By Adam Silverstein
First features at the Sundance Film Festival have a certain charge to them — films that feel urgent, a little exposed, and not yet shaped by expectation. You feel it in the screenings and the conversations afterward, when directors are still discovering what their work means out loud.
The 2026 lineup puts that energy front and center. This year, 34 of the festival’s 90 feature films — 40% of the program — are directed by first-time feature filmmakers, spanning Midnight, NEXT, Premieres, U.S. and World Cinema competitions. The films range from intimate documentaries to bold genre swings, political reckonings, and deeply personal stories.
Together, they point to where independent cinema is headed next. Below are the debut features from the 2026 lineup.
The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist
Directors: Charlie Tyrell (with Daniel Roher)
Section: Premieres
Available to watch in person
A father-to-be tries to figure out what is happening with the AI insanity, exploring the existential dangers and stunning promise of this technology that humanity has created.
Director: Poh Si Teng
Section: U.S. Documentary Competition
Available to watch in person and online
When three American doctors — Palestinian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian — enter Gaza to save lives, they find themselves caught between medicine and politics, risking everything to expose the truth.
Director: Brydie O’Connor
Section: U.S. Documentary Competition
Available to watch in person and online
An archive-driven exploration of the life, work, and legacy of iconic, pioneering lesbian filmmaker Barbara Hammer.
Director: Stephanie Ahn
Section: U.S. Dramatic Competition
Available to watch in person and online
Haunted by an abusive childhood, Audrey, a Korean American woman in her 30s, faces her emotional past. When her mother’s car accident brings her back to her parents’ home, she meets the man responsible for the accident. Their relationship builds, passions ignite, and they form a loving connection.
Director: Paloma Schneideman
Section: World Cinema Dramatic Competition
Available to watch in person and online
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.
Director: Janay Boulos, Abd Alkader Habak
Section: World Cinema Documentary Competition
Available to watch in person and online
The love story of a London-based Lebanese journalist and a Syrian activist and cameraman as told through 13 years of personal archives across revolutions, war, and exile.
Director: Molly Manners
Section: World Cinema Dramatic Competition
Available to watch in person and online
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.
Director: Rafael Manuel
Section: World Cinema Dramatic Competition
Available to watch in person and online
Tee girl Isabel feels strangely drawn to Dr. Palanca, the president of the country club where she works. However, after piecing together a violent picture of what lies beneath the club’s pristine surface, she realizes that what began as an innocent infatuation is actually rooted in a sinister shared history.
Directors: Maryam Ataei (with Hossein Keshavarz)
Section: U.S. Dramatic Competition
Available to watch in person and online
In Tehran’s underground art scene, two young women build a blissful world of freedom and sisterhood. But when their creative circle is exposed, they must fight to save each other.
Directors: Elizabeth Wolff (with Liz Garbus)
Section: Premieres
Available to watch in person
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.
Director: John Wilson
Section: Premieres
Available to watch in person
After attending a workshop on how to write and sell a Hallmark movie, filmmaker John Wilson tries to use the same formula to sell a documentary about concrete.
Director: Myrsini Aristidou
Section: World Cinema Dramatic Competition
Available to watch in person and online
11-year-old Iris learns her estranged father, Aris, is back in town for his own father’s funeral. Determined to know him, Iris tracks him down to a dilapidated shipyard, where he’s been keeping to himself. What begins as a stubborn attempt to reconnect slowly unfolds into a fragile bond.
Director: Ramzi Bashour
Section: U.S. Dramatic Competition
Available to watch in person and online
After he’s kicked out of his Indiana high school, an American kid and his Lebanese mom hit the road west.
Director: Suzanne Andrews Correa
Section: World Cinema Dramatic Competition
Available to watch in person and online
In the border city of Juárez, Mexico, where violence against women is perpetrated with impunity, an unlikely defender emerges with a desperate call for change. Inspired by true events.
Director: Louis Paxton
Section: NEXT
Available to watch in person and online
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.
Directors: Efraín Mojica, Rebecca Zweig
Section: NEXT
Available to watch in person and online
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.
Director: Rachael J. Morrison
Section: U.S. Documentary Competition
Available to watch in person and online
Joybubbles discovers he can manipulate the telephone system by whistling a magic tone. Born blind and yearning for connection, his early obsession unwittingly lays the groundwork for a subculture that shapes the future of hacking and technology.
Director: Bea Wangondu (with Andrew H. Brown)
Section: World Cinema Documentary Competition
Available to watch in person and online
As a Nairobi journalist probes a land battle entangling the local government and a powerful multinational corporation, covered wounds are revealed and family secrets are exposed.
Director: Olive Nwosu
Section: World Cinema Dramatic Competition
Available to watch in person and online
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.
Director: Abby Ellis
Section: U.S. Documentary Competition
Available to watch in person and online
An environmental nuclear bomb looms in Utah. Two intrepid scientists and a political insider race the clock to save their home from unprecedented catastrophe.
Director: Adrian Chiarella
Section: Midnight
Available to watch in person
Two star-crossed teenage boys must escape a violent entity that takes the form of the person they desire most — each other.
Director: Vera Miao
Section: Midnight
Available to watch in person and online
After the death of her father, a grieving young girl moves to an isolated house in a new town with her mother and grandmother, only to discover there is something monstrous hidden in the town’s history and the woods behind their new home.
Director: THUNDERLIPS
Section: Midnight
Available to watch in person
When a messy millennial underachiever accidentally gets alien-pregnant, she must overcome skeptical doctors, a useless baby daddy, and her oversharing mum in order to survive and reclaim her life.
Director: Giselle Bonilla
Section: U.S. Dramatic Competition
Available to watch in person and online
When a frustrated playwright and middle school theater teacher finds out his ex-girlfriend has started dating his nemesis, the school’s principal, he decides to ruin the principal’s chances of winning the Blue Ribbon of Academic Excellence.
Director: Georgia Bernstein
Section: NEXT
Available to watch in person and online
As a series of perverse scam calls unsettles an idyllic retirement community, a starry-eyed nurse becomes entangled with her mysterious patient.
Directors: Gabriela Osio Vanden, Jack Weisman
Section: U.S. Documentary Competition
Available to watch in person and online
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.
Directors: David Greaves (with William Greaves)
Section: Premieres
Available to watch in person
A decade after his death, genre-defying filmmaker William Greaves has one last trick up his sleeve with what he considered the most important event he captured on film: a 1972 party he engineered with the living luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance.
Directors: Jack MacInnes (with Itab Azzam)
Section: World Cinema Documentary Competition
Available to watch in person and online
Filmed over 10 years, one girl’s epic journey from Syria to Germany and back again. She and her family navigate war, exile, and heartbreak in a foreign land, illuminating the complexities of the refugee experience.
Director: David Shadrack Smith
Section: U.S. Documentary Competition
Available to watch in person and online
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.
Director: NB Mager
Section: U.S. Dramatic Competition
Available to watch in person and online
A teenage girl stages an elaborate musical about the one day her high school wishes it could forget.
Director: Liz Sargent
Section: U.S. Dramatic Competition
Available to watch in person and online
Anna, a 38-year-old Korean adoptee with a cognitive disability, cares for her aging parents in a fragile balance of meeting one another’s needs. When a Florida heat wave shatters their family and Anna’s routine, her future is uncertain until she creates a world where she can thrive.
Director: Petar Glomazić (with Biljana Tutorov)
Section: World Cinema Documentary Competition
Available to watch in person and online
In the remote highlands of Montenegro, a shepherd mother and daughter proudly defend their ancestral mountain from the threat of becoming a NATO military training ground, stirring memories of the violence that shattered their family.
Director: Adam Meeks
Section: U.S. Dramatic Competition
Available to watch in person and online
Assigned to a county-mandated drug court program, Cody Parsons embarks on the tenuous journey toward recovery amid the opioid epidemic in rural Ohio.
Director: Ian Tuason
Section: Midnight
Available to watch in person
The host of a popular paranormal podcast becomes haunted by terrifying recordings mysteriously sent her way.
Director: Padraic McKinley
Section: Premieres
Available to watch in person
In Oregon in 1933, Samuel Murphy is torn from his daughter and sent to a brutal work camp. Warden Clancy tempts him with early release if he smuggles gold through deadly wilderness, but betrayal festers within the crew, and Murphy questions how far he’ll go to see his child again.
Director: William Lafi Youmans (with Jason Osder)
Section: U.S. Documentary Competition
Available to watch in person and online
The assassination of a beloved Palestinian American activist in Southern California ignites a 40-year quest for justice, revealing the roots of a dangerous political movement that thrives today.
