Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic This year’s Sundance Film Festival has stayed true to its mandate to mint the next generation of filmmakers, presenting 88 features, nearly all world premieres, more than a third from first-time directors. But it’s not all business as usual in Park City, Utah. The Los Angeles wildfires are still weighing on minds while the new Trump administration has added a drumbeat of sweeping policy changes and upheaval. The outside world is much louder than the comparative quiet of this year’s initially soft market for film sales.The festival also faces an existential challenge, thanks to a planned relocation to a new city in 2027. Sundance already splits screenings somewhat between Park City and Salt Lake City and virtual options — but the mountain resort town of Park City is part of the festival’s indie lore. Official candidates for a new home include Boulder, Colorado; Cincinnati, Ohio; and Utah again, but reconfigured. It may be generally accepted that Sundance has outgrown Park City, but sceptics abound. (“Cincinnati is not exactly the city that never sleeps,” sniffed one ski-sweatered movie-goer.)The stakes are high for not tarnishing the Sundance aura, as evidenced by alums from last year’s festival nominated for Oscars last week: A Real Pain, A Different Man, Black Box Diaries. But at the 2025 edition, clear frontrunners have not yet emerged, and the consensus standouts arrived relatively late: Sorry, Baby, a deftly comic look at trauma, for example, or the gonzo relationship horror Together. By contrast, buzzed-about selections often under-impressed despite big names putting in energetic efforts.If Ira Sachs captures a quintessential piece of New York, the festival also offered duelling portraits of laconic men on frontiers in the American WestSophie Hyde’s rambunctious Jimpa stars Olivia Colman as Hannah, a director prepping a film about her outspoken gay father (John Lithgow), whose nickname provides the title. Jimpa holds court among thinkers and artists in airy Amsterdam, where Hannah’s non-binary teenager, Frances (Aud Mason-Hyde), visits to get away from their hometown in Australia. Hyde, who directed the Emma Thompson-starring Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, populates her multigenerational ensemble of queer experience with a Greek chorus of Jimpa’s older friends and a younger gender-fluid crew for the inexperienced but level-headed Frances to explore.Colman’s precision and Lithgow’s plumminess play well to the clash of personalities and values, and the chatty film has a rolling emotional candour that’s refreshing at its best. But Hyde here has a frustrating tendency towards pocket-guide explanations of identity and sexuality, and this diligent verbiage dampens the sparks of perception and discovery that Colman especially is so skilled at bringing out. The semi-autobiographical scenario — Hyde is Aud Mason-Hyde’s mother — deflates over the two-hour-plus running time. There’s no shortfall of energy in The Thing with Feathers, thanks to the monstrous metaphorical crow at its core. Benedict Cumberbatch plays a graphic novelist whose wife has died young, leaving him and their two boys bereft and adrift in a dim, quiet row house. Dylan Southern’s adaptation of the Max Porter novella Grief Is the Thing with Feathers (previously adapted as a stage show by Enda Walsh) cycles through harrowing visitations by a man-sized bird who is part tormentor, part grief sherpa to Cumberbatch’s “sad dad”.The crow (voiced with mocking relish by David Thewlis) takes over both the house and mind of this troubled father, the film recalling The Babadook in its sinister claustrophobia. (Eric Lampaert is credited as playing the beastly bird, a feathery dervish.) Cumberbatch’s haggardly expressive face could tell the story alone, but Southern keeps resorting to jump-scares and cage-match fracases with the crow. The arrival of a demon at the glass-panelled front door offers a welcome, spooky set piece, but by then the film has boxed itself in.The director of the exquisite Peter Hujar’s Day, Ira Sachs, has been a fixture at Sundance since the 1990s, when he attended as a reviewer for the Village Voice. His latest film stars Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall, both at their best, in a deceptively simple-sounding piece that keeps growing in insight and complexity. It stages a 1974 conversation between photographer Peter Hujar and writer Linda Rosenkrantz, who intended to publish the transcript in book form (as she did in her 1968 novel Talk, based on taped chats with her friends).Rosenkrantz asks Hujar to recount a day in his life, and in the artist’s obsessive hands, this becomes a rich chronicle of encounters with Allen Ginsberg and others, and a record of his own thoughts, observations and greasy meals. Amid the beautifully changing light of a Manhattan apartment, Whishaw and Hall cultivate a cosy rapport, talking through magazine assignments, Lower East Side encounters and Chinese takeaway preferences. The film is alive with smart variations in staging, and truly feels more like a time-warp hang-out than a Warholian experiment. It marks a different triumph for Sachs after his well-regarded love-triangle drama Passages, which also starred Whishaw and premiered at Sundance in 2023.If Sachs captures a quintessential piece of New York, the festival also offered duelling portraits of laconic men on frontiers in the American West. Rebuilding has been highly anticipated because of Challengers star Josh O’Connor, who here plays a rancher forced to start anew after a wildfire and to live in a trailer settlement. The director, Max Walker-Silverman, hits an easy groove by crafting something like a country ballad in movie form. O’Connor nurtures relationships with his daughter (Lily LaTorre, a bit cute), his ex (Meghann Fahy), and a gallery of new neighbours. But the film is almost vanishingly gentle and wispy, and O’Connor leans heavily on aw-shucks mannerisms and slouch. Among the non-Americans playing laconic American types, Joel Edgerton has the edge in Train Dreams, an aching period study of a man who falls out of history. Clint Bentley’s thoughtfully narrated adaptation of the Denis Johnson novella follows Robert Grainier on his days as a railroad worker and lumberjack and eventually family man, carving out a secluded homestead with his wife (Felicity Jones), only to encounter tragedy. Bearing echoes of Kelly Reichardt’s 2019 film First Cow, Train Dreams taps into the rough-hewn pioneer poetry of individualism and brutality in a vast wilderness.The rugged settings of both Train Dreams and Rebuilding resonated with the towering mountains circling Park City, even amid the comfortable vacationers and industry insiders Ubering away after each screening. But more than geography, the two films testified to a constant churn of new beginnings and daunting challenges. That sensation felt peculiarly suited to a transitional era at the festival and, more broadly, to uncertain times in the US at large, where the prospect of hopeful endings can feel more distant than anything on screen.Festival continues to February 2, festival.sundance.orgFind out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning
