Get ready to update your LetterBoxd Watchlist. The Sundance Film Festival is departing Utah after this year (sorry, Lisa Barlow) and heading to Boulder, Colorado. To commemorate the festival’s first 41 years in Park City, its programmers created a comprehensive watch list of the 101 definitive films that premiered at the festival and shared it with Vulture first. Like Sundance itself, the movies are wide-ranging in scope and include documentaries like the acclaimed Hoop Dreams, comedies like Napoleon Dynamite, and Oscar-favorite dramas like Past Lives.
The watch list begins with the first year of the festival, recommending the Coen brothers’ Blood Simple from 1985, and ends with the 2025 collegiate drama Sorry, Baby, from filmmaker Eva Victor. Most years of the festival are included on the list, though there are some exceptions: 1987, 1997, 2008, and 2024. The programmers limited themselves to one movie per filmmaker, so they had to make hard choices, like which Richard Linklater movie to include (they opted for Boyhood over Before Sunrise, a prioritization that film fans could debate for hours). The full list of films on the watch list can be found at sundance.org.
Click here to preview your posts with PRO themes ››
“The rundown is a small portion of the films that tell the story of the Sundance Film Festival,” the programmers shared in a statement. “The final list is in order of year, contains only one title per artist, encompasses films that had their premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, and entailed applying various considerations to narrow it down. We would love to include every film as each and every one has made the Festival and independent film what it is, so consider this a small start to reminiscing and inspiration to craft your own Sundance Film Festival 101 Films watchlist.” Now layer up for the cold and get to watching.
