Gemma Chan, Mason Reeves and Channing Tatum appear in Josephine by Beth de Araújo, an official selection of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by Greta Zozula.
The countdown to the 2026 Sundance Film Festival is on, and much of the slate is driven by women directors with unmistakable creative voices. Across feature films, episodic works, and short films, more than 70 new projects by women are premiering and screening this year, each offering a distinct lens on love, identity, power, and more.
Discover the ache and allure of a rekindled romance in Rachel Lambert’s Carousel, the raw tenderness of a queer coming-of-age story in Paloma Schneideman’s Big Girls Don’t Cry, the questions raised in Valerie Veatch’s Ghost in the Machine, an investigative documentary exploring the rise of artificial intelligence, and other bold projects directed by women showing at the 2026 Festival.
Below, take a look at all the new movies and series from women at the Sundance Film Festival. Browse ticketing options now — Single Film Tickets are on sale today! — and be sure to Favorite these titles and add them to your schedule.
U.S. DRAMATIC COMPETITION
Director: Stephanie Ahn
Available 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: Rachel Lambert
Available in person and online
A divorced doctor’s carefully constructed life in Cleveland is upended when his daughter’s debate aspirations and the unexpected return of a past love force him to confront his own choices and embrace a second chance.
Director: Beth de Araújo
Available in person and online
After 8-year-old Josephine accidentally witnesses a crime in Golden Gate Park, she acts out in search of a way to regain control of her safety while adults are helpless to console her.
Director: NB Mager
Available 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
Available 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: Giselle Bonilla
Available 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.
U.S. DOCUMENTARY COMPETITION
Director: Poh Si Teng
Available 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
Available in person and online
An archive-driven exploration of the life, work, and legacy of iconic, pioneering lesbian filmmaker Barbara Hammer.
Director: Rachael J. Morrison
Available 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.
Directors: Gabriela Osio Vanden, with Jack Weisman
Available 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.
Director: Sharon Liese
Available in person and online
When the small town of Marion, Kansas, is thrust into the international spotlight after a police raid on the Marion County Record and the death of its 98-year-old co-owner, a fierce debate ignites about the abuse of power, journalistic ethics, local journalism, and the United States Constitution.
Director: Abby Ellis
Available 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.
WORLD CINEMA DRAMATIC COMPETITION
Director: Paloma Schneideman
Available 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: Molly Manners
Available 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: Myrsini Aristidou
Available 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: Olive Nwosu
Available 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: Suzanne Andrews Correa
Available 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.
WORLD CINEMA DOCUMENTARY COMPETITION
Director: Sinéad O’Shea
Available in person and online
A son of one of America’s wealthiest families creates a communist revolutionary base in rural Massachusetts as a means of disrupting the capitalist system he grew up in, but has now come to despise. It’s the starting point of an astonishing journey.
Directors: Janay Boulos, with Abd Alkader Habak
Available 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.
Directors: Bea Wangondu, with Andrew H. Brown
Available 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.
Directors: Itab Azzam, with Jack MacInnes
Available 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: Selina Miles
Available in person and online
After #MeToo broke the cultural silence on gender violence, international human rights lawyer Jennifer Robinson fights against the weaponization of defamation laws to silence survivors.
Directors: Biljana Tutorov, with Petar Glomazić
Available 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.
NEXT
Director: Valerie Veatch
Available in person and online
The untold origins of artificial intelligence lie not in machines but in power, revealing the fantasies behind the hype that got us here and where we go next.
Directors: Rebecca Zweig, with Efraín Mojica
Available 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: Georgia Bernstein
Available 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.
PREMIERES
Director: Josephine Decker
Available in person and online
After losing both her job and boyfriend, Jamie retreats to her small Texas hometown, where friends and flings from a fateful high school summer turn her life upside down.
Director: Petra Biondina Volpe
Available in person only
Frank, serving a life sentence, takes a prison job caring for aging inmates with Alzheimer’s and dementia. What begins as a self-interested bid for parole becomes a profound, transformative bond with fellow inmate Louis, offering Frank a glimpse of redemption in an unforgiving place.
Directors: Liz Garbus, Elizabeth Wolff
Available in person only
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: Rory Kennedy
Available in person only
A Hungarian girl dreams of conquering international men’s chess. After a 15-year battle against world champion Garry Kasparov, Judit Polgár revolutionizes the sport’s patriarchal culture to become one of the greatest chess prodigies in history and the greatest woman chess player of all time.
Director: Alexandria Stapleton
Available in person only
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.
Director: Joanna Natasegara
Available in person only
An outsider fueled by relentless determination works his way into the inner circle of the Wu-Tang Clan, where his ambition and creativity converge in the making of an album poised to ignite global controversy.
Director: Cathy Yan
Available in person only
A desperate gallerist conspires to sell a dead body at Art Basel Miami.
Director: Olivia Wilde
Available in person only
Joe and Angela are on thin ice, and tonight might be when it all falls apart. Unfortunately, their upstairs neighbors are about to arrive for dinner, and everything that can go wrong goes worse.
Director: Sara Dosa
Available in person and online
Facing the death of his country’s glaciers and the loss of his beloved grandparents, Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason turns his archives into a time capsule to hold what is slipping away — family, memory, time, and water.
Director: Dawn Porter
Available in person and online
In 1983, author Ta-Nehisi Coates learned that a 14-year-old boy was murdered in his Baltimore middle school. Upon revisiting the case, he uncovers the truth: Three innocent teenagers were wrongfully convicted and spent 36 years in prison — creating a lasting impact on the accused, the witnesses, and their community.
Director: Eleanor Wilson, with Alex Huston Fischer
Available in person only
A fisherwoman asks a basketmaker to weave her a husband.
MIDNIGHT
Director: Vera Miao
Available 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: Natalie Erika James
Available in person only
Hana, a lovelorn medical student, becomes terrorized by a hungry ghost after taking part in an obscure weight loss craze: eating human ashes.
Director: Tamra Davis
Available in person and online
Immersive POV camera footage reveals electric performances, candid interviews, and intimate backstage life with Beastie Boys, Sonic Youth, Foo Fighters, Pavement, Rancid, Beck, The Amps, and Bikini Kill — an all-access view inside an era-defining moment in music.
SPOTLIGHT
Directors: Jane Pollard, with Iain Forsyth
Available in person only
A portrait of the inimitable singer, songwriter, and icon Marianne Faithfull.
FAMILY MATINEE
Director: Alysa Nahmias
Available in person only
It’s Girl Scout Cookie season, and four tenacious girls strive to be a top-selling “Cookie Queen,” navigating an $800 million business in which childhood and ambition collide.
PARK CITY LEGACY
Director: Lynn Shelton
Available in person only
Two guys take their bromance to another level when they participate in an art film project.
Directors: Valerie Faris, with Jonathan Dayton
Available in person only
A family determined to get their young daughter into the finals of a beauty pageant take a cross-country trip in their VW bus.
EPISODIC
Director: Stacey Lee
A case that haunted Tennessee’s best detectives for decades is cracked wide open with the help of some unlikely investigators: a high school sociology class.
Director: Nicole Holofcener
No one is more worried about Jules and Poppy than Jules and Poppy.
SHORT FILMS
ANIMATED SHORT FILM PROGRAM
Directors: Carolyn London, with Andy London
Available in person and online
In 1981 in suburban Long Island, New York, the mullets are long, the metal is heavy, and 14-year-old Douglas gets a birthday surprise that will change his life forever.
Director: Grace An
Available in person and online
When the mind of a bilingual child mirrors absurd translations, their poetic misinterpretations can accidentally produce multiple meanings — and create puns.
Mangittatuarjuk (The Gnawer of Rocks)
Director: Louise Flaherty
Available in person only
Two young women are trapped in the lair of the Mangittatuarjuk, the Gnawer of Rocks. The young women and their village use the teachings of the elders to try to defeat the monster.
Directors: Josefina Montino, with Martín André
Available in person and online
A man secludes himself in a house in the forest. The ghosts of his past begin to torment him, forcing him to face his fears and guilts to not be consumed by madness.
DOCUMENTARY SHORT FILM PROGRAM
Director: Liza Mandelup
Available in person and online
When Luigi Mangione is charged with murder, he becomes the subject of fevered obsession. Through letters, fantasies, and conspiracies, strangers turn Luigi into a cultural sensation and a canvas for their rage, desire, and misplaced hope.
Directors: Livia Albeck-Ripka, with Victor Tadashi Suárez
Available in person and online
On January 7, 2025, the Eaton fire destroyed over 9,000 structures in Altadena, California. Thousands more were left standing but contaminated with toxic ash. Residents face the impossible decision of whether they should risk their health to return home.
Director: Arielle Knight
Available in person and online
On an idyllic farm in rural Georgia, Black beekeeping parents tenderly share their knowledge of life, love, and nature with their young sons while restoring their homestead.
Director: Lindsay Aksarniq McIntyre
Available in person and online
An exploration of the close and enduring connections between Inuit, caribou, lichens, and land use. A handmade caribou gelatin emulsion reveals the land where caribou struggle to survive burn events and habitat disruption.
MIDNIGHT SHORT FILM PROGRAM
Director: Jill Marie Sachs
Available in person and online
Vivi, a third-culture Filipina American, travels to the Philippines to reconnect with her roots but falls in with a group of Western eco-volunteers. When they scorn the customs of a remote mountain village, an ancient evil comes knocking.
Director: Carter Amelia Davis
Available in person and online
A woman embarks on a road trip to deliver her creamy homemade sports drink to a mysterious online buyer.
Director: Meagan Coyle
Available in person only
A trauma victim joins a utopian farming community only to find she’s bitten off more than she can chew.
SHORT FILM PROGRAM 1
La Tierra del Valor (The Home of the Brave)
Director: Cristina Costantini
Available in person and online
During a summer of grief and fear brought on by immigration raids in Los Angeles, one small act of bravery gives a community hope.
Director: Anooya Swamy
Available in person and online
Pankaja, along with her daughter, Lalli, searches for her missing husband through the city slums of Bangalore to bring him back home.
Director: Malin Barr
Available in person and online
Locked out on a freezing New Year’s Eve, Cleo discovers the real threat isn’t the cold — it’s the man beside her.
Director: JJ Adler
Available in person only
When an atheist psychiatrist hypnotizes his con artist patient, a message from his long-dead twin emerges. It could be the perfect con, or it could be proof that reality is far stranger than he would like to admit.
SHORT FILM PROGRAM 2
Director: Jen Nee Lim
Available in person only
In a time and place where abortion is illegal, a pregnant woman’s repeated attempts to end her pregnancy fail until she crosses paths with a strange bus driver.
Director: Leah Vlemmiks
Available in person and online
Under pressure from her adult daughter to move and become a live-in babysitter, 74-year-old Agnes finds agency in an unexpected place.
Director:Jamie Kiernan O’Brien
Available in person and online
When a trans college student learns the girl she idolizes is sleeping with their teaching assistant, she takes drastic steps to emulate her.
SHORT FILM PROGRAM 3
Director: Jessy Moussallem
Available in person and online
Mireille promises Johnny the big screen, dragging him to an audition whose rules only she truly knows.
Director: Alexandra Kern
Available in person and online
On the shifting edge of the Mississippi River in New Orleans, the spirit of a fading outsider community endures through its two oldest residents.
Director: Lovisa Sirén
Available in person only
Forced to leave her baby daughter with the child’s father, young mother Esther is caught in desperation and longing. Through the night she chases touch and comfort, seeking ways to hold onto whom she loves the most.
SHORT FILM PROGRAM 4
Director: Lily Platt
Available in person and online
Fired from her day job, an impulsive actress crashes a support group and spirals into a chaotic night that forces her to face her addiction to drama.
Director: Hannah Schierbeek
Available in person and online
A drifter’s life takes a dramatic turn when he discovers a runaway member of a survivalist cult in the back of his truck.
Director: María Cristina Pérez
Available in person and online
A woman seeks to reconcile with her sister over an incident from their adolescence by exploring their shared experiences through their bodies.
Directors: Lisa Malloy, with Ray Whitaker
Available in person and online
Darkness settles over Little Egypt. Brielle, Karri, and Nunu wander among the limestone outcrops and sandstone spires. In a cave that hid freedom seekers along the Underground Railroad, their uncle shares a story of a creature that stirs at night.
Director: Gabriela Ortega
Available in person and online
In the wake of Selena Quintanilla’s murder, Marga’s life takes an unexpected turn at 21 weeks pregnant during a surprise visit to Mexico City.
SHORT FILM PROGRAM 5
Director: Amandine Thomas
Available in person and online
Maria, burdened with caregiving for her sick husband, gets invited to a party.
Director: Praise Odigie Paige
Available in person and online
In 1970, a 16-year-old Nigerian refugee in Virginia tries to keep her family together when a newcomer draws her sister away.
Director: Anna Baumgarten
Available in person and online
Two grocery store employees have an unexpected, helium-fueled encounter with a late-night customer.
Director: Chloe Leigh King
Available in person and online
A Montenegrin father takes his teenage daughter on an unforgettable dinner date.
Director: Ana A. Alpizar
Available in person and online
A girl’s long-distance romance with an older Norwegian man promises to pull her and her mother from their austere life in Cuba, but her dreams are shaken when she realizes he isn’t as ideal as he seem
