BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) storytellers are bringing captivating cinematic experiences to audiences everywhere. Of the165 films premiering at the 2023 Festival (101 feature films and 64 shorts) in just two weeks, 110 projects were directed by one or more filmmakers who identify as people of color.
We’ve put together a list of all the films screening at the 2023 Festival created by artists who identify as BIPOC, from thrill-seeking dramas to backstories about beloved musicians like Little Richard and The Indigo Girls, captivating shorts, and eye-opening documentaries.
Visit our Festival site to browse ticketing options and add a few of these titles to your schedule ahead of the Fest. And while you’re there, read through more guides like this one to get familiar with the artists at this year’s Festival. Explore all the upcoming Festival features by women filmmakers, and get to know the directors who identify as LBGTQ+.
But first, here are all the projects by artists who identify as BIPOC screening at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival:
Director: Bi Gan
Section: Short Film Program 4
Available to watch in person and online
An anthropomorphic feline wanders across empty cities and exurban spaces of contemporary China. Black Cat is on a quest to answer a single question: What is the most precious thing in the world?
Director and Screenwriter: Sing J. Lee
Section: U.S. Dramatic Competition
Available to watch in person and online
During a routine pickup, an elderly Vietnamese cab driver is taken hostage at gunpoint by three recently escaped Orange County convicts. Based on a true story.
Director: Raven Jackson
Section: U.S. Dramatic Competition
Available to watch in person and online
A decades-spanning exploration of a woman’s life in Mississippi and an ode to the generations of people, places, and ineffable moments that shape us.
Director: Valeria Hofmann
Section: Midnight Short Film Program
Available to watch in person and online
While a gamer uploads a testimonial video to denounce the harassment she suffers in a video game, a stranger enters her home and hacks her computer, blurring the boundaries between the real and virtual worlds.
AUM: The Cult at the End of the World
Co-director: Chiaki Yanagimoto
Section: U.S. Documentary
Available to watch in person and online
On the morning of March 20, 1995, a deadly nerve gas attack in the Tokyo subway sent the nation and its people into chaos. This exploration of Aum Shinrikyo, the cult responsible for the attack, involves the participation of those who lived through the horror as it unfolded.
Director: Hadi Rezayati Charan
Section: Short Film Program 6
Available to watch in person and online
A boy lives in a border village with Azheh. After Azheh’s death, the boy tries to fulfill her will to be buried in his homeland.
Director: Meran Ismailsoy
Section: Short Film Program 2
Available to watch in person and online
Chirkova’s film is about a middle-aged Iranian man who makes a desperate bid to keep his apartment as his relationship with his son unravels. Chirkova was also a producer for Bump, a short that premiered at last year’s Festival.
Co-director: Rebecca Landsberry-Baker
Section: U.S. Documentary
Available to watch in person and online
When the Muscogee Nation suddenly begins censoring its free press, a rogue reporter fights to expose her government’s corruption in a historic battle that will have ramifications for all of Indian country.
Writer-director: Walé Oyéjidé
Section: NEXT
Available to watch in person and online
A Burkinabé boy flees his [West African] village and migrates to Italy. When disillusioned by heartbreak and haunted by memories of home, he travels through time in hope of regaining all he has lost.
Director: Iyabo Kwayana
Section: Animation Short Film Program
Available to watch in person and online
An unlikely hero’s journey into his own memories becomes a vehicle for reconciliation and healing for himself and his sibling.
Director: Roger Ross Williams
Section: Premieres
Available to watch in person
Saúl Armendáriz (Gael García Bernal), a gay amateur wrestler from El Paso, rises to international stardom after he creates the character Cassandro, the “Liberace of Lucha Libre.” In the process, he upends not just the macho wrestling world, but also his own life.
Director: Eddie Alcazar
Section: NEXT
Available to watch in person and online
Two mysterious brothers abduct a mogul during his quest for immortality. Meanwhile, a seductive woman helps them launch a journey of self-discovery.
Director: Gregg Araki
Section: From the Collection
Available to watch in person
Back in 1995, The Doom Generation premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in the Premieres section. This year, the film will be returning to the Festival’s From the Collection category. It’s one of 12 films directed by Araki that screened at the Sundance Film Festival.
In Araki’s film, two troubled teens pick up an adolescent drifter. Together, they embark on a sex-and-violence-filled journey through an America of psychos and convenience stores.
Araki was a Creative Advisor for the Sundance Institute Screenwriters Intensive (2020), Directors Lab (2012), and Creative Producing Feature Film Lab (2008, 2010).
Director: Anthony Chen
Section: Premieres
Available to watch only in person
Jacqueline, a young refugee [from Liberia], lands alone and penniless on a Greek island where she tries to survive, then to cope with her past. While gathering her strength, she begins a friendship with a rootless tour guide and together they find the resilience to forge ahead.
Expect a dynamic performance from Cynthia Erivo. “Erivo, who was nominated for an Oscar for 2019’s Harriet, vividly portrays Jacqueline’s bone-deep grief and all-too-fresh fears, as well as her guarded attempts at human connection,” according to the Festival website.
Director: Maite Alberdi
Section: World Cinema Documentary
Available to watch in person and online
Augusto and Paulina have been together for 25 years. Eight years ago, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Both fear the day he no longer recognizes her.
Director and producer Maite Alberdi (The Mole Agent) returns to the Festival with her fourth film and was a World Documentary Competition Juror for the Festival in 2019.
Director: Anggun Priambodo
Section: Short Film Program 5
Available to watch in person and online
An incarcerated man is allowed a temporary release with a woman prison officer to evacuate his mother — who is trapped in a village during an earthquake that might lead to a tsunami — bringing them to an unexpectedly exciting experience.
Director: Andrew Fitzgerald
Section: U.S. Fiction Short Films
Available to watch in person and online
A Vietnamese-American family’s plan to cover up a drunk driving accident begins to unravel when their emotional baggage spills out in front of the police.
Director: Erica Tremblay
Section: U.S. Drama
Available to watch in person and online
Following her sister’s disappearance, a Native American hustler kidnaps her niece from the child’s white grandparents and sets out for the state powwow in hopes of keeping what is left of their family intact.
Director: Zhen Li
Section: Animated Short Films
Available to watch in person and online
A crush has gone moldy in this animated short — Li’s first project to premiere at Sundance Film Festival.
Director: Babak Jalali
Section: NEXT
Available to watch in person and online
Donya works for a Chinese fortune cookie factory in San Francisco. Formerly a translator for the U.S. military in Afghanistan, she struggles to put her life back in order. In a moment of sudden revelation, she decides to send out a special message in a cookie.
Director: Adura Onashile
Section: World Cinema Dramatic Competition
Available to watch in person and online
This will be Onashile’s first project to premiere at Sundance Film Festival. In her film, Eleven-year-old Ama and her mother, Grace, take solace in the gentle but isolated world they obsessively create. Ama’s growing up threatens the boundaries of their tenderness and forces Grace to reckon with a past she struggles to forget.
Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project
Director(s): Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson
Section: U.S. Documentary
Available to watch in person and online
Intimate vérité, archival footage, and visually innovative treatments of poetry take us on a journey through the dreamscape of legendary poet Nikki Giovanni as she reflects on her life and legacy.
Giovanni draws parallels between space exploration and the Black experience. “The Afro-futuristic lens honors Giovanni’s complexity and transports us on a journey through Black liberation from the perspective of one of America’s most acclaimed and beloved writers, a profound artist and activist.”
Director(s): Alejandra Vasquez and Sam Osborn
Section: U.S. Documentary Competition
Available to watch in person and online
In the competitive world of high school mariachi, the musicians from the South Texas borderlands reign supreme. Under the guidance of coach Abel Acuña, the teenage captains of Edinburg North High School’s acclaimed team must turn a shoestring budget and diverse crew of inexperienced musicians into state champions.
Producer James Lawler also produced Don’t Let Me Drown (2009 Sundance Film Festival), which was supported by Sundance Institute.
Gush
Director: Fox Maxy (Payómkawichum and Mesa Grande Band of Mission Indians)
Section: New Frontier
Available to watch in person
An embodied rumination of both male and female power, healing and haunting, all within an apocalyptic world. A transformation that courses through unknown terror to untamed collective joy.
Director: Nova Paul
Available to watch in person and online
At the edge of the playground close to the forest, the children of Okiwi School made a refuge they call Hawaiki. Hawaiki has spiritual and metaphysical connections for Māori as the children create a space for their self-determination.
Taietsarón:sere ‘Tai’ Leclaire
Short Film Program 5
Available to watch in person and online
Leclaire’s short film follows a queer Native who is confronted by a non-Native wearing a ceremonial headdress at a music festival. He retreats into his mind to find the perfect response from various versions of his own identity.
Director: David Zonana
Section: World Cinema Dramatic
Available to watch in person and online
Luis, an 18-year-old boy with Indigenous roots, enters the Heroic Military College in hopes of ensuring a better future. There, he encounters a rigid and institutionally violent system designed to turn him into a perfect soldier.
Director: Kymon Greyhorse
Section: Short Film Program 2
Available to watch in person and online
Greyhorse’s short film is about the world around us as it shifts, and we adapt and change. Although we might look different, deep down we are still the same. We are made from Mother Earth — mud, wood, love, and patience. In 2022, Greyhorse was a fellow for Sundance Institute’s Full Circle Fellowship.
I Have No Tears, and I Must Cry
Director: Luis Fernando Puente
Section: Short Film Program 5
Available to watch in person and online
Maria Luisa is ready to escape immigration limbo. But when her green card interview takes an unexpected turn, she faces the anxiety of losing the life she had planned.
Director: Alexandria Bombach
Section: Premieres
Available to watch in person
Blending 40 years of home movies, film archives, and intimate present-day vérité, a poignant reflection from Amy Ray and Emily Saliers of iconic folk rock duo Indigo Girls. A timely look into the obstacles, activism, and life lessons of two queer friends who never expected to make it big.
Director: Maria Estela Paiso
Section: Short Film Program (Short Film Preceding Feature)
Available to watch in person and online
A girl’s childhood home attempts to destroy her using her own personal history, but she resists.
In the Big Yard Inside the Teeny-Weeny Pocket
Director: Yoko Yuki
Section: Short Film Program 5
Available to watch in person and online
When it shrinks, it expands. It floats and it sinks. It separates but connects. When I think I’m watching them, they’re actually watching me.
Director: Kenneth Dagatan
Section: Midnight
Available to watch in person and online
Stranded in the Philippines during World War II, a young girl finds that her duty to protect her dying mother is complicated by her misplaced trust in a beguiling, flesh-eating fairy.
Director: Frédéric Tcheng and Bethann Hardison
Section: Premieres
Available to watch in person
In Tcheng’s film, co-directed by fashion revolutionary Bethann Hardison, Hardison looks back on her journey as a pioneering Black model, modeling agent, and activist, shining a light on an untold chapter in the fight for racial diversity.
Audiences might also be familiar with Halston (2019 Sundance Film Festival), which Tcheng wrote, directed, and produced.
Section: World Cinema Documentary Competition
Director: Roman Liubyi
Available to watch in person and online
In summer 2014, sunflower fields and coal mines in eastern Ukraine turned into a 12 square kilometer crime scene. A multi-layered investigation into the downing of flight MH17, in which a butterfly-shaped shrapnel was found in the pilot’s body, implicated the state responsible for a war crime that remains unpunished.
Director: Justin Chon
Section: Premieres
Available to watch in person and online
A father-son relationship is put to the test when an up-and-coming rapper at the crossroads of his career decides to let go of his manager, who is also his father. This decision forces them to confront the past and figure out what they want of each other.
Director: Sierra Urich
Section: U.S. Documentary
Available to watch in person and online
Spurred by a provocative family memory and a lifetime of separation from the country her mother left behind, a young filmmaker delves into her mother’s and grandmother’s complicated pasts and her own fractured Iranian identity.
Director: Saim Sadiq
Section: Spotlight
Available to watch in person and online
As the Ranas, a happily patriarchal joint family, yearn for the birth of a baby boy to continue the family line, their youngest son secretly joins an erotic dance theater and falls for an ambitious trans starlet. Their impossible love story illuminates the entire family’s desire for a sexual rebellion.
Director: Sophia Mocorrea
Section: Short Film Program 5
Available to watch in person and online
Luisa from Argentina and Fred from Germany are confronted with their social roles at their wedding. The German tradition of kidnapping the bride shakes the couple’s equality. There is no room for love in this role-play of marriage.
Director: D. Smith
Section: NEXT
Available to watch in person and online
Four Black transgender sex workers explore the dichotomy between the Black community and themselves while confronting issues long avoided.
Writer-director: Sterling Hampton
Section: Short Documentary Film Program
Available to watch in person and online
A young Black ballerina expresses her passion and pain as a dancer in the ballet community while performing in the inner-city neighborhoods of Los Angeles.
Director: Glorimar Marrero Sánchez
Section: World Drama
Available to watch in person and online
As her cancer spreads, Noelia’s ultimate decision is to return to her native Vieques, Puerto Rico, and claim her freedom to decide her own fate. She reunites with her friends and family, who are still dealing with the contamination of the U.S. Navy after 60 years of military practices.
Little Richard: I Am Everything
Director: Lisa Cortés
Section: U.S. Documentary
Available to watch in person
This celebration of Little Richard reveals the Black queer origins of rock ’n’ roll, finally exploding the whitewashed canon of American pop music. Through archival and performance footage, the revolutionary icon’s life unspools with all of its switchbacks and contradictions.
Director: Elijah Bynum
Section: U.S. Dramatic Competition
Available to watch in person and online
In this premiere starring Jonathan Majors, an amateur bodybuilder struggles to find human connection as his relentless drive for recognition pushes him to the brink.
Director: Patricia Ortega
Section: World Drama
Available to watch in person and online
With the help of her newly emigrated daughter, a religious grandmother learns how to use the internet. However, an accidental encounter with pornography poses a dilemma for her.
Writer-director: C.J. “Fiery” Obasi
Section: World Cinema Drama
Available to watch in person and online
When the harmony in a village [in West Africa] is threatened by outside elements, two sisters must fight to save their people and restore the glory of a mermaid goddess to the land.
Writer-Director: Milisuthando Bongela
Section: World Cinema Documentary
Available to watch in person and online
Set in past, present, and future South Africa — an invitation into a poetic, memory-driven exploration of love, intimacy, race, and belonging by the filmmaker, who grew up during apartheid but didn’t know it was happening until it was over.
The filmmaker grew up in a Xhosa community in South Africa, effectively shielded from the idea of apartheid. According to the Festival Film Guide: “Bongela invites the audience in as she plumbs the anatomy of race as bequeathed to us by our ancestors, and explores what roles our ancestors play in how we create our personhood.”
Murder in Big Horn
Director: Razelle Benally (Oglala Lakota and Navajo)
Section: Premieres
Available to watch in person and online
The deaths of a group of Native American women in rural Montana are the focus as Native families, journalists, and local law enforcement reveal a violent crisis set in motion almost 200 years ago.
Director: Vuk Lungulov-Klotz
Section: U.S. Dramatic Competition
Available to watch in person and online
In Lungulov-Klotz’s film, over the course of a single hectic day in New York City, three people from Feña’s past are thrust back into his life. Having lost touch since transitioning from female to male, he navigates the new dynamics of old relationships while tackling the day-to-day challenges of living life in between.
Writer-director: Maisha Maene
Section: Short Film Program 5
An “afronaut” emerges from the wreckage of his spaceship in the volcanic crater of Mount Nyiragongo. As he encounters the people of present-day Goma in the city, he begins to understand how to change the future for his people. English subtitles.
Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV
Director: Amanda Kim
Section: U.S. Documentary
Available to watch in person and online
The quixotic journey of Nam June Paik, one of the most famous Asian artists of the 20th century, who revolutionized the use of technology as an artistic canvas and prophesied both the fascist tendencies and intercultural understanding that would arise from the interconnected metaverse of today’s world.
Director: Reema Maya
Short Film Program 3
Somewhere between fantasy, trauma, paranoia, precaution, and the promise of a burger, a night gets catapulted into an investigation of child abuse at a dysfunctional police station in Mumbai.
Director: Xenia Matthews
Section: Short Film Program 6
Available to watch in person and online
First-time Sundancer Xenia Matthews’ film tells the story of the long-dead Ourika, a Senegalese girl enslaved by a French aristocrat, who is awoken in the eerie space between life and death, between body and soul, where she finds her way back to life and into liberation.
Writer-director: Jeron Braxton
Section: Short Animated Film Program
Available to watch in person and online
Cash for organs and anything for love.
Directors: Sharon Liese and Catherine Hoffman
Section: Short Film Program 1
Available to watch in person and online
Three generations of a Kansas City family are finally unified when they do something that countless other African Americans could not — choose their own last name.
Director: Maryam Keshavarz
Section: U.S. Drama
Available to watch in person and online
When a large Iranian-American family gathers for the patriarch’s heart transplant, a family secret is uncovered that catapults the estranged mother and daughter into an exploration of the past. Toggling between the United States and Iran over decades, mother and daughter discover they are more alike than they know.
Director: Sujanth Ravichandran
Section: Midnight Short Film Program
Available to watch in person and online
Bob is a plumber hired to fix a broken pipe. He lands, to his surprise, in a gay fetish club.
Director: Richie Mehta
Section: Indie Episodic
Available to watch in person and online
A group of Indian Forest Service officers, NGO workers, police constables and Good Samaritans risk their lives trying to track down the biggest elephant ivory poachers in the history of India and bring them to justice. Inspired by true events.
Director: Nida Manzoor
Section: Midnight
Available to watch in person
Aspiring martial artist Ria Khan believes she must save her older sister, Lena, from her impending marriage. With the help of her friends, Ria attempts to pull off the most ambitious of all wedding heists in the name of independence and sisterhood.
Director: Crystal Kayiza
Section: Short Film Program 2
Available to watch in person and online
On a bus ride from New York to Oklahoma, Meyi, a young Ugandan-American girl, realizes her place in the world through her mother’s ambitious effort to reunite their family.
Director: Rashad Frett
Section: Fiction Short Films
Available to watch in person and online
An ex-offender struggling with new freedom pursues redemption at all costs when given a job from his neighbor.
Director: Sebastian Silva
Section: Premieres
Available to watch in person
After filmmaker Sebastian Silva goes missing in Mexico City, social media celebrity Jordan Firstman begins searching for him, suspecting that the cleaning lady in Sebastian’s building may have something to do with his disappearance.
Director: Raine Allen-Miller
Section: Premieres
Available to watch in person
Two twenty-somethings reeling from bad breakups deal with their nightmare exes and connect over the course of an eventful day in South London.
The Sea on the Day When the Magic Returns
Director: Jiwon Han
Section: Animation Short Film Program
Available to watch in person and online
Sejin once had the power to have anything she wanted just by thinking about it. Now she has lost her magic. Hours before her interview to be a tourist interpreter, Sejin heads to the weary sea to save her father.
Writer-director: Vincent Fontano
Section: Short Film Program 4
Available to watch in person and online
In an insular city, a young girl is paralyzed by the fear of her loved ones disappearing. Her grandmother tells her the tale of Edwardo, the first one of his kind to have fought death. English subtitles.
Director: Aziz Zoromba
Section: International Short Films
Available to watch in person and online
In order to prove his popularity to his older brother, Simo sneakily infiltrates his brother’s gaming channel and uses a suspicious object to help increase the viewers. His actions have the effect of a bomb on the whole family.
Director: Noora Niasari
Section: World Drama
Available to watch in person and online
Shayda, a brave Iranian mother, finds refuge in an Australian women’s shelter with her 6-year-old daughter. Over Persian New Year, they take solace in Nowruz rituals and new beginnings, but when her estranged husband re-enters their lives, Shayda’s path to freedom is jeopardized.
Shirampari: Legacies of the River
Director: Lucia Flórez
Section: Documentary Short Film Program
Available to watch in person and online
In Florez’ short about one of the most remote places in the Peruvian Amazon, an Ashéninka boy must overcome his fears and catch a giant catfish using only a hook to begin his adult journey.
Director: Randall Park
Section: U.S. Dramatic Competition
Available to watch in person and online
Following Ben, Miko, and Alice as they navigate a range of interpersonal relationships and traverse the country in search of the ideal connection.
Directors: Kristen Lovell and Zackary Drucker
Section: U.S. Documentary
Available to watch in person and online
The history of New York’s Meatpacking District as told from the perspective of transgender sex workers who lived and worked there. Filmmaker Kristen Lovell, who walked “The Stroll” for a decade, reunites her community to recount the violence, policing, homelessness, and gentrification they overcame to build a movement for transgender rights.
Sunflower Siege Engine
Director: Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians)
Section: Shorts Program 1
Available to watch in person and online
Movements of resistance are collapsed and woven together, from reflections of one’s own body in the world today to documentation of Alcatraz, the reclamation of Cahokia, and the repatriation of the ancestors.
Director: Selma Cervantes
Short Film Program 1
Available to watch in person and online
Inés works as a seamstress in a sweatshop where pregnancy tests are periodically administered. When she becomes pregnant, she is sure that her condition will get her fired. She does everything she can to keep it a secret.
Director: Ido Mizrahy
Section: World Cinema Documentary Competition
Available to watch in person an online
Social isolation affects millions of people, even Mars-bound astronauts. A savvy NASA psychologist is tasked with protecting these daring explorers.
Director: Liz Sargent
Section: Short Film Program 6
Available to watch in person and online
After their mother’s death, a cognitively disabled woman and her estranged sister must learn to communicate in order to move forward.
Director: A.V. Rockwell
Section: U.S. Drama
Available to watch in person and online
Convinced it’s one last, necessary crime on the path to redemption, unapologetic and free-spirited Inez (Teyana Taylor) kidnaps 6-year-old Terry from the foster care system. Holding on to their secret and each other, mother and son set out to reclaim their sense of home, identity, and stability in New York City.
Writer-director: Qasim Basir
Section: NEXT
Available to watch in person and online
Muhammad returns home to Detroit to bury his stepfather and is thrust into settling his accounts, but Muhammad’s struggles with depression and addiction may finish him before he finishes the task.
Director: Inga Elin Marakatt
Midnight Short Film Program
Available to watch in person and online
A pregnant widow steals silver from a dead body in order to survive and feed her daughter. But the silver is cursed and has consequences for all of them, including the unborn.
Writer-director: Jarreau Carrillo
Section: Short Film Program 6
Available to watch in person and online
In Carrillo’s short, a Black man attempts to take a vacation.
Director and co-writer: Tari Wariebi
Program: Shorts Film Program 2
Available to watch in person and online
In a world where Black men have wings and their first flight is a rite of passage, Akil must defy fears, insecurities, and societal barriers while discovering his perfect launch into manhood.
Director: Melina Valdez
Section: Short Film Program 4
Available to watch in person and online
Unable to process her grief after the death of her stepfather, a teenage girl escapes reality by shooting guns in the woods.
Well Wishes My Love, Your Love
Director: Gabriel Gabriel Garble
Section: Animated Short Films
Available to watch in person and online
Newly orphaned and freshly wounded from a loss, a boy lends his companion a prosthetic arm for the day. The companion records the limb being exposed to textures and materials. What will become of the limb and the video recordings? This is the premise of Garble’s project, her first to premiere at the Sundance Film Festival.
When You Left Me On That Boulevard
Director: Kayla Abuda Galang
Section: Short Film Program 3
Available to watch in person and online
Teenager Ly and her cousins get high before a boisterous family Thanksgiving at their auntie’s house in southeast San Diego in 2006. This will be Galang’s first project to premiere at the Festival.
Director: Shalini Adnani
Section: Short Film Program 3
Available to watch in person and online
In Adnani’s short film — her first to premiere at the Festival — a man is summoned from Mumbai to his village to deal with a termite infestation threatening to destroy his childhood home.
Director: Shuli Huang
Section: Documentary Short Film Program
Available to watch in person and online
In Huang’s film, as a young Chinese filmmaker returns to his hometown in search of himself, a long-overdue conversation with his mother drives them into a quest for acceptance and love. This will be Huang’s first film to premiere at the Sundance Film Festival.
Director: Thembi L. Banks
Section: NEXT
Available to watch in person and online
High school senior Brandon is drowning in responsibilities when his world is turned upside down after being robbed at gunpoint by the girl of his dreams.
Director: Dane Ray
Section: U.S. Fiction Short Films
Available to watch in person and online
A mourning widow suspects a stranger in town is wearing her late husband’s Army jacket. She cautiously stalks the man into the night in an attempt to find closure.
