Sundance Film Festival Announces 2014 Competition Lineup

The Sundance Film Festival has announced its 2014 lineup.

According to Variety, the 30^th Annual Sundance festival will feature 117 films with 96 of them being world premieres. John Cooper, the festival's director said, "It will offer a snapshot of the ways in which the independent film scene has dramatically shifted over the past three decades." Variety reported that 12,218 films, the highest amount of films ever submitted to the festival. 

During the announcement of the films, Cooper also said, "Independent film in general has been absorbed and embraced as a vital part of the cultural landscape. It's no longer an outsider sport. It really is part of an American art form."

The director of programming Trevor Groth added, "I think the completeness of vision is different now from when I first started 20 years ago. There were original ideas then, and there are original ideas now. ... But its taken time for filmmakers to develop their skills and their full stories."

The festival directors unveiled 56 of the films in the festival's dramatic and documentary competition slates, as well as the 11 titles in the low-budget Next lineup. Some of the American dramatic entries include Jim Mickle's "Cold in July," Mona Fastvold's "The Sleepwalker" and Carter Smith's "Jamie Marks Is Dead."

The World Cinema dramatic competition will include a musical entitled "God Help the Girl," directed by the band Belle and Sebastian. Another entry in this competition will be German filmmaker David Wnendt's sexually explicit "Wetlands."

The festival is known for showing movies that could be potential awards films and this year industry and press will also look out for those. Some of the high-profile films that will premiere include "God's Pocket," which is directed by John Slattery and stars Philip Seymour Hoffman; as well as "Happy Christmas," directed by Joe Swanberg and starring Anna Kendrick.

The festival is slated to open with four competition titles: Damien Chazelle's "Whiplash", Todd Miller's "Dinosaur 13″, Hong Khaou's "Lilting" and Nadav Schirman's "The Green Prince."

The Sundance Film Festival will announce its Spotlight, Park City at Midnight and New Frontier titles Thursday, along with a brand-new Sundance Kids slate devoted to children's programming. The Premieres and Documentary Premieres lineups will be unveiled Monday.

The festival is slated to run from Jan. 16-26.