Robert Redford goes back to Sundance’s roots for this year’s opening

Plus: dramas and documentaries to the fore; and award-winners look at the epidemic of sexual violence on American campuses.

Park City, Utah, is the home of Sundance. George Frey / EPA

On January 22, Robert Redford kicked off this year’s Sundance Film Festival, the event he founded 31 years ago, at the event’s original home, the 280-seat Egyptian Theatre. The Sundance festival has long outgrown that venue and now casts a Hollywood sheen over this cosy ski resort town of Park City in the state of Utah for 10 days. Gift suites, sponsored showrooms and celebrity hangouts have overtaken shops on Main Street. Posh parties and starry concerts pop up at the town’s nightclubs and hotels. Movies remain the focus, however, as more than 12,000 submissions from around the globe were culled to provide the 118 feature-length documentary and narrative films featured during the festival. “The big takeaway I have is the bravery and boldness of our independent film community,” said the festival director John Cooper. “There’s a real intensity that is permeating independent filmmaking these days.”

Dramas and documentaries to the fore

James Franco, in his first appearances since The Interview-Sony hack scandal, has three films in Park City – two at Sundance and one at the concurrent, even-more-indie festival, Slamdance. The comedians Jack Black and Sarah Silverman take dramatic turns in feature films; Bobcat Goldthwait debuts a documentary about the comic Barry Crimmins; and the comedian Tig Notaro stars in her own documentary, Tig.

Other starry offerings include: Z for Zachariah, in which Margot Robbie believes she's the last person on Earth, until she discovers Chris Pine and Chiwetel Ejiofor; Sleeping With Other People, starring Jason Sudeikis and Alison Brie; the gambling drama Mississippi Grind, starring Ryan Reynolds, Sienna Miller and Alfre Woodard; Lila & Eve with Jennifer Lopez and Viola Davis; Slow West with Michael Fassbender; and the closing-night film, Grandma, starring Lily Tomlin.

The Sundance Film Festival concludes on February 1.

Award-winners look at campus violence

The campus rape epidemic is given a face, dozens of them in fact, in The Hunting Ground, the director Kirby Dick's sobering investigation into the systematic silencing of sexual assault victims. The film premiered at Sundance. Through an expert juxtaposition of personal accounts and damning statistics, the film paints a brutal picture of university administrators more concerned with keeping campus crime statistics low than helping the students who have come forward to report rape. Dick and the producer Amy Ziering explored sexual assault in the US military in 2012's The Invisible War, and were inspired to tackle the issue on college campuses after hearing from women at their university ­screenings. The Hunting Ground will come out in American cinemas on March 20 and will also be shown on CNN later this year.