By Jordan Crucchiola
By taking us into the past, filmmakers can guide audiences to a better understanding of where we are now through showing us where we have been. Whether that means stalking the dark hallways of clandestine queer gathering places in 18th-century London, witnessing the American railroad boom through the eyes of one working man, or even reliving the Golden Age of Hollywood musicals with Jennifer Lopez as a silver screen diva, the 2025 Sundance Film Festival will transport you to all those places and more.
Use the list below to find period piece treasures in this year’s lineup — among both the short films and feature-length narratives — and be sure to mind the griffins as you make your way through. Single Film Tickets for online and in-person viewing go on sale January 16.
SHORT FILMS
Em & Selma Go Griffin Hunting (Midnight Short Film Program) — Writer-director Alexander Thompson takes his love of myths, fairy tales, and the fantastical and imbues them into this short film set in the Great Depression–era American countryside. Em & Selma Go Griffin Hunting follows an adolescent girl embarking on a quest to slay a mythical beast selected by her mother, in accordance with long-standing tradition, and it features Hereditary breakout Milly Shapiro in one of the titular roles. Available in person and online as part of the Midnight Short Film Program.
Sweetheart (Short Film Program 1) — A theater and film director by trade, Luke Wintour makes his narrative screen debut with Sweetheart. The piece is set in 1723 London, where a man named Thomas Neville (Eben Figueiredo) has to hide out in a molly house — essentially the proto-queer clubs of Georgian Britain — after being caught cruising in the public toilets. Once inside, though, Thomas meets an underground community preparing for a night of revelry, and the audience follows him as he discovers this side of life for the first time. Available in person and online as part of Short Film Program 1.
FEATURES
Kiss of the Spider Woman (Premieres) — From the page to the screen to the stage — and now back to the screen again — Kiss of the Spider Woman has been winding its way through pop culture for half a century, first as a 1976 novel by Manuel Puig, then as an Academy Award–nominated film in 1985, and finally as a Tony-winning musical in the early 1990s. Now, Bill Condon (Dreamgirls, Chicago) brings Kiss back to film as a musical once again, this time with a cast that includes Diego Luna and Jennifer Lopez. The story takes place in an Argentinian prison cell in 1981, amid the backdrop of a military dictatorship. In the cell is Molina (Tonatiuh) , a professional window dresser imprisoned for indecency who mentally escapes his captivity by imagining a film in which the screen diva main character (Lopez) is both a fashion editor and the eponymous Spider Woman able to kill prey with a kiss. While imprisoned, Molina bonds with a political prisoner named Valentín (Luna), and the story plays out with the help of showstopping musical numbers that harken back to the extravagance of classical Hollywood productions. This will be Condon’s return to the Sundance Film Festival after 1998’s Gods and Monsters. Available in person.
Peter Hujar’s Day (Premieres) — Peter Hujar was a New York photographer in the sense that he lived in the city, but more than that, he was an artist of the city, at home amid the poets and the drag queens and the Lower East Side’s underground elements — even as he was admired by its literati. Hujar became famous for his focus on male sexuality and death, but he also made portraits of Fran Lebowitz, Susan Sontag, Divine, William Burroughs, and John Waters. For his new feature, Peter Hujar’s Day, writer-director Ira Sachs brings to life a recently discovered 1974 recording of Hujar talking with his friend, the author Linda Rosenkrantz, in her 94th Street apartment. The two are brought to life by actors of exceptional craft, Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall, to re-create the experience of two artists living and working in New York during an explosive creative era for the city. Peter Hujar’s Day will be Sachs’ 10th project to screen at the Sundance Film Festival. Available in person.
Plainclothes (U.S. Dramatic Competition) — For his feature directorial debut, writer-director Carmen Emmi arrives as a talent to watch with Plainclothes. His script, which was selected as a top 50 finalist for the 2022 Academy Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting, centers on a promising young police officer, Lucas (Tom Blyth), who is tasked with the difficult beat of entrapping and apprehending gay men. But Lucas has a secret he keeps from the department as well, and while living undercover he succumbs to forbidden attraction to one of his marks, Andrew (Russell Tovey). With strategic use of lo-fi VHS footage laced throughout his anxious thriller, Emmi brings the 1990s setting to life and pulls the viewer into the paranoid spiral of Lucas’ internal battle with his own desire, as well as his struggle against external repressive elements within the society generally and the police force specifically. Available in person and online.
Rabbit Trap (Midnight) — Though subtle in its period signifiers, this film’s placement in both 1973 and the rural Welsh countryside emphasize the feeling of isolation cultivated by writer-director Bryn Chainey. Dev Patel is Darcy and Rosy McEwen is Daphne, a married couple who have left behind more developed environs in favor of a remote cottage surrounded by rolling green hills and on the edge of a mysterious forest. They see only each other, but even in their quiet moments alone the couple seems to exist far apart. And when a strange visitor (Jade Croot) comes upon their home and burrows into their lives, Daphne and Darcy are forced to confront the unacknowledged rifts between them as the very world around them becomes more threatening. Chainey’s interests in folktales and themes of belonging are on full display in this Midnight special, and the entirely analog life of its central couple makes for an eerie, enveloping sense of disconnection from more worldly forms of rescue or retreat. Available in person.
Train Dreams (Premieres) — On the heels of co-writing A24’s critically hailed Sing Sing, Sundance Film Festival alum Clint Bentley (Jockey, 2021) returns with this quintessential American drama adapted from Denis Johnson’s novella of the same name, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Joel Edgerton stars as Robert Grainier, a logger working to build U.S. railways in the early 20th century. Grainier’s job takes him from his wife (Felicity Jones) and child for long spells, and he labors to reconcile his place in the world with the staggering pace of change in the age of the locomotive. America is expanding at an unprecedented clip, but Bentley keeps his film intimately trained on the love and loss and life endured and experienced by Grainier, and in the process breathtakingly realizes Johnson’s original work. Available in person.
The Virgin of Quarry Lake (World Cinema Dramatic Competition) — In this literary adaptation, touted genre filmmaker Laura Casabé (winner of the Best Director award in the Noves Visions section at the 2020 Sitges Film Festival for Los que vuelven) draws inspiration from two short stories by Mariana Enríquez, “El carrito” and “La Virgen de la tosquera,” with Benjamin Naishtat penning the script for this first-ever screen treatment of the author’s work. In The Virgin of Quarry Lake, three teenagers in 2001 Buenos Aires enter a love triangle that incorporates elements of folklore to create a coming-of-age tale that ensorcells a recent high school graduate named Natalia (Dolores Oliverio), her childhood friend Diego (Agustín Sosa), and the older and more mature Silvia (Fernanda Echevarría), who captures the attention of the young man at Natalia’s expense. Available in person and online.
Become a Sundance Institute member by January 10 to get early access to our Single Film Ticket Pre-Sale. That means you’ll be able to purchase movie tickets before they become available to the general public! Members also get 20% off merch and invites to special events.
