Previewing The Last Roundup In Park City

This week in Park City, Utah, the 2026 edition of the Sundance Film Festival — the final one to be presented in this ski resort town before the fest moves to Boulder, Colorado — will host world premieres of meticulously curated shorts, documentaries and features. If you can’t make it there for the January 22-February 1 winter wonderland for indie cinema, don’t despair: Some tickets remain available for online screenings.

And remember: The best of the bunch likely will be available in theatrical and/or digital release in the months ahead.

Here are a few titles that have caught our interest, with details culled from the Sundance website.

Hot Water

After he’s kicked out of his Indiana high school, an American kid and his Lebanese mom hit the road west.

Ramzi Bashour’s lyrical debut feature (pictured above) is a rippling reflection on westward motion. Expansive landscapes literally and narratively unfurl epic canvases large enough to hold this duo’s dual exploration of home. Lubna Azabal (Strangers, 2008 Sundance Film Festival) and Daniel Zolghadri (Lurker, 2025 Sundance Film Festival) deliver remarkably connected central performances and are joined by Festival familiar Dale Dickey (Winter’s Bone, 2010 Sundance Film Festival). A personal story tracing the impact of a longitudinal experience of this country — its variety and the unusual circumstances under which any person traverses it — grapples with definitions of home, histories of diaspora, and the disruptive but good work of education. An allegory about the way forward motion often leads to return, Hot Water brings beginnings and endings into insightful alignment.

Aanikoobijigan [ancestor/great-grandparent/great-grandchild]

Trapped in museum archives, Ancestors bend time and space to find their way home. History, spirituality, and the law collide as tribal repatriation specialists fight to return and rebury Indigenous human remains, offering a revealing look at the still-pervasive worldviews that justified collecting them in the first place.

Aanikoobijigan [ancestor/great-grandparent/great-grandchild] documents the emotional and vital work of MACPRA (Michigan Anishinaabek Cultural Preservation and Repatriation Alliance). This alliance, made up of repatriation specialists representing all Michigan tribes, fights to bring their Ancestors and funerary objects home from settler colonial institutions like museums, libraries, and archives.

Adam and Zack Khalil’s monumental and formally daring film follows the pressing struggle to rebury Indigenous human remains that have been held in sterile storage, laying bare the history of Indigenous collections and the battle to recognize and enforce the laws intended to facilitate their repatriation to the communities they were originally stolen from. Using an essayistic approach alongside vérité portraits, the film celebrates the courageous individuals who carry out this hard and emotionally draining labor of return.

Jaripeo

A journey to Michoacán’s hypermasculine rodeos descends into the subconscious of memory, queer desire, and longing, leading to a reckoning with the wounds and beauty of a home left behind.

“I brought you here to Penjamillo so you could see a little bit of what it’s like to be a young queer ranchero,” explains Efraín Mojica, who makes their feature directorial debut with Jaripeo, alongside Rebecca Zweig. Mojica serves as our guide into the vibrant world of the “jaripeos,” rural rodeos that draw macho cowboys, drunken revelers, and — enabled by the bacchanalian atmosphere — hidden queer encounters. Through vérité and Super 8 footage, the camera captures secret glances and fleeting touches and lingers lovingly on the riders’ bodies — manifestations of machismo as filtered through a queer lens. Mojica and Zweig construct rich portraits of queer rancheros sharing memories and confidences in warm, sometimes flirty, conversations and bring their past experiences to life in indelible, stylized dreamscapes celebrating queer self-expression, desire, and belonging. Jaripeo invites viewers to enter this space of traditional, performative masculinity and discover what lies beneath its surface.

Filipiñana

Tee girl Isabel feels strangely drawn to Dr. Palanca, the president of the country club where she works. However, after piecing together a violent picture of what lies beneath the club’s pristine surface, she realizes that what began as an innocent infatuation is actually rooted in a sinister shared history.

Displaying an extraordinary command of his surreal and unnerving visual language, first-time filmmaker Rafael Manuel adapts his award-winning 2020 short film of the same name to chilling effect. Manuel plumbs the depths of Filipino identity and national consciousness to uncover ominous fragments and cracks that defy picture-perfect unity. Through a stylized, colorful approach lensed with care and precision by cinematographer Xenia Patricia, Manuel takes us into a world where violence and control are exerted with the subtle flick of a wrist or tip of a hat. Painting a scathing portrait of class disparities and post-colonial power structures in ways that are both quiet and unsettling, Filipiñana announces the arrival of an accomplished writer-director who unflinchingly confronts his country’s past, present, and future.

Nuisance Bear

A polar bear is forced to navigate a human world of tourists, wildlife officers, and hunters as its ancient migration collides with modern life. When a sacred predator is branded a nuisance, it becomes unclear who truly belongs in this shared landscape.

Filmmakers Gabriela Osio Vanden and Jack Weisman return to Churchill, Manitoba — affectionately known as the “Polar Bear Capital of the World” — to deepen the inquiry begun in their award-winning short film. The result is a striking portrait of the fraught coexistence between polar bears and humans, guided by an Inuit narrator whose insights resist simplification.

The film traces this relationship with nuance, revealing how these arctic creatures deal with being constantly monitored, photographed, and redirected. There is a thrill in watching a polar bear outwit human efforts to contain it, underscoring the bears’ resilience and the fragility of the systems that attempt to control them.

By challenging the conventions of a nature documentary and favoring confrontation over moralism, Nuisance Bear invites us to reconsider our assumptions about wildlife as spectacle.