If you’re a regular Latina Media Co reader, you may think the Sundance Film Festival is a Latinx mecca. And it is – a time for our film community to come together in the snow and celebrate our art and artistry. I’ve gone for four years now, and each time, that’s how I’ve experienced it. BUT, it turns out there are other ways to do Sundance. The Robert Redford-founded festival is known for its exclusiveness – programming just around 100 films per year. So if Sundance can be counted on to select 8–15 feature films from our community per year, what’s happening at the non-Latinx part of the festival? This year, I took a look, and here’s what I found:

I Want Your Sex

The (non-Latinx) funniest film I saw at Sundance 2026, I Want Your Sex is an outrageous boudoir comedy by Gregg Araki. It’s his eleventh feature to make it to the festival, marking him as a clear favorite, and the sold-out 1,000+ seat theater I saw the film in loved it. I sought out this comedy in part because fellow Critics Choice Association member Sean Boelman said it was his top film to watch. And it did not disappoint.

The premise goes something like this: Olivia Wilde plays a highly successful modern artist whose main (only?) theme is sex. And it’s not just an intellectual exercise, she organizes her life and persona around sex too, with her character, for example, giving interviews in a loose mesh dress with no undergarments. When a naive young man, played by Cooper Hoffman, gets caught in her sights, things go erotically right and wrong in just about every other way.

Sundance billed the film as a critique of Gen Z’s prudishness. And it does that. But it’s more of a freewheeling sexual romp with Wilde eating up her part as the dom audiences love and hate in equal parts. Which is to say, this film is for people who liked Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” and aren’t afraid to say so.

Seized

A documentary by Sharon Liese, Seized is perhaps a more typical (non-Latinx) Sundance offering, given the festival’s reputation for serious films. It’s certainly an important work as we face an authoritarian government, working hard to control the media.

Seized tells the story of the Marion County Record, a small town paper that made national news when its local government decided to raid its offices and the home of its editor and publisher, Eric Meyer. As such, the doc does an excellent job in showing what local papers do. Over the course of the film, we see the Record exposing the transfer of bad cops to small communities like theirs, refusing to get involved in petty local disputes (like between divorcing spouses) and fighting back against overreaching government. The film is smart in that it doesn’t portray Meyer as a saint, noting not just his prickly disposition but also his oversteps, like when he includes (publicly available) information on a woman’s sex life as part of an unrelated story.

With its clear-eyed depiction of those who fight authoritarianism, this documentary left me fired up and ready to fight. I imagine when it gets a distributor and hits local screens, the feeling will be mutual.

Carousel

Of course, I want to watch Jenny Slate and Chris Pine fall in love. Who wouldn’t? That’s what writer/director Rachel Lambert promises with her return to Sundance with her fifth film, Carousel. Now, does she go out of her way to make Pine less alluring? Yes – he’s in unflattering dad-clothers (think tucked-in T’s) all the time, but there’s no hiding Kirk’s charisma.

This elevated rom-com drops us right into Slate and Pine’s reality as high school exes who’ve grown up but not forgotten each other. There’s absolutely no explanation of who’s who, which is refreshing when streaming has leaned so deep into exposition as a way to cater to the two (or more!) screen crowd. But I do have to admit, I spent a lot of the film trying to figure out some of the basic facts (what exactly is Sam Waterston’s relationship to Pine’s Noah?) that I missed getting completely carried away in the story.

Still, Slate and Pine are as charming as you can imagine. There was one scene, in particular, I can’t forget, where they’re role-playing during a hook-up: Pine as the small-town doctor he is and Slate as a pretend patient. In it, they artfully and hilariously decimate our health insurance “system” with a light and sexy touch. Full of these telling, small moments, Carousel is definitely worth a watch – or two, because that’s how many I think it takes to really enjoy this film.

The Moment

The buzziest – and worst – film I saw at Sundance was The Moment, a mockumentary about Charlie XCX’s post brat-summer.

Certainly, the film will delight her super fans, thanks to her meta-humor being on full display. And to be fair, parts of the film are absolutely hilarious, including an ending sequence that had me cackling. Charlie does a great job as a heightened version of herself, even surrounded by impressive pros like Hailey Gates as Charlie’s creative director and Alexander Skarsgård as her bro-y concert-documentary director.

But honestly, the film is boring. I had to fight to stay awake, and that is not the vibe cocaine-loving Charlie usually gives. I think the problem was director Aidan Zamiri. A frequent collaborator of the “360” singer, his background is in music videos, and it shows. There are many great sequences in the film, but it doesn’t hold together – meaning Zamiri hasn’t quite figured out the full-length format.

Still, Charlie XCX is an artist to watch (she was in three Sundance films – some Latinx, some non – this year: The Moment, I Want Your Sex, and The Gallerist) and if The Moment proves anything, it’s that she’s way more than one big album. So mission accomplished for sure.

Bonus: See You When I See You

I’m a Duplass brother fan. I first noticed them on The Mindy Project, as the annoying holistic midwives that antagonize our MD protagonist. And they’ve gone on to show up in a lot of my favorite things (Dying for Sex, Language Lessons, The Morning Show), while remaining indie darlings with their own studio and unique flair for human-scaled inanity.

So when I saw older brother Jay had a film at Sundance, I was excited to see it. And honestly, I wanted to include it in my list of Latinx films at the festival because Ariela Barer is listed as part of the ensemble cast. But I’ve learned that having one, named Latinx actor, is a crapshoot – do they have a meaningful part or are they stuck with a bad accent and/or drug subplot off in the corner? Since I didn’t know, I couldn’t include the film in my preview.

Thankfully, Duplass does right by Barer, giving her a meaty part as the love interest of Cooper Raiff’s lead. She’s fully formed as an emotionally intelligent woman who exists outside of her would-be boyfriend’s issues. And their relationship is the backbone of this film’s heartfelt rumination on suicide, family, love, and survival. So it’s a win all around.