Announcing the 2026 Sundance Institute | Sandbox Fund Grantees

Director & Producer: Katerina Suvorova

Producers: Aruan Anartay, Assel Yerzhanova

A young Kazakh scientist fighting to save the Caspian seal from extinction must embrace the ancient mythic world of the sea to succeed, a choice that comes at an unbearable physical cost.

Director & Producer: Charlie Shackleton

Producers: Catherine Bray, Anthony Ing

A mother and son revisit the medical emergency that reshaped their lives and the remarkable fragments that remain of that time.

Director: Marley McDonald

Producer: John Cardellino

An all-archival adventure documentary that explores the creation of the American Museum of Natural History. Told through the interconnected stories of its extraordinary artifacts, the museum reveals a deep human desire to freeze time, amass treasures, and understand our place in the world.

Director & Producer: Anaïs Taracena

Guatemala is restless land crossed by 37 volcanoes that have been eternal witnesses to tragedies, wars, and rebellions. Are these mountains of fire the voice of a wounded land, or the guardians of a history still seeking justice?

Director & Producer: Pauline Blanchet

Producer: Ljubomir Stefanov

How do we remember the past when our history has been faked? A political vision to rebuild a capital on the foundations of an unfinished city erased a collective memory, casting a dark shadow over Skopje’s future identity.

Director & Producer: Dylan Habil

Producer: Lucinda Van de Rheede

Zacharia Mutai balances fatherhood with his bond to the last two northern white rhinos, revealing a tender, deeply human view of care, loss, and endurance on the front lines of a crucial mission that might be the species’ final stand.

Director & Producer: Emma D. Miller

Producers: Colby Day, Florrie Priest

When a retired theater director begins creating internet videos featuring intimate conversations with his growing collection of ventriloquist dummies, his daughter attempts to repair their relationship by exploring the psychological depths and possibilities of his strange new hobby.

Director: Matthew Crotty

Producers: Francesca Roth, Claire Vaye Watkins

A film exploring the lifeways along the largely underground Amargosa River, which surfaces at the Borehole, a hot spring created by an environmental disaster and now the center of a rural community and a place of healing on the internal fringes of the American West. Narrated by Claire Vaye Watkins.

Directors: Anupama Srinivasan, Anirban Dutta

Producers: Anirban Dutta, Ryan Krivoshey

In New York City, a multiethnic team of scientists and researchers chase, study, and combat mosquitoes to protect the city’s population from the deadly viruses these tiny insects carry.

Director: Robert Greene

Producers: Susan Bedusa, Bennett Elliott, Douglas Tirola

In a dreamlike 1950s town square built inside a warehouse, we will investigate our memory care crisis, the healing potential of filmmaking, and the fragility of reality itself by collaborating with three participants and their families to film scenes centered around their most important memories.

Director & Producer: Jessica Bishopp

Producer: Gannesh Rajah

On a remote Icelandic archipelago, a team of marine ornithologists study elusive seabirds in global decline. On the same archipelago, two young women and the lost seabirds they rescue come of age.

Director & Producer: Tamara Kotevska

Producers: Sigrid Dyekjær, Anna Hashmi, Enrico Saraiva, Harry Vaughn, Jean Dakar

In the northernmost part of the Yakut Tundra, Vladik, a young Dolgan reindeer herder, is at a crossroads when he has to make a decision to either follow in his father’s ancestral footsteps or join the modern mammoth tusk hunters.

Director & Producer: Ra’anan Alexandrowicz

Producers: Yoni Brook, Susan Norget, James Doolittle, Emma Mørup

A 1970s children’s fantasy novel in which the time-thieving Men in Gray infiltrate an imaginary city is the point of departure for a documentary that explores our relationship with time in an era where it is accelerated, fragmented, and commodified as never before.

Directors & Producers: Arlieta Hall, Brittany Alsot

Chicago comedian Arlieta Hall turns to her greatest tools, stand-up comedy and improvisation, to navigate the heartbreak and humanity of caring for her father, who is living with Alzheimer’s disease.

Director & Producer: Sasha Wortzel

Producer: Danielle Varga

An ode to the Florida Everglades, told through the prescient writings of Marjory Stoneman Douglas and those who today call the region home.

Director: Julie Wyman

Producers: Lindsey Dryden, Shaleece Haas, Jonna McKone

When a filmmaker with a rare form of dwarfism seeks out people with bodies like hers, she enters a community in flux. She joins forces with little people artists to trace a troubled history of being put on display. Together they forge a vision of disabled beauty and power.