its longtime home of Park City, Utah, before moving to Boulder, Colorado, in 2027. Here are our top five films we’re looking forward to, featuring diasporic directors and stories.
Animated Short: Cabbage Daddy by Montreal-based Korean-Canadian director Grace An
“When the mind of a bilingual child mirrors absurd translations, their poetic misinterpretations can accidentally produce multiple meanings — and create puns.”
NEXT: If I Go Will They Miss Me by LA-based Black Mexican director Walter Thompson-Hernández
“Twelve-year-old Lil Ant struggles to connect with his father when he begins to see surreal, almost spectral visions of boys drifting around his neighborhood. Their presence reveals a link between father and son, laying bare the threads that bind family, legacy, and place.
Set in the working-class Watts neighborhood in South Los Angeles, writer-director Walter Thompson-Hernández’s moving family drama focuses on a fraught father-son relationship. Big Ant is just out of prison and struggling to reconnect with his wife, Lozita (Danielle Brooks), and adolescent son, Lil Ant, a sensitive artist yearning for a role model. Adapted from his acclaimed short (2022 Sundance Film Festival, Short Film Jury Award: U.S. Fiction), Thompson-Hernández audaciously combines social and magical realism, charting the emotional trajectory of a conflicted dad and his restless son. Dense with allusions to Greek mythology, but grounded in documentary detail, the film has its head in the clouds without losing sight of the street-level conditions that shape its characters’ lives. If I Go Will They Miss Me is a loving, lyrical portrait of life under the LAX flight path.”
Short: Jazz Infernal by Montreal-based Ivorian-Ghanian director Will Niava
“Koffi, a young Ivorian trumpeter, arrives in Montréal with nothing but the legacy of his father to guide him. Lost between the city’s noise and the silence of his past, he must confront his roots to finally find his voice.”
Documentary: Nuisance Bear by Toronto-based Venezuelan-Canadian director Gabriela Osio Vanden & Jack Weisman
“A polar bear is forced to navigate a human world of tourists, wildlife officers, and hunters as its ancient migration collides with modern life. When a sacred predator is branded a nuisance, it becomes unclear who truly belongs in this shared landscape.
Filmmakers Gabriela Osio Vanden and Jack Weisman return to Churchill, Manitoba — affectionately known as the “Polar Bear Capital of the World” — to deepen the inquiry begun in their award-winning short film. The result is a striking portrait of the fraught coexistence between polar bears and humans, guided by an Inuit narrator whose insights resist simplification.
The film traces this relationship with nuance, revealing how these arctic creatures deal with being constantly monitored, photographed, and redirected. There is a thrill in watching a polar bear outwit human efforts to contain it, underscoring the bears’ resilience and the fragility of the systems that attempt to control them.
By challenging the conventions of a nature documentary and favoring confrontation over moralism, Nuisance Bear invites us to reconsider our assumptions about wildlife as spectacle.”
U.S. Drama: Hot Water BY NY-BASED SYRIAN-AMERICAN Ramzi Bashour
“After he’s kicked out of his Indiana high school, an American kid and his Lebanese mom hit the road west.
Ramzi Bashour’s lyrical debut feature is a rippling reflection on westward motion. Expansive landscapes literally and narratively unfurl epic canvases large enough to hold this duo’s dual exploration of home. Lubna Azabal (Strangers, 2008 Sundance Film Festival) and Daniel Zolghadri (Lurker, 2025 Sundance Film Festival) deliver remarkably connected central performances and are joined by Festival familiar Dale Dickey (Winter’s Bone, 2010 Sundance Film Festival). A personal story tracing the impact of a longitudinal experience of this country — its variety and the unusual circumstances under which any person traverses it — grapples with definitions of home, histories of diaspora, and the disruptive but good work of education. An allegory about the way forward motion often leads to return, Hot Water brings beginnings and endings into insightful alignment.”
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