The Sundance Film Fest has always been a star-maker. More directors and actors have had their breakout in the cold mountains of Utah than at any other festival in the world. Remember Quentin Tarantino way back when, and Steven Soderbergh, Ryan Coogler, David O.Russell, Paul Thomas Anderson, Edward Burns, Robert Rodriguez, and the Coen Bros.  On the acting front, few may remember that some of the biggest stars of today had their first performances shown in Park City, including Tessa Thompson, Jennifer Lawrence, Brie Larson, Amy Adams, Michael B. Jordan, Lakeith Stansfield, Quvenzhané Wallis, Daniel Kaluuya and even Hugh Grant – yes, Four Weddings and a Funeral made its big splash at a snowy premiere there.

It is to be expected that the 2022 edition is no exception. Back to at least halfway in person after a completely virtual festival in 2021, with 82 films in the lineup (10 more than last year but still short of the 118 in 2020), we will recognize some names and discover plenty of new ones across the Feature Film, Indie Episodic and New Frontier categories.

Among the eleven premieres, Jesse Eisenberg tries his hand at directing with the romantic comedy When You Finish Saving the World, as does Lena Dunham with Sharp Stick, about a May-December romance in which she also plays a small role. Brazilian filmmaker Gabriel Martins will show Mars One and the documentary The Princess – about, who else? Princess Diana – will sure pack in audiences. Ramin Bahrani returns with 2nd Chance, a film about the inventor of the bulletproof vest. The British comedy Good Luck to You, Leo Grande starring Emma Thompson as a merry widow who hires a sex worker to lighten the mood. Adam McKay produced Fresh, a film described as a horror-thriller about the travails of online dating, with Normal People lead Daisy Edgar-Jones, and The Artist director Michel Hazanavicius will bring the aptly titled Final Cut about real zombies showing up on the set of a zombie movie to the festival. This French remake is based on the 2017 Japanese Film One Cut of the Dead with Bérénice Bejo.

Golden Globe winner John Boyega stars in 892, a drama written by the acclaimed playwright Kwame Kwei-Armah. The actor plays a veteran alongside the late Michael K. Williams, whose last appearance this is. 892 is in the competition section with other notables such as Alice with Keke Palmer as the title character, a slave who discovers that what she thought was the 1800s is actually the 1970s. This film, interestingly, is based on facts. And there is Master, a supernatural thriller about women of color in a mostly white, haunted New England college. Phyllis Nagy, screenwriter of the Globe-nominated Carol, makes her directorial debut with Call Jane, starring Sigourney Weaver and Elizabeth Banks, a 1960s drama about abortion. Given the current fights on this issue, the film will cause discussion.

Abortion is also the theme of a documentary called The Janes, about seven women oon Chicago’s South Side who created a network for safe procedures in 1972. Sundance’s documentary section is always worth mentioning; here again, many careers were launched (think Alex Gibney), and high-profile docs have premiered at the festival (think Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth). This year, W Kamau Bell is sure to make headlines with We Need to Talk About Cosby, about the fall of the sitcom star. Unwritten history is explored in Descendant, a film about a part of Mobile, Alabama called Africatown that was founded by the enslaved ancestors of the current residents, who were transported from Africa on the last and illegal slaveship.

Music docs include Nothing Compares about the life and career of Sinead O’Connor.

And Jeen-Yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy which includes the very first interview with Kanye West at 21. Director Clarence “Coodie” Simmons, who was the radio host who did the interview and his co-director  Chike Ozah had unprecedented access.

Says Festival director-of-programming Kim Yutani: “This year’s program reflects the unsettling and uncertain times we’ve been living in for the past year and a half. The artists in the program, through their bold and innovative storytelling, and their sheer determination to create work in this moment, challenge us to look at the world through different lenses and examine and reevaluate how these stories impact us now and in the future.” Flexibility is a given with a pandemic that does not want to leave, and the organizers know it as festival director Jackson puts it: “Wherever you are we can accommodate whatever the next couple of months throws at us and still have the festival.”

One way or another the ten days in January will take place from the 20^th to the 30^th.