I spent the last week of January glued to my laptop, watching Sundance Film Festival films online while my kids did homework nearby. This is not how I imagined experiencing America’s most influential independent film festival. Ten years ago, I would have been on a plane to Utah, probably nursing a cold from the altitude and eating overpriced pizza between screenings. Now I’m watching Josephine on my couch in pajamas at 9 p.m. after bedtime stories, and honestly? The film still wrecked me.
The 2026 Sundance Film Festival wrapped on February 1 with an awards ceremony that felt particularly significant. This was the final year in Park City before the festival moves to Boulder, Colorado in 2027. After four decades in Utah, including all those years when Robert Redford’s vision transformed independent cinema from scrappy outsider art to cultural force, the 2026 slate delivered exactly what Sundance does best: stories that make you uncomfortable, films that refuse easy answers, and voices you’ve never heard telling truths you can’t ignore.
Key Takeaways
- Josephine won both Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award (U.S. Dramatic), a rare double honor
- Nuisance Bear took U.S. Documentary Grand Jury Prize for its climate change and Indigenous rights themes
- Shame and Money (Kosovo) and To Hold a Mountain (Montenegro) won World Cinema Grand Jury Prizes
- The Incomer won NEXT Innovator Award for blending Scottish folklore with animation
- One In A Million, filmed over 10 years, won both Audience Award and Directing Award (World Documentary)
- This was Sundance’s final year in Park City before moving to Boulder in 2027
- Most award winners are available online through February 1 at festival.sundance.org
- The festival featured 97 feature films and 54 shorts selected from 16,201 submissions
Grand Jury Prize Winners: The Best of the Festival
Josephine (U.S. Dramatic Competition)
Director: Beth de Araújo | Cast: Mason Reeves, Channing Tatum, Gemma Chan, Philip Ettinger | Status: World Premiere
The double winner of the night. Josephine took home both the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award, which almost never happens. Usually the jury picks something challenging and audiences go for something accessible. When both groups agree, you know the film is doing something exceptional.
The premise sounds almost unbearable: 8-year-old Josephine witnesses a crime in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. What follows isn’t a thriller or a procedural. It’s a quiet, devastating study of how trauma ripples through a family when the person most affected is too young to process what she saw and too young to explain what she needs.
Beth de Araújo’s direction trusts the audience with silence. Long takes. Uncomfortable pauses. A child acting out in ways that read as behavioral problems until you remember what she’s carrying. The adults around Josephine, played by Channing Tatum and Gemma Chan, are portrayed with startling empathy. They’re not villains for failing to fix this. They’re parents watching their child struggle with something they can’t reach.
Jury Citation: “For the depth and nuance of storytelling. For the delicate and elegant execution of a challenging subject matter. The skilled direction of performance from the cast. The humanistic view of the filmmaker and how they withheld judgment of those dealing with the impact of victimization. This filmmaker offered an empathetic view into the many different ways we as humans cope and try to set the wrongs right.”
The jury’s phrase “withheld judgment” is key. So much trauma content in film lately feels like it’s instructing you how to feel. Josephine just shows you. What you do with that is yours.
Nuisance Bear (U.S. Documentary Competition)
Directors: Gabriela Osio Vanden, Jack Weisman | Country: USA, Canada | Status: World Premiere
A polar bear documentary that’s actually about climate change, colonialism, Indigenous rights, and Western tourism’s strange relationship with wildlife. The title tells you everything. When a polar bear’s ancient migration routes collide with human settlement, the bear gets labeled a “nuisance.” The question of who actually belongs in this landscape becomes uncomfortable fast.
The film follows one bear (and the humans in its path) through a migration season that reads like allegory but is entirely real. Wildlife officers, tourists with cameras, Indigenous hunters maintaining traditional practices, and resort owners all circle the same animal with completely different frameworks for understanding what it is and what they owe it.
Jury Citation: “This film tells an enormous story with great drama, beauty and verve, and powerfully confronts the realities of climate change, the tensions between Indigenous tradition and Western capitalist encroachment, and the complexities of humanity’s relationship with the natural world. It also features a standout sequence that is, like the film itself, humorous, terrifying, and unforgettable. Of all the documentaries we saw, this one was the least… polarizing.”
Yes, the jury made a polar bear pun. They earned it.
Shame and Money (World Cinema Dramatic Competition)
Director: Visar Morina | Country: Germany, Kosovo, Slovenia, Albania, North Macedonia, Belgium | Cast: Astrit Kabashi, Flonja Kodheli, Kumrije Hoxha | Status: World Premiere, Available Online
A Kosovar family loses their livelihood in a village and has to rebuild in the capital. It sounds like a thousand immigration stories, but director Visar Morina finds something universal in the specific humiliations of starting over when you’re no longer young and no longer naive about what the system offers people like you.
The film tracks what “hypercapitalist society” actually means at ground level. The small negotiations. The dignity you trade for stability. The way children absorb their parents’ shame without anyone explaining it. Kosovo isn’t a setting Western audiences know well, which makes the film feel fresh, but the emotional beats translate instantly. Anyone who’s ever had to reinvent themselves after losing the life they built will recognize this family.
Jury Citation: “For his powerful and unique portrayal of human dignity in contemporary Kosovo that universally resonates. A sensitive filmmaker who masterfully draws the audience into the daily struggles of a family. For his deep empathy for his characters in a crucial moment in which they are beginning again.”
To Hold a Mountain (World Cinema Documentary Competition)
Directors: Biljana Tutorov, Petar Glomazić | Country: Serbia, France, Montenegro, Slovenia, Croatia | Status: World Premiere
In Montenegro’s remote highlands, a shepherd mother and daughter defend their ancestral mountain from becoming a NATO military training ground. The film is visually stunning in the way mountain documentaries often are, but the intimacy is what sets it apart. This isn’t National Geographic pretty. It’s close, personal, sometimes claustrophobic.
The women at the center carry memories of violence that shattered their family. Their resistance to the military proposal isn’t just about land rights or politics. It’s about refusing to let one more thing be taken from a place that holds their grief and their history.
Jury Citation: “This visually and emotionally stunning film transported us to a remote mountain top and into the most intimate moments of a family fighting to protect not only their land, but their way of life. The truest example of the power of cinema to make the personal political.”
NEXT Section: Innovation and Risk
The NEXT section at Sundance is where you find the weird stuff. Films that don’t fit comfortably in traditional categories. Experiments that might frustrate you or might change how you think about what movies can do.
The Incomer (NEXT Innovator Award)
Director: Louis Paxton | Country: UK | Cast: Domhnall Gleeson, Gayle Rankin, Michelle Gomez, John Hannah | Status: World Premiere
On a remote Scottish island, siblings Isla and Sandy hunt birds and communicate with mythical beings while resisting outsiders. Then Daniel, an awkward government official, arrives to relocate them. What unfolds is part folklore, part comedy, part something that defies easy categorization.
Domhnall Gleeson continues his streak of choosing projects that refuse to repeat themselves. The film mixes animation with live action, deadpan humor with genuine mythology, and somehow lands as both funny and deeply felt.
Jury Citation: “This award goes to a boldly original comic fable that blends folklore with formal playfulness. Deadpan humor, animation, and myth collide—proof that fearless invention can be both uproarious and deeply humane.”
TheyDream (NEXT Special Jury Award)
Director: William David Caballero | Country: USA | Status: World Premiere, Documentary
After 20 years of documenting his Puerto Rican family, director William David Caballero and his mother face devastating losses. Their response? Create animations that bring their loved ones back to life. Through tears and laughter, they discover that every act of creation is also an act of letting go.
Jury Citation: “For fully exploring multiple filmmaking techniques blending craft and emotion to tell a personal story of those often overlooked… more importantly with loving humor and brutal honesty.”
Audience Award Winners
Audience awards at Sundance measure something different than jury prizes. They capture which films connected most viscerally with actual viewers. Sometimes that’s the same as what critics love. Sometimes it’s not.
American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez (U.S. Documentary Audience Award)
Director: David Alvarado | Country: USA | Status: World Premiere
Luis Valdez pushed Chicano storytelling from California’s fields to Hollywood film screens. Zoot Suit. La Bamba. Works that expanded whose stories American cinema considered worth telling. This documentary traces that journey against the political resistance and industry skepticism that met Valdez at every turn.
If you grew up watching La Bamba without fully understanding what it meant for that film to exist, this documentary fills in the context. Valdez wasn’t just making movies. He was claiming space.
HOLD ONTO ME (World Cinema Dramatic Audience Award)
Director: Myrsini Aristidou | Country: Cyprus, Denmark, Greece | Cast: Christos Passalis, Maria Petrova | Status: World Premiere
Eleven-year-old Iris learns her estranged father, Aris, is back in town for his own father’s funeral. Determined to know him, she tracks him to a dilapidated shipyard where he’s been keeping to himself. Their reconnection is fragile, stubborn, and entirely earned.
Films about absent parents reuniting with children can tip into sentimentality fast. This one doesn’t. The Greek title translates to “Hold Me,” which captures the film’s central tension: wanting connection and not knowing how to ask for it.
One In A Million (World Cinema Documentary Audience Award and Directing Award)
Directors: Itab Azzam, Jack MacInnes | Country: UK | Status: World Premiere
Filmed over ten years, this documentary follows one girl’s journey from Syria to Germany and back again. She and her family navigate war, exile, and heartbreak in a foreign land. The decade-long commitment shows in every frame. This isn’t breaking news footage with a narrative imposed. It’s watching a life unfold, with all the complexity that implies.
Jury Citation: “Elegantly exploring the ideas of freedom and the importance of home in the aftermath of war, this film impressed us with its sense of scale and decade-long directorial commitment to its subjects. It is a beautiful synthesis of one family’s migration across multiple countries as they seek refuge from societal upheaval.”
Aanikoobijigan (NEXT Audience Award)
Directors: Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil | Country: USA, Denmark | Status: World Premiere, Documentary, Available Online
The title translates to “ancestor/great-grandparent/great-grandchild.” Trapped in museum archives, Ancestors bend time and space to find their way home. The film follows tribal repatriation specialists fighting to return and rebury Indigenous human remains, while confronting the worldviews that justified collecting them in the first place.
It’s a documentary that uses magical realism to tell a true story. The bones in museum collections are real. The bureaucratic obstacles to repatriation are real. The film’s formal inventiveness makes the horror of that history land differently than a straightforward documentary might.
Special Jury Awards Worth Watching
Take Me Home (Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award)
Director: Liz Sargent | Cast: Anna Sargent, Victor Slezak, Ali Ahn | Status: World Premiere
Anna, a 38-year-old Korean adoptee with a cognitive disability, cares for her aging parents in a fragile balance of meeting one another’s needs. When a Florida heat wave shatters their family and routine, her future becomes uncertain until she creates a world where she can thrive.
The jury praised the film for “modeling a different way to tell a story,” noting that director Liz Sargent embraced “the truth of the moment on set” and trusted her vision to capture something genuine. Anna Sargent, who plays the lead, is the director’s sister, and that relationship infuses every scene.
Ha-chan, Shake Your Booty! (Directing Award, U.S. Dramatic)
Director: Josef Kubota Wladyka | Cast: Rinko Kikuchi, Alberto Guerra, Damián Alcázar | Status: World Premiere
Haru and Luis love competing in Tokyo’s ballroom dance scene, but after tragedy strikes, Haru withdraws into isolation. When friends coax her back to the studio, sparks fly with the new instructor. The jury specifically praised Rinko Kikuchi’s performance and the film’s magical realism.
Jury Citation: “For bringing us into a creative world that allowed us to explore love, loss, and grief through dance with deep emotion and surprising joy and laughter. We will carry Rinko Kikuchi’s performance in our hearts, and thank this film for reminding us that when magical realism works it is truly a feat to behold.”
Soul Patrol (Directing Award, U.S. Documentary)
Director: J.M. Harper | Producers include: Nasir Jones (Nas) | Status: World Premiere
The Vietnam War’s first Black special operations team reunites to tell their story. The film uncovers a hidden chapter of American military history while asking whether reckoning with the past can bring peace to those who lived it.
Jury Citation: “With remarkable intelligence and resourcefulness, and an elegant attention to cultural context, this filmmaker achieves a skillful balance of archival footage, vivid re-enactments and troubling hallucinations. In doing so, he makes palpable the trauma of Black Americans who have never gotten due recognition for their sacrifices in war.”
Who Killed Alex Odeh? (Special Jury Award for Journalistic Excellence)
Directors: Jason Osder, William Lafi Youmans | Status: World Premiere
The assassination of a Palestinian American activist in Southern California ignites a 40-year quest for justice. What starts as true crime procedural becomes something larger: an excavation of America’s role in suppressing justice for one family while a dangerous political movement continued to thrive.
The Lake (Special Jury Award for Impact for Change)
Director: Abby Ellis | Status: World Premiere, Available Online
An environmental crisis looms in Utah. Two scientists and a political insider race to prevent unprecedented catastrophe. The jury praised the film for showing “the interdependency of science and faith, and the power of individuals and communities to avert disaster by working together.” In an era of climate despair, this film offers something rare: people working across political divides.
Short Films: Don’t Skip These
Sundance shorts often showcase tomorrow’s feature directors. This year’s winners include:
The Baddest Speechwriter of All (Grand Jury Prize) — At 93, Martin Luther King Jr.’s lawyer and speechwriter reflects on making history. Directors Ben Proudfoot and Stephen Curry deliver an intimate view of the Civil Rights Movement through one man’s memories.
Paper Trail (Special Jury Award for Creative Vision) — Don Hertzfeldt‘s latest. “A life, seen through paper.” The jury called it “a meticulous and brilliantly crafted example of how a single idea, which unfolds with vision and ingenuity, can expand our way of seeing the world around us.”
Living with a Visionary (Animation Award) — James Cromwell voices John, who after 50 years of marriage must care for his wife while learning to live alongside her vivid hallucinations. Heartbreaking and funny in equal measure.
How to Watch These Films
Most 2026 Sundance award winners are available online through February 1 at festival.sundance.org. After that, distribution varies. Some will hit theaters. Some will land on streaming platforms. Some may take months to find their audience.
If you’re planning to attend Sundance in Boulder next year (or just want to live vicariously), check out these guides to the festival’s Utah roots: best restaurants in Park City, best restaurants in Salt Lake City, and Sundance tips and tricks from someone who’s done the festival circuit.
My advice for this year? Watch what you can now while the streaming window is open. Josephine is the must-see. Nuisance Bear will stay with you. The Incomer is perfect for anyone who needs something weird and wonderful to reset their brain.
And if you only have time for one short, find Paper Trail. Don Hertzfeldt never disappoints.
What This Year’s Winners Tell Us
Sundance 2026 felt like a festival concerned with belonging. Who gets to stay in their homeland. Who gets to return. Whose stories count as worth preserving. A polar bear declared a nuisance for existing where it always has. A Kosovar family starting over in a place that doesn’t want them. Indigenous remains held in museum drawers. A Syrian family’s decade of displacement. A Palestinian American activist whose murder went unsolved for 40 years.
These are films about people fighting to hold onto place, memory, and dignity while systems designed to erase them keep grinding forward.
Next year, Sundance itself becomes a story about place. After decades in Utah, the festival moves to Boulder. The jury awards and filmmaker speeches this year carried an awareness of ending, of gratitude for what Park City provided and uncertainty about what comes next.
But if these films prove anything, it’s that stories survive relocation. They travel. They adapt. They find new homes and new audiences. Just like the people who make them.
Information current as of January 30, 2026. Film availability and distribution may change after the festival window closes.
Frequently Asked Questions
What film won the most awards at 2026 Sundance?
Josephine won both the U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic and the U.S. Audience Award: Dramatic, making it the only film to win both a jury prize and audience award in its category. One In A Million also won two awards: World Cinema Documentary Audience Award and Directing Award.
Where can I watch the 2026 Sundance award winners?
Most award-winning films are available for online streaming through February 1, 2026 at festival.sundance.org. After the festival window closes, films will be distributed through various theatrical and streaming platforms throughout the year.
Why is Sundance moving from Park City?
Starting in 2027, the Sundance Film Festival will be held in Boulder, Colorado. The 2026 festival was the final edition in Park City and Salt Lake City, Utah, where the festival has been held for four decades since founder Robert Redford established it there.
Who were the 2026 Sundance jury members?
U.S. Dramatic: Janicza Bravo, Nisha Ganatra, Azazel Jacobs. U.S. Documentary: Natalia Almada, Justin Chang, Jennie Livingston. World Cinema Dramatic: Ana Katz, So Yong Kim, Tatiana Maslany. World Cinema Documentary: Toni Kamau, Bao Nguyen, Kirsten Schaffer. NEXT: John Cooper and Trevor Groth.
What is the NEXT section at Sundance?
NEXT is Sundance’s section dedicated to innovative, boundary-pushing films that don’t fit traditional categories. The 2026 NEXT Innovator Award went to The Incomer, a Scottish folklore-animation hybrid, and the NEXT Special Jury Award went to TheyDream, a documentary blending family footage with animation.
How many films were shown at 2026 Sundance?
The 2026 festival featured 97 feature-length and episodic works plus 54 short films, selected from 16,201 total submissions.
What is Josephine about?
Josephine follows an 8-year-old girl who witnesses a crime in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. The film focuses on the aftermath and how trauma affects both the child and the adults trying to help her. It stars Channing Tatum and Gemma Chan and was directed by Beth de Araújo.
Which documentaries won at 2026 Sundance?
Key documentary winners include Nuisance Bear (U.S. Grand Jury Prize), To Hold a Mountain (World Grand Jury Prize), American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez (U.S. Audience Award), One In A Million (World Audience Award and Directing Award), and Soul Patrol (U.S. Directing Award).
