Sundance Film Festival Announces 2022 Lineup

The revered Sundance Film Festival is set to run from January 20-30 next year, and they just unveiled their full lineup. The Festival will be unfolding both in person in the ski town of Park City, Utah and through updated online systems for viewers from home.

Along with the online program, Sundance will also be playing eight feature films for their Satellite Screens program. These films will play at seven independent cinemas across the country during Sundance’s last weekend (January 28-30). These titles are Alice; Emergency; Every Day in Kaimukī; Free Chol Soo Lee; Honk for Jesus, Save Your Soul; La Guerra Civil; Marte Um (Mars One); and Sirens. Additional Short Films will be added to the program as well.

The festival’s lineup includes the directorial debut of Jesse Eisenberg (When You Finish Saving The World), a documentary on Princess Diana (The Princess), and W. Kamau Bell’s documentary We Need to Talk About Cosby. There seemed to be a particular interest in non-fiction features this year, with documentaries populating categories they weren’t usually in like the Premiere and Midnight selections of the festival.

There is even a higher prominence of foreign-language films this year. For example, the director Michel Haznavicius (The Artist) has a zombie film Final Cut premiering at the festival, which is a French-language remake of the Japanese film One Cut of the Dead.

The 2022 lineup shows a decent balance between high-profile projects and films from exciting new unknown directors. Sundance Festival Director Tabitha Jackson, who is in her second year of running the selection, stated that out of the directors who were chosen for the feature film program, “42% are first-time directors.”

There were more submissions to this year’s festival than ever before. The lineup was selected from 14,849 submissions, which included 3,762 feature films. 52% of the movies premiering at Sundance were directed by one or more female filmmakers, up from last year’s 50%. 35% of this year’s films were directed by people who identify as people of color, which is down from last year’s 51%.

Jackson also stated that plenty of filmmakers seemed to be returning to common accessible genre tropes, but flipped them to talk about important issues. Jackson feels like “something exciting is going on as filmmakers turn to these forms to exploit some of the issues in society in a way that’s compelling and visceral.”

Only two out of the ten films in the U.S. dramatic competition have distribution deals currently, so we’re likely to see a ton of acquisitions come out of this year’s festival.

Check out the full Sundance Film Festival lineup here, and keep your eyes open for the Shorts lineup which will drop tomorrow.