Next year's Sundance Film Festival will feature Jennifer Lopez singing and dancing in Bill Condon's ''Kiss of the Spider Woman,'' Questlove exploring the legacy of Sly & The Family Stone and Associated Press journalist Mstyslav Chernov's latest documentary about the war in Ukraine.
The Sundance Institute on Wednesday unveiled 87 feature films set to premiere at the 2025 festival, kicking off on Jan. 23 in Park City, Utah.
Now in its 41st year, the festival remains a place of discovery for independent cinema and emerging voices. Because of its January timing, it's also a gathering that arrives alongside the presidential inauguration. At the 2017 festival following Donald Trump's first inauguration, Main Street was taken over by a lively women's march full of celebrities. This year, no such plans have been announced.
''Sundance as a festival has endured as a place to gather through inaugurations every four years, through different cultural moments and political moments,'' said festival director Eugene Hernandez. ''We have a program that both engages with the world and also offers at the very same time an escape.''
Narrative films and documentaries premiering this year will touch on politicized topics like transgender stories and rights, ''stand your ground'' laws, incarceration, the right to die and book banning. But Sundance doesn't program by theme or have mandates about topics, said Kim Yutani, the festival's director of programming.
''I think what you see across the program are stories that are told with real authenticity. There's an innovative quality to many of these films,'' Yutani said. ''And the idea of free expression is something that is just as important to us.''
Urgent issues and familiar faces in documentaries
Documentaries are always a highlight at Sundance, where the conversation starts and often continues through the year into the Oscar race. Chernov follows his Oscar winning''20 Days in Mariupol'' with ''2000 Meters to Andriivka,'' which looks at a Ukrainian platoon on a mission to liberate a village from Russian occupation. It's a joint project between AP and PBS ''Frontline."