Sundance Film Festival

Sundance Film Festival | London 2023

The Sundance Film Festival: terrible sidekick for a cowboy, excellent platform for emerging film-makers.

The festival is staged annually in Salt Lake City, championing independent cinema and often catapulting its featured participants to worldwide fame. American Psycho, Reservoir Dogs and Four Weddings & A Funeral all made their debut there. And now, for the 11th year, a little sliver of the festival is making its way over to our shores too, with dozens of films hand-picked by the programmers for a run at the Picturehouse Central cinema on Shaftesbury Avenue.

Taking place from 6th – 9th July, it’s a tightly packed programme of some of the most highly commended flicks from the 2023 listings. The line-up is a blend of feature length films, shorts and documentaries, a few highlights of which include…

• Scrapper – a UK premiere and the programme’s opening screening, Scrapper comes from BAFTA Nominee (and London local) Charlotte Regan, following the funny & touching story of a 12 year old girl reconnecting with her estranged father after her mother’s death;
• Birdsong – a documentary about the disappearing whistled language of the Hmong people of northern Laos;
• Passages – Ben Whishaw, Franz Rogowski and Adèle Exarchopoulos star in a portrait of a gay couple whose relationship is upended by an affair with a younger woman;
• Invisible Beauty – the true story of pioneering Black model Bethann Hardison and her activist work to improve representation over her five-decade career;

• Going Varsity in Mariachi – a real-life insight into “the competitive world of high school mariachi”;
• White Ant – director Shalini Adnani’s dreamlike short about termites, shot in Mumbai on 16mm film;
• The Totally F*cked Up Cinema of Gregg Araki – a three-film retrospective of the radical queer film-maker; and
• You Hurt My Feelings – another UK premiere and the festival’s closing show; a comedy-drama about marital breakdown starring Seinfeld’s Julia Louis-Dreyfus and The Crown’s Tobias Menzies.

You can book tickets to individual screenings now, but, since it’s a festival, there’s also the option to go for passes that give you access to multiple films. There’s also set to be a whole programme of industry talks, discussions and masterclasses hosted by some of the most interesting names in the biz, all of which will be announced shortly…

…if you want to hear from some reel professionals.

NOTE: Tickets are on sale for the Sundance Film Festival London now – you can see the full programme, and book, HERE.

Sundance Film Festival London 2023 | Picturehouse Central, Shaftesbury Avenue, W1D 7DH

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