Sundance 2023 #1: What we're looking forward to at the festival

Seventh Row Podcast

This is the first episode of our new podcast season on the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. Subscribe to our newsletter for updates on the 2023 Sundance podcast season and coverage on the website.

Sundance 2023 runs from January 19-28, and we'll be covering this year's festival in a new podcast season about the films this year and how the programming fits into the festival's history. This is Seventh Row's second podcast season (the first was on Women at Cannes in 2022).

In this episode, we discuss the films we're looking forward to at the 2023 Sundance Film Festivals based on directors we love, actors we love, and films we're hearing buzz about. We talk about the festival's importance in the film year, why we're pleased the festival has continued to offer a virtual option when other festivals are all returning to in-person only, and more.

Because the festival loves to program films by slot and quota, we are also introducing our annual Sundance Bingo Card, which you can download here. Play along during the festival (or look at past festival editions and the films you've caught which screened there). You can find last year's bingo card here.

Click here to read the episode show notes.

• 00:00 Introduction
• 05:31 The accessibility of a virtual Sundance
• 11:13 The films we’re looking forward to at the festival

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How to follow our Sundance 2023 coverage

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Follow Seventh Row on Twitter and Instagram @SeventhRow; Alex Heeney @bwestcineaste Twitter and Instagram; and Orla Smith @orlamango on Twitter and @orla_p_smith on Instagram.

Show Notes Links to articles/books related to the 2023 selections

• Watch Lockdown Film School with Lily Gladstone. Gladstone has a new film, Fancy Dance, at Sundance 2023, and we're excited to see it.
• Read an excerpt from our interview with Lily Gladstone from the ebook Roads to nowhere: Kelly Reichardt's broken American Dreams. Gladstone talks about learning different languages, which is particularly relevant to Fancy Dance in which she speaks Cherokee.
• Read Orla Smith's analysis of Thomasin McKenzie's performance in Leave No Trace, which appears in our ebook Leave No Trace: A Special Issue. Leave No Trace premiered at Sundance, and McKenzie returns to Sundance this year as the lead of William Oldroyd's Eileen.
• Read an excerpt of Alex Heeney's interview with Matthieu Rytz on Anote's Ark, which premiered at Sundance in 2018. The full interview appears in the ebook The 2019 Canadian Cinema Yearbook, which is available to purchase here. Rytz returns to Sundance this year with the documentary Deep Rising, which we're looking forward to.
• Read Alex Heeney's interview with Sebastian Silva on Magic Magic from 2015. He returns to Sundance 2023 with the film Rotting in the Sun.
• Get our ebook God's Own Country: A Special Issue, about Francis Lee's film which premiered at Sundance in 2017 and marked the debut of a major filmmaker.
• Read our interview with Eliza Hittman on Beach Rats, which starred Harris Dickinson in his breakout role. In 2021, we named Dickinson as one of the fifty screen stars of tomorrow. Dickinson appears in Scrapper at Sundance 2023.

Discover past Sundance coverage related to this year's selections

• Read our past reviews of Sundance films starring Ben Whishaw: Lilting and Surge.
• Whishaw returns to Sundance this year with two films: Passages and Bad Behaviour.
• Read Orla Smith's review of Fresh from Sundance 2022, which was one of the better Midnight films we've seen at Sundance. On the episode, Orla talks about not being impressed with the Midnight films that tend to screen at Sundance.
• Discover all of our past podcast episodes on films that screened at Sundance.
• Download the Sundance 2023 Bingo Card here.

Related episodes to the Sundance 2023 preview

All of our podcasts that are more than six months old are only available to members. We also regularly release members only bonus episodes. Many of the episodes listed here are now only available to members (Members Only).

To listen to all of these related episodes, become a member.

• Ep. 116: Virtual film festivals: Taking stock of their past, present, and future (Members Only): Sundance is one of the only festivals in 2023 to continue to offer a virtual component. On this episode from 2021, we talked about the advent of virtual film festivals, why we like them, why they may struggle, and what we'd like to see in the future.
• Ep. 94: HBO's Looking (Members Only): Raúl Castillo first impressed us in Andrew Haigh's TV series Looking. He's finally starting to get more traction as a film actor, almost a decade later, and he stars in Cassandro at Sundance 2023. In this episode, we talk about why Looking was one of the best shows of the 21st century, and why Castillo is such a great actor.

Sundance Film Festival episodes

• Ep. 123: Sundance 2022: Creative nonfiction (Free): At the end of Sundance 2022, we reflect on the creative nonfiction films at the festival.
• Bonus Episode 23: Sundance 2022: Fiction Films (Members Only): At the end of Sundance 2022, we reflect on the highs, lows, discoveries, and disappointments among the fiction films at the festival, from Sharp Stick to Living.
• Ep. 78: Sundance 2021 part 1 (Members only): At the end of Sundance 2021, we reflect on the highs and lows of the festival with guests Andrew Kendall and Lena Wilson.
• Ep. 79: Sundance 2021 part 2 (Members Only): At the end of Sundance 2021, we continue our discussion of the best and worst of the festival.

Ben Whishaw episodes

• Bonus Episode 25: This is Going to Hurt and physician mental health (Members Only): We discuss how Ben Whishaw gave the performance of 2022 as the lead in the miniseries This is Going to Hurt, the best TV series of 2022. Whishaw returns to Sundance 2023 with two films.
• Ep. 69: Paddington and Paddington 2: We swoon over Ben Whishaw's performance in the Paddington films and in Lilting, which premiered at Sundance almost a decade ago. Ben Whishaw returns to Sundance 2023 with two films.