By Erik Adams
Coming-of-age stories and movies go together like acne and puberty. High stakes, heightened emotions, big changes, ample opportunity for comedic embarrassment — it’s the stuff of adolescence and many great moments in cinema.
The intimate scale and storytelling that often defines independent filmmaking means that the Sundance Film Festival has long been a showcase for onscreen characters taking giant leaps and tentative steps toward the next stage of their life. The 2026 Festival is no exception — appropriate for an event that’s about to undergo its own major transition. Here are 15 shorts and features from this year’s lineup that, no matter the genre, format, or setting, are guaranteed to transport you back to your own youth.
SHORT FILMS
Birdie (Short Film Program 5) — Coming of age can often feel like being caught between two worlds, and that goes double for the main characters of Praise Odigie Paige’s latest short. In this atmospheric, summery period piece, the youngest of a family of Nigerian refugees bears witness to the changes lying ahead of her, represented by the recent arrival of another refugee from the Biafran War and news of the concluding conflict back home. Available in person and online.
Seniors (Short Film Program 2) — Everything’s about to be different for high-school senior Tom (Noah Pacht). He just doesn’t know how different yet. Director Adam Curley packs an impressive amount of characterization and emotion into his debut short’s 12 minutes, giving us a clear picture of Tom and his parents (played by Brooke Bloom and Matt Walton) in the fleeting moments before their whole family comes apart. Available in person and online.
FEATURES
Big Girls Don’t Cry (World Cinema Dramatic Competition) — It’s the summer of 2006, and 14-year-old Sid Bookman (Ani Palmer) knows she’s into girls — it’s every other aspect of her personality she’s still figuring out. She wants so badly to be noticed by the older, cooler kids she idolizes in her rural New Zealand hometown; director Paloma Schneideman notices Sid for who she really is, favoring close-ups of Palmer as she gets comfortably uncomfortable in the poses her character pulls IRL and in a Wild West of online flirting and making friends via SMS. Available in person and online.
BURN (NEXT) — In content and form, Makoto Nagahisa’s kaleidoscopic follow-up to Pisko the Crab Child is in Love (2024 Sundance Film Festival) is probably the most challenging film on this list. It presents the streets and squats of Tokyo as a sort of grimy fairyland, where young Ju-Ju (Nana Mori) seeks solace from an abusive home and finds kinship (while facing some harsh realities) among a colorful group of fellow runaways. Available in person and online.
Extra Geography (World Cinema Dramatic Competition) — Adolescent friendship rarely looks as genuine, or as genuinely intense, as it does in Molly Manners’ visually assured debut. That’s thanks in large part to newcomers Marni Dugan and Galaxie Clear, who expertly depict ecstatic highs and devastating lows in their portrayal of two attached-at-the-hip boarding school besties who make falling in love the top priority of their summer. Available in person and online.
Hold Onto Me (Κράτα Με) (World Cinema Dramatic Competition) —
Iris (Maria Petrova) never got to know her father (Christos Passalis) while he was still around, but when he reemerges to get the affairs of his own dad in order, first-time feature director Myrsini Aristidou kicks off a moving, gorgeously photographed period of reconciliation and bonding, played with maximum pathos by Petrova and Passalis. Available in person and online.
Hot Water (U.S. Dramatic Competition) — Sometimes the hallmarks of coming of age can sneak up on us later in life: In Hot Water, teenage Daniel (Daniel Zolghadri) and his mother, Layal (Lubna Azabal) are on parallel journeys toward self-discovery, acceptance, and grace. Director Ramzi Bashour sets them on a literal journey, too, taking the duo on a road trip (another coming-of-age standby) through the breathtaking, wide-open landscapes of the Western United States. Available in person and online.
If I Go Will They Miss Me (NEXT) —
Walter Thompson Hernández’s dreamlike feature debut builds the premise of his prize-winning 2022 Sundance Film Festival short — a kid growing up in South Los Angeles’ Watts neighborhood has recurring visions of boys with airplane wings for arms — into a touching father-son fable. Big Ant (J. Alphonse Nicholson) and Little Ant (Bodhi Dell) have each had encounters with these winged boys, but their differing reactions — and Little Ant’s mental image of his dad as a Greek god — threaten to pull them apart just as they’re on the verge of connecting for the first time. Available in person and online.
Levitating (World Cinema Dramatic Competition) — The hallucinogenic imagery and wild dance moves of Indonesian director Wregas Bhanuteja’s third feature are unlike anything else you’ll see at the Festival, but the framework is tried-and-true coming-of-age, with a young protagonist (Angga Yunanda) training to be the very best in his chosen field (in this case, channeling spirits through music), falling in love, enduring a misunderstanding father, and ultimately banding together with friends and rivals to save a cherished local resource from greedy developers. Available in person and online.
Leviticus (Midnight) — The terrors of growing up are classic horror fodder. Romantic rejection, social shunning, parental pressures, the feeling that the whole world is set against you — writer-director Adrian Chiarella skillfully preys on all these fears and the anxiety of being queer in a Christian fundamentalist community with the slow-burning tale of cursed teenage lovebirds Naim (Joe Bird) and Ryan (Stacy Clausen). Available in person.
Little Miss Sunshine (Park City Legacy) — Paul Dano speaks few words in Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris’ 2006 Sundance Film Festival breakout, but he makes one line really count: “Sometimes I just wish I could go to sleep until I was 18.” The rush to grow up is one of the many, simultaneously funny and poignant threads running throughout this acclaimed ensemble piece, be it in the vow-of-silence-taking, Nietzsche-inspired pretensions toward maturity of Dano’s character, or the beauty-pageant aspirations of his 7-year-old sister, Olive (Abigail Breslin). But as the members of their family prove over and over, adults can have unfulfilled dreams and unsolved problems, too. Available in person.
Mysterious Skin (Park City Legacy) — An absolute stunner from Festival fixture Gregg Araki, whose unmistakable filmmaking style found a new, more tender gear with this adaptation of Scott Heim’s novel about two boys who share a traumatic childhood experience and grow up to be two young men (Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Brady Corbet in career-redefining turns) on diverging-yet-ultimately-intersecting paths. Available in person.
One In A Million (World Cinema Documentary Competition) — When documentarians Itab Azzam and Jack MacInnes meet Isra’a on the streets of Izmir, Turkey, she already seems wise beyond her years — preternaturally matter-of-fact about the supplies she and her family need for their clandestine trek to Europe by boat. Across the next 90 minutes (and 10 years of footage), we watch as Isra’a grows into the young woman hinted at in those words, in a remarkable feat of documentary filmmaking that sees her, her parents, and her siblings adapting to life in Germany and eventually returning to Aleppo. Available in person and online.
Queen of Chess (Premieres) — The ninth documentary brought to the Festival by director Rory Kennedy focuses on chess grandmaster Judit Polgár. Kennedy traces Polgár’s path to becoming the game’s greatest female player, beginning with a unique childhood in which she and her sisters were raised to epitomize their father’s deeply researched notion of “genius.” Available in person.
Run Amok (U.S. Dramatic Competition) — NB Mager adapts her short of the same name into a candy-colored, but by no means sugar-coated, satire about growing up in the age of American mass shootings. She takes aim at the adults whose only answer to these tragedies is “arm the teachers,” all the while taking seriously the confusion and lost innocence of the kids they’ve failed to protect. Chief among them: Meg (Alyssa Marvin, in a tremendous performance), who composes a confrontational musical to teach the lessons those in her school and her community never properly internalized. Available in person and online.
Tell Me Everything (World Cinema Dramatic Competition) — Director Moshe Rosenthal reaches into his own childhood to depict an underdiscussed rite of passage: Learning our parents are people with their own flaws and secrets, too. The discovery that redefines Boaz’s (Yair Mazor) youth reverberates across dual timelines, as Rosenthal shows how a father-son rupture impacts the boy before his bar mitzvah and for years afterward. Available in person and online.
