The 2026 Sundance Film Festival, opening Thursday, January 22nd, will mark its final edition in Park City and Salt Lake City, Utah, ahead of the festival’s move to Boulder, Colorado in 2027. Running in person through February 1st, select titles will also be available nationwide online from January 29th. This year’s festival is the first since the passing of its founder, the Oscar-winning actor, filmmaker, mentor and champion of independent cinema, Robert Redford, and Sundance 2026 has been crafted by programmers as a tribute to Redford’s vision with the Park City Legacy program celebrating the festival’s rich history in Utah. Sundance 2026 also marks the first festival since the sad passing of Sundance Institute’s Chief Communications Officer Tammie Rosen, a much-loved figure in the Sundance community and beyond.
“As we prepare to gather for this landmark edition of our Festival in a cherished locale, we’re also honoring the enduring impact of our beloved founder, Robert Redford, and celebrating what he created: a dynamic home for independent, global storytelling,” shares Eugene Hernandez, Director of Sundance Film Festival and Public Programming. “In announcing this year’s selection, we’ve hit a major milestone on the road to the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. We’re proud to conclude our survey of submissions from artists around the world, curating a bold selection of new voices and renowned artists alike that we invite audiences to discover.”
“The program for the 2026 Festival invites audiences to experience intimate character journeys, deeply human stories, and compelling explorations of stories from around the globe,” adds Kim Yutani, Sundance Film Festival Director of Programming. “Each year, we have the privilege of introducing distinctive storytellers to audiences, and we are grateful to the artists who entrust us with their films at the start of the journey. The upcoming edition will be especially profound in introducing brand-new works while concurrently marking the significance of the many films we have been fortunate to present and gone on to have a long-lasting impact on independent film and culture.”
Of the 90 feature films in the Sundance 2026 lineup selected from more than 16,000 submissions, 21 (23%) were directed by one or more filmmakers who identify as LGBTQIA+. Here we take a look at some of the LGBTQIA+ feature and shorts highlights by program section, with descriptions courtesy of Sundance. Single in-person and online tickets and short film online passes are still available at https://festival.sundance.org.
U.S. Documentary Competition
Barbara Forever
An archive-driven exploration of the life, work, and legacy of iconic, pioneering lesbian filmmaker Barbara Hammer.
Turning the lens on a celebrated filmmaker is no easy task, particularly one whose work is as groundbreaking, sensual, and life-affirming as Barbara Hammer’s. Yet, director Brydie O’Connor does her justice. Weaving a kinetic tapestry of archival footage guided by Hammer’s own voice, the film offers an intimate front-row seat into the mind of a visual poet.
Barbara Hammer was deeply concerned with who makes history and who is left out, which motivated her to record her life, her body, her lovers, and the joy found in her lesbian identity. O’Connor’s portrait is an inspiring tribute and candid document of artistic process, capturing the persistence, unabashed ambition, and inevitable tensions such drive creates. Barbara Hammer’s work opened the door for so many artists, and her legacy, so deftly captured here, reminds us why. — Stephanie Owens, Programmer
Premieres January 24th at 5:45pm MST at The Ray Theatre, Park City, followed by further in-person and online screenings.
Public Access
An unprecedented look inside one of the greatest media experiments to hijack American screens. Rare archives from New York’s underground capture a world of creators who shattered rules, defied censors, and transformed our televisions into a free-speech battleground where anyone could be a star.
The internet and social media platforms may have given birth to influencers and content creators, but decades before their popularization, public access television such as New York City’s Manhattan Cable Television opened up the floodgates for technological free expression. With no editorial input allowed, ordinary New Yorkers had carte blanche to create — from the interactive Grube Tube to Glenn O’Brien’s underground scene free-for-all TV Party and the pioneering LGBTQ+ series The Emerald City. But when sexually explicit programming pushed the boundaries and stirred public debate, First Amendment court battles followed. David Shadrack Smith takes viewers through the unfiltered creativity and chaos of this paradigm-shifting new technology, which presaged today’s media-driven world. As Public Access cheekily warns, “Brace yourself! Nothing you have ever seen before can prepare you for this.” — Basil Tsiokos, Senior Programmer
Premieres January 23rd at 8:45pm MST at The Ray Theatre, Park City, followed by further in-person and online screenings.
Premieres
I Want Your Sex
When fresh-faced Elliot lands a job with artist and provocateur Erika Tracy, his fantasies come true as she taps him to become her sexual muse. But Elliot finds himself out of his depth as Erika takes him on a journey into a world of sex, obsession, power, betrayal, and murder.
In writer-director Gregg Araki’s latest feature, a sex-forward Los Angeles art gallery hosts a delightfully enigmatic sadomasochistic game, as Cooper Hoffman’s eager Elliot is pushed to the edge by the sharply sardonic Erika, masterfully portrayed by Olivia Wilde. More than an art-world satire or a celebration of depravity, Araki and Karley Sciortino’s quick-witted writing and circular narrative structure reveal a spunky yet earnest reflection on the current state of sex — challenging misaligned conceptions of kink/predation, exhibition, and generational predispositions toward sexual freedom and autonomy.
I Want Your Sex is Araki’s 11th Sundance Film Festival premiere (following the episodic Now Apocalypse in 2019), constituting a fresh, prismatic validation of form for the auteur — an outrageously playful sexual crusade that only the one Gregg Araki could make. — CA
Premieres January 23rd at 6:15pm MST at Eccles Theatre, Park City, followed by further in-person screenings.
The Brittney Griner Story
Explores the circumstances that led to Brittney Griner playing basketball outside the U.S. despite being one of the best players in the sport, including her harrowing detainment, unwavering determination to secure her freedom, and her advocacy for the release of other wrongful detainees.
The media frenzy surrounding the detainment and eventual release of Brittney Griner was highly politicized, fueled by speculation and attempts to leverage her narrative to advance political agendas. Now, director Alexandria Stapleton gives the floor to Griner to tell her story, alongside her wife, Cherelle, and an inner circle of friends and family.
This intimate access grounds the film in Griner’s humanity, reminding us she is a wife, parent, daughter, sister, and friend — far more than just an athlete-turned-political pawn. Griner opens up about her childhood, the disappointment and fear surrounding her detainment, her harrowing experience in a Russian penal colony, and the complicated negotiations to get her home. It’s a riveting story of resilience, anchored by a family who never stopped pushing for her release and that of others. — Stephanie Owens, Programmer
Premieres January 27th at 2:30pm MST at The Ray Theatre, Park City, followed by further in-person screenings.
Give Me the Ball!
World champion tennis trailblazer Billie Jean King has had a game-changing impact on culture and sports. Rare archive and candid interviews with Billie Jean and those closest to her reveal how one woman put changing the world ahead of saving herself.
The story of professional women’s sports could not be told without Billie Jean King. Her status is so iconic, some might lose sight of the real human being — her struggles, her flaws, and her all-consuming, competitive drive. In fighting for equity for herself and others, King was uncompromising, to the point of subordinating her personal well-being by hiding her sexual orientation and eating disorders. Directors Liz Garbus and Elizabeth Wolff present Billie Jean King in full, in her own words, and with archival footage that brings the dark times and indelible victories to life again. With refreshing honesty and the hard-won perspective of having lived through it all, Give Me the Ball! is an electric portrait of one of the greatest of all time. — Sudeep Sharma, Programmer
Premieres January 26th at 6pm MST at Eccles Theatre, Park City, followed by further in-person screenings.
NEXT
The Incomer
On a remote Scottish isle, siblings Isla and Sandy hunt birds and talk to mythical beings while fighting off outsiders. Their lives change when Daniel, an awkward official, arrives to relocate them.
Relocating a pair of siblings is easier said than done in Louis Paxton’s delightful, uproariously funny, heartwarming first feature. A comedic inflection of Scottish island folklore, The Incomer draws us into its eclectic vision through sublime deadpan humor, formal inventiveness, a sprinkling of animation and fantastical creatures, and the charm of its oddball characters. Having lived in isolation and mistrustful of mainland folk, Isla and Sandy (brilliantly played by Gayle Rankin and Grant O’Rourke) initially try to toss Daniel (Domhnall Gleeson) off the island — literally. But several days and one initiation ritual later, there’s a thaw. The siblings share their lore and Daniel speaks of mainland virtues, like avocados and the internet. Their interactions are fresh and funny, but there’s also a poignant exchange around belonging. These three people — who have experienced isolation, loss, and loneliness — lower their guard and embrace human connection. — John Nein, Senior Programmer and Director of Strategic Initiatives
Premieres January 22nd at 5:30pm MST at The Ray Theatre, Park City, followed by further in-person and online screenings.
Jaripeo
A journey to Michoacán’s hypermasculine rodeos descends into the subconscious of memory, queer desire, and longing, leading to a reckoning with the wounds and beauty of a home left behind.
“I brought you here to Penjamillo so you could see a little bit of what it’s like to be a young queer ranchero,” explains Efraín Mojica, who makes their feature directorial debut with Jaripeo, alongside Rebecca Zweig. Mojica serves as our guide into the vibrant world of the “jaripeos,” rural rodeos that draw macho cowboys, drunken revelers, and — enabled by the bacchanalian atmosphere — hidden queer encounters. Through vérité and Super 8 footage, the camera captures secret glances and fleeting touches and lingers lovingly on the riders’ bodies — manifestations of machismo as filtered through a queer lens. Mojica and Zweig construct rich portraits of queer rancheros sharing memories and confidences in warm, sometimes flirty, conversations and bring their past experiences to life in indelible, stylized dreamscapes celebrating queer self-expression, desire, and belonging. Jaripeo invites viewers to enter this space of traditional, performative masculinity and discover what lies beneath its surface. — Basil Tsiokos, Senior Programmer
Premieres January 25th at 3pm MST at The Yarrow Theatre, Park City, followed by further in-person and online screenings.
TheyDream
After 20 years of chronicling his Puerto Rican family, a director and his mother face devastating losses. Through tears and laughter, they craft animations that bring their loved ones back to life, discovering that every act of creation is also an act of letting go.
In TheyDream, director William David Caballero brings together decades’ worth of his family’s stories in a profoundly moving and creative work of intergenerational healing through art. At its center is Milly, Caballero’s mother, who dutifully bore the responsibility of caregiving for her father, mother, and husband as they dealt with aging and various health concerns. Working in close collaboration with Milly, Caballero uses miniatures and motion capture technology to transform old home movies and recorded conversations with departed family members into sometimes whimsical, often bittersweet animated sequences. Demonstrating deep vulnerability and candor, TheyDream and its stories of familial love and loss are both uniquely personal and universally resonant. Caballero was once told by a documentary professor that no one would ever want to see a film about his family. How wrong she was. — Basil Tsiokos, Senior Programmer
Premieres January 23rd at 2:45pm MST at Library Center Theatre, Park City, followed by further in-person and online screenings.
zi
In Hong Kong, a young woman haunted by visions of her future self meets a stranger who changes the course of her night — and possibly her life.
Kogonada plays with — and returns to — form in this sensitive cinematic poem. Held within a stylish jaunt through the streets of Hong Kong, zi is a film with soul and a wavelike confidence that commits to recursivity as a mode and central theme. Kogonada regulars Michelle Mao, Haley Lu Richardson, and Jin Ha carefully portray transitory misfits, grappling with a clever fusion of existential anxiety, romantic misgiving, and personal memory.
Somewhere between sci-fi and supernatural, a deep, easy warmth takes root. Following Columbus (2017 Sundance Film Festival), After Yang (2020 Sundance Film Festival), and A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, Kogonada crafts a decidedly contained film, exploring a pervasive sense of unmooring, yet cultivating an unrelenting sense of peace. Through the igniting/smoldering embers of relationships lost/forming, zi is an invitation to surrender to Kogonada’s truly indie world of temporal fragmentation. — CA
Premieres January 24th at 8:45pm MST at The Ray Theatre, Park City, followed by further in-person and online screenings.
Midnight
Saccharine
Hana, a lovelorn medical student, becomes terrorized by a hungry ghost after taking part in an obscure weight loss craze: eating human ashes.
Natalie Erika James follows Relic (2020 Sundance Film Festival) with this revoltingly punchy, modern, and timely take on body horror. Through sickeningly syrupy scenes of literal and spiritual consumption, Midori Francis embodies Hana, a body-dysmorphic young woman bent on chasing her weight goal at all costs. The archetypal myth of the hungry ghost manifests literally, creating a uniquely tense atmosphere fit for a physically and metaphorically dangerous haunt.
The viscosity of James’ exploration of haunting and body horror in the era of accessible weight-loss medications is especially poignant, as Saccharine works to deconstruct weight and fatness as metrics by which we classify antagonism and personal shortcoming. What if the desperation to conform is a destructive consumption itself? What if we manifest our own bottomless specters? — CA
Premieres January 22nd at 11:55pm MST at The Ray Theatre, Park City, followed by further in-person screenings.
Leviticus
Two star-crossed teenage boys must escape a violent entity that takes the form of the person they desire most — each other.
A haunting and sensitive feature directorial debut from writer-director Adrian Chiarella, Leviticus promises a new, poignant entry into the canon of coming-of-age horror. An isolated Australian small town hosts the evils of religious fanaticism and its consequences for queer youth, creating an atmosphere that’s chilling and near-claustrophobic. Joe Bird and Stacy Clausen tenderly embody Naim and Ryan, magnetically attracted teens coming into their sexuality, yet facing physical and spiritual violence at every bend.
At times sensual, and just as often thrilling, Leviticus shines as both a harrowing Midnight experience and a queer social horror. At the core of this merciless curse narrative is an authentic reflection on what it means to love queerly despite the persistent dangers from within and without. — CA
Premieres January 23rd at 11:55pm MST at The Ray Theatre, Park City, followed by further in-person screenings.
World Cinema Dramatic Competition
Big Girls Don’t Cry
Over one transformative summer in rural New Zealand in 2006, 14-year-old Sid Bookman discovers desire, identity, and the internet as she imitates the people she longs to be loved by.
Paloma Schneideman, mentored through Jane Campion’s film program, crafts an artful coming-of-age portrait of queer adolescence that beautifully inhabits the liminal space between youth and adulthood, desire and experience — a time when we’re conscious of everything, but lacking language for any of it. With aching recognition, we’re inescapably drawn into Sid (newcomer Ani Palmer in a stellar breakout performance) — her trying on of identities, mimicry, feigning of maturity, shame, and longing for acceptance — as she endears herself to a group of older teens, the first generation for whom sexual curiosity is entwined with the internet. Schneideman’s voice is fresh and vibrant, her intimate, shallow-focus photography drawn to faces and bodies, full of precarity and vulnerability and perfectly attuned to these young people. The film breathes with specificity and authenticity, ironically rendering so sharply an interior life that is, by its nature, so obscure. — John Nein, Senior Programmer and Director of Strategic Initiatives
Premieres January 24th at 2:45pm MST at The Ray Theatre, Park City, followed by further in-person and online screenings.
Tell Me Everything
Amid the late 80s pop craze and rising HIV epidemic, 12-year-old Boaz uncovers a devastating secret about the father he idolizes that threatens to tear his family apart. Across a yearslong journey, Boaz seeks to heal the wound and reclaim the father-son bond he never stopped yearning for.
On the heels of his impressive first feature, Karaoke, Moshe Rosenthal crafts a captivating, deeply moving father-son story that explores the upheaval in a family after a startling revelation. Tell Me Everything is told with warmth and intimacy through the experience of Boaz, a boy nearing his bar mitzvah and manhood, yet still trying to understand masculinity and his father, his perspective blurred by confusion and fear. In exploring the truth, Boaz leaves his childhood behind with every step, carrying his shame, guilt, and anger into adulthood. Propelled by phenomenal performances, richly detailed storytelling, a vibrant visual sensibility, and a vivid evocation of the 80s, Tell Me Everything is a poignant story of family, reckoning, and the search for a father — or maybe just the attempt to truly see him. — John Nein, Senior Programmer and Director of Strategic Initiatives
Premieres January 25th at 2:30pm MST at Holiday Village Cinemas – 1, Park City, followed by further in-person and online screenings.
Extra Geography
In an English girls boarding school, two teenage best friends grapple with the challenges of girlhood — friendship, boys, studies, and growing up — and embark on their school project, falling in love.
In her thoroughly funny, stylish debut feature, Molly Manners (In My Skin, One Day) offers a wry, poignant story about best friendship. Brought to life through standout debut performances from Galaxie Clear and Marni Duggan, Minna and Flic exist entirely in each others’ worlds — their perfectly synchronous thoughts and movements playfully accented by Manners’ visual style. Charming, adorably self-centered, codependent, and snide, they audition together for A Midsummer Night’s Dream (despite Shakespeare being rubbish) and — knowing that love makes one “worldly” — decide their school project will be to fall in love with the first person they see: their geography teacher (Alice Englert). They hatch a plan, enamored of their own cleverness (“We should probably dream about her.”), but their synchronicity soon falters. Extra Geography offers a bittersweet lesson in unsinkable friendship: in life, love, and Shakespeare, someone always gets upstaged. — John Nein, Senior Programmer and Director of Strategic Initiatives
Premieres January 23rd at 5:45pm MST at Library Center Theatre, Park City, followed by further in-person and online screenings.
LADY
In the sprawling African metropolis of Lagos, a fiercely independent young cab driver meets a band of radiantly reckless sex workers whose sisterhood pulls her into danger and joy, setting her on a journey toward her own transformation.
Lady is a strong woman in a man’s world. A taxi driver on today’s streets of Lagos, Lady makes enough money to care for herself and her grandmother while most Nigerians must choose between breakfast and lunch. When her oil-producing motherland eliminates fuel subsidies for its citizens, Lady’s childhood friend, Pinky, propositions her to join ranks with her boss who is looking for a night driver for his ladies. Director Olive Nwosu’s exciting debut feature pulses with the potent energies and complex realities in Lagos. LADY radiates the love and dreams between people, the choices made to forge pathways for living through debilitating circumstances and intergenerational traumas, and the sea change of a new generation, rising to DJ Revolution’s call to decolonize their minds and take back their lives. — Shari Frilot, Senior Programmer, Chief Curator of New Frontier
Premieres January 22nd at 6pm MST at Library Center Theatre, Park City, followed by further in-person and online screenings.
Park City Legacy
Mysterious Skin
Two preadolescent boys both experienced a strange event and later it affects their lives in different ways. One becomes a reckless, adventurous sex worker, while the other retreats into a reclusive fantasy of alien abduction.
A picture of youth and trauma in late-20th-century Middle America, Mysterious Skin presents a sensitive, disquietingly hypnotic coming-of-age entry into writer-director Gregg Araki’s canon. Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Brady Corbet deliver exceptionally embodied performances as boys on near-opposite sides of the vast canyon of their shared psychological wound — both approaching revelation in distinctly vulnerable capacities.
A notable formal departure from Araki’s established auteur style, Mysterious Skin screened at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival to critical acclaim. Deftly marrying Araki’s bold filmmaking and youthful flair with the gravity of Scott Heim’s lauded novel, the film realizes an unflinchingly honest attention to the American socioeconomic underbelly; the queer psychosexual; the random, undeserved consequences of living. Two decades later, Mysterious Skin remains an unconventional, provocative classic. — CA
Screens in-person only on January 28th at 5:30pm MST at Library Center Theatre, Park City.
Short Film Program
Callback
Max arrives home to find that his boyfriend has booked a callback. All hell breaks loose. Written and directed by Matthew Puccini starring Justin H. Min, Michael Hsu Rosen, and Brayden Raqueño.
Callback screens in Short Film Program 5 premiering January 26th at 9pm at Library Center Theatre, Park City, followed by further in-person and online screenings.
Gender Studies
When a trans college student learns the girl she idolizes is sleeping with their teaching assistant, she takes drastic steps to emulate her. Written and directed by Jamie Kiernan O’Brien starring Jake Junkins, Fannie Massarsky, and Austin Cassel.
Gender Studies screens in Short Film Program 2 premiering January 24th at 3:15pm at The Yarrow Theatre, Park City, followed by further in-person and online screenings.
Seniors
A high school senior goes on his first college campus tour the day his parents’ marriage begins to fracture. Written and directed by Adam Curley starring Brooke Bloom, Noah Pacht, Matt Walton, and Dan Thompson.
Seniors screens in Short Film Program 2 premiering January 24th at 3:15pm at The Yarrow Theatre, Park City, followed by further in-person and online screenings.
Single in-person and online tickets and short film online passes are still available at https://festival.sundance.org.
Away from the film program, on Friday, January 23rd at 3pm Frameline, GLAAD, & NewFest with IMDbPro Present: “Cheers, Queers”
3:30pm – 4:45pm MT – INVITE ONLY – Cheers, Queers Toast
Industry professionals will gather to celebrate LGBTQ stories and makers with representation at Sundance Film Festival.
4:45pm – 5pm MT – “We Will Always Be Here: A Highlight Reel of LGBTQ Sundance Film Festival History”
This panel will bring notable LGBTQ filmmakers, creatives, and activists to the stage to share personal memories and visions for the future, MC’d by Ryan Mitchell. This segment will include reflections from the Cheers, Queers event founders Alex Schmider (GLAAD), Allegra Madsen (Frameline), and David Hatkoff (NewFest).
5pm – 5:50pm MT – “The New & Next Queer Cinema: A Conversation with Queer Icons of Then and Now” Panel
As the Sundance Film Festival casts its gaze (gay-ze?) across its 40+ year history, and GLAAD also marks its 40-year anniversary advocating for LGBTQ representation and acceptance, this segment will bring together a historic conversation between the Queer Icons that shaped the New Queer Cinema movement, and those building on its legacy.
5:50pm – 6pm MT – Honoring LGBTQ Storytellers at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival
A staged photo to visually commemorate and spotlight LGBTQ storytellers and culture makers, celebrating their boundary-pushing creativity and impact in the industry.
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