The Sundance Film Festival is celebrating 40 years of bringing independent film to a broader audience. As a fixture on the festival circuit, if you ever get a chance to be in Park City for two snow filled weekends of pure cinema, do yourself a favor and do not pass it up. But just because you haven’t been doesn’t mean you’ve never seen a Sundance film. Here are our picks for the 10 best of all time.

Film festivals inherently provide a little bit of everything. They’re a collection of different genres, budget scale, unique perspectives and experience.  From the stalwart category of low budget horror film auteurs like Hereditary, Get Out and the more recent Talk To Me, to the sneaky creative science fiction of Another Earth or Swiss Army Man from The Daniels, there’s something for everybody at Sundance. But excellent programming aside, what is Sundance for? Debuts from Robert Rodriguez and Kevin Smith have launched whole indie film movements, while big splashes from Christopher Nolan and Stephen Soderbergh have provided the basis for incredible careers. In short, Sundance is an integral part of the movies we all know and love whether the world at large is aware of it or not.

This list was written by Clint Gage and edited by Justin Donaldson.

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