“Buddy”
(Midnight, World Premiere, Fiction)
A brave girl and her friends must escape a kids’ television show—simple sentence, deeply unnerving implications, and a built-in meta-horror engine. Director Casper Kelly has an excellent cast for chaos: Cristin Milioti, Delaney Quinn, Topher Grace, Keegan-Michael Key, Michael Shannon, and Patton Oswalt.
“undertone”
(Midnight, U.S. Premiere, Fiction)
A paranormal podcast host gets haunted by terrifying recordings that arrive like cursed content drops, the kind of modern nightmare that feels designed for headphones and insomnia. Writer-director Ian Tuason casts Nina Kiri, Adam DiMarco, Michèle Duquet, Keana Lyn Bastidas, and Jeff Yung.
“Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass”
(Premieres, World Premiere, Fiction)
A sheltered woman’s longtime crush on a celebrity turns into a full-blown identity crisis when she gets permission to act on it—wish fulfillment curdling into self-interrogation. Director David Wain has Zoey Deutch leading opposite Jon Hamm, with Brandon Flynn, Joan Cusack, and John Slattery on deck.
“Chasing Summer”
(Premieres, World Premiere, Fiction)
Directed by Josephine Decker (who previously made “Madeline’s Madeline” and “Shirley”), the film followed Jamie after she lost both her job and boyfriend and retreated to her small Texas hometown, where old friends and flings from a fateful high school summer re-emerged and sent her life spinning. The script (and lead performance) came from stand-up comedian and actor Iliza Shlesinger, with the cast also including Garrett Wareing, Lola Tung, Cassidy Freeman, Tom Welling, and Megan Mullally.
“Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie”
(Premieres, World Premiere, Documentary)
Alex Gibney builds the film around previously unseen footage captured by Rachel Elizabeth Griffiths, following Salman Rushdie through rehabilitation—physical and spiritual—after the attack, with the project explicitly tied to Rushdie’s memoir. It reads like a portrait of recovery that’s also a portrait of survival as a public act.
“Once Upon A Time In Harlem”
(Premieres, World Premiere, Documentary)
A decade after his death, filmmaker William Greaves becomes the subject and the author at once through a 1972 party he staged with living Harlem Renaissance luminaries—material he considered his most important capture. Greaves was a pioneering, genre-bending figure (often cited for works like “Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One”), and the film promises a final, posthumous statement shaped by David Greaves and producers Liani Greaves and Anne de Mare.
“Paralyzed by Hope: The Maria Bamford Story”
(Premieres, World Premiere, Documentary)
Co-directed by Judd Apatow and Neil Berkeley, this doc blurs performance and crisis as comedian Maria Bamford turns her mental health journey into material—funny, raw, and (per the official description) ultimately inspiring. If you know Bamford from her fearless stand-up and her semi-autobiographical Netflix series “Lady Dynamite,” the premise sounds like an extension of that same unfiltered honesty, just with the camera pushed closer.
“Antiheroine”
(Premieres, World Premiere, Documentary)
Edward Lovelace and James Hall train their lens on Courtney Love, the ex-grunge icon, former Hole singer, songwriter, and actor whose shadow stretches across rock and pop culture—and whose public mythology has constantly threatened to swallow the person. The hook here is immediacy: Love, now sober, is framed at a hinge point, preparing to release new music for the first time in over a decade and ready to tell her story “unfiltered and unapologetic,” on her own terms.
“Troublemaker”
(Premieres, World Premiere, Documentary)
Director Antoine Fuqua recounts the struggle against apartheid through Nelson Mandela’s own voice, drawn from recordings made while Mandela wrote “Long Walk to Freedom.” The concept suggests something intimate and elemental: history delivered by the person living it, rather than by the usual chorus of narration.
“The Best Summer”
(Midnight, World Premiere, Documentary)
An immersive, POV-footage time capsule of a music-era moment, with electric performances and backstage life featuring the Beastie Boys, Sonic Youth, Foo Fighters, Pavement, Rancid, Beck, Bikini Kill, and more. Director Tamra Davis has the kind of access that tends to turn nostalgia into lived texture—sweaty, immediate, and loud.
Follow along for all of our coverage from the 2026 Sundance Film Festival here.
