From The Hollywood Reporter:

In announcing the competition slate for the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, Geoffrey Gilmore, its longtime director, said he sees the beginning of a new era in independent filmmaking. “Filmmakers are undergoing a massive expansion in perspective and aesthetic qualities,” he said. “Where once independence meant a detachment, a kind of navel-gazing, that doesn’t exist right now. Instead, there is engagement and innovation. Filmmakers are going out and engaging the real world in terms of subject matter, vision and innovative storytelling.”

Old categories of films long a staple of Sundance — the coming-of-age picture or the dysfunctional family drama — are no longer applicable to the competition films in the upcoming festival, Gilmore insisted. These new films tend to be more optimistic about the future, both politically and personally. Where once the independent world created its films almost in reaction to Hollywood and its happy endings, the new independents are drawing on the traditions of the American independent film itself. So if one thing characterizes Sundance 2007, Gilmore said, it is “freshness.”

Continue reading for a list of the films and their description.