Sundance 2023: A-List Directors Will Be Slim, But New Discoveries Aplenty

Sundance will be announcing their entire lineup in late November. This will be the first edition of the Park City-set festival to take place in-person since 2020. That means the 2023 edition will probably get a bump in quality. The 2021 and 2022 lineups were all screened virtually due to COVID.

Eric Kohn has decided to get a head-start of what we might see pop up at next January’s edition and it looks fairly grim, that is if you want the big names to show up. Then again, that’s never been the lure of Sundance — it’s first and foremost a place for cinematic discovery.

The best films this year will probably again come from newcomers since the A-List directors tipped to premiere new films at Sundance next year amount to ZERO, unless you count Ira Sachs, Rebecca Miller, Dave Franco, and Brandon Cronenberg as maestros.

The fest’s rich history with discovering small, indie gems was not entirely lost during these last few virtual years. In fact, if an indie movie did become a breakout hit then chances were that it most certainly premiered at Robert Redford’s three decade old film festival. In 2021 and 2022 we got the likes of “CODA,” “Summer of Soul,” “Living,” “Passing,” “Flee,” “Fire of Love,” “All That Breathes,” “Cha Cha Real Smooth,” “Mass,” “Navalny,” “God’s Country,” “Resurrection,” “Emily the Criminal,” and “Watcher.”

Festival boss Tabitha Jackson was let go of her duties earlier this year, despite Sundance garnering its first Best Picture winner ever with “Coda.” There seems to be a lot of bitterness with Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s “Everything Everywhere All At Once” having originally been slated for Sundance 2022 before the filmmakers getting cold feet due to the Fest’s all-virtual format. SXSW ended up world premiering the film and the rest, as they say, is history.

If we look back on Sundance history we will also find another trend: Best Picture nominees. Since 2009, when new rules for the number of Best Picture nominees were instated, there were only three years in which no Sundance movie was nominated. In the past 13 years, 16 films that premiered at Sundance have cracked the Best Picture lineup.