Founded by late US actor Robert Redford in 1978 as the Utah/US Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival has since become the largest and leading US film festival for independent cinema. Celebrating its final Utah edition this year, the festival will inaugurate its new home in Boulder, Colorado, in 2027. Prior to the 2026 edition of the gathering (running 22 January-2 February), Cineuropa spoke with John Nein, senior programmer and director of Strategic Initiatives for the festival, to learn more about this year’s programme (read news), with a focus on the European and international films in the showcase.

Cineuropa: Sundance’s two primary strands for non-US cinema are the World Cinema Dramatic and World Cinema Documentary competitions. How many submissions do you typically receive, and could you tell us about any trends or developments in these competitions in this year’s edition of the festival?
John Nein: One of the exciting things about the programme over the last, I'd say, 10 to 15 years is just how many more international submissions we’ve received. I think it's a reflection of how certain films have stood out internationally at Sundance. To give a quantitative answer, we received around 2,500 international features for the festival this year, between non-fiction and fiction films. That’s a pretty significant number, and it reflects an uptick over the years. The qualitative answer is that I think it's a reflection of the idea that Sundance represents an opportunity. It represents a way that films can stand out in a festival in a slightly different way. It's something we've put a lot of time and effort into. We really believe in creating opportunity and visibility for these films.

How do you go about curating these strands when you have so many submissions for just a few slots?
It's actually such a small programme that it's sometimes frustrating to us that there are only so many films we can include. There are 10 films in each international competition. Even though we play films in our Midnight section and certainly some bigger films in our premiere section, by and large, the world cinema competitions are the centrepieces for international films in the programme. It’s a fairly small section, so it's intensely curated and incredibly competitive. The way that we came to it over the years was that Sundance had developed a reputation for platforming groundbreaking new talent associated with US cinema. But then we asked, what’s the difference? If you're a new voice, if you're an exciting voice, Sundance is a place that reflects courageous, boundary-pushing storytelling, formally and in terms of subject matter, so it should be a place of discovery for international talent too.

What do you think Sundance offers international filmmakers in particular?
What appeals is a certain identity that’s emerged over the years, which international filmmakers are very aware of. Sundance developed its reputation around the kind of artists that were being supported. When you travelled around, you heard people talk about these seminal US films that came out of Sundance. The difference, as you know, is that film is also a business. What’s changed over the past 20 years or so is the recognition that we’ve had as a festival, that films coming to Sundance were also making a business decision. What we needed to build was a sense of viability and opportunity for those films to see it as a place where they could sell to distributors, where they could be reviewed and attract press attention. We’ve focused heavily on relationships with those companies over the years in order for them to have a better sense of what those opportunities are.

What we found was that as soon as those companies started to meet with success thanks to films in the festival, they started to think: “We know how this can work.” Having a small programme means that we can talk to distributors, buyers and the press about almost every single international film in the programme. We offer a kind of hand-holding experience for each project, where you can listen to their expectations. There's a kind of bespoke treatment that these films receive, which I think is really helpful. When you accumulate those stories over 15 years or so, you start to build a sense of opportunity and of what's possible for these filmmakers.

In Cineuropa, we focus on anything with European involvement which, these days, means films from all around the world. Do you pay attention to geographical representation in the programming process and, if so, how?
It’s really important to us to have films representing countries from all over the world. We have a programming team who travel to festivals, project markets and cities to meet with producers and sales companies. Through our travels, we’ve become very aware of the fact that some European countries are very robust coproduction partners. That’s one way that we get to see films originating in other parts of the world but which have a European connection. I think that’s really clear in the programme this year. I'm thinking of Filipiñana from the Philippines and Levitating from Indonesia, for instance. You really do need an increasingly globalised kind of cooperation in order for these films to be made. It's definitely the case for nonfiction films too. We’re also aware of certain countries where one region tends to enjoy fairly robust representation. But when we see something from a different part of one of those regions, it's a noteworthy experience too. It’s the sense that something is fresh, something new. And that’s exciting for us.