Sundance opened submissions for New Frontier, its program dedicated to immersive, interactive, and experimental storytelling. While the festival built its reputation on independent film, New Frontier is where narrative escapes the flat screen — showcasing virtual and mixed reality, interactive and AI-driven work, installations, and performance-based pieces that expand what storytelling can be. It remains one of the most visible platforms where the immersive and new-media art worlds meet the independent film establishment, giving experimental narrative work a stage, an audience, and industry attention it rarely gets elsewhere.
Watch: Creators Pushing the Boundaries of Storytelling in Sundance’s New Frontier (YouTube)
Where immersive art meets the film world
New Frontier’s particular value is its position at a crossroads. Immersive and interactive storytelling often falls between worlds — too experimental for traditional film, too narrative for a gallery — and Sundance’s program gives it a home with real cultural weight, placing a VR narrative or an interactive installation in front of the same audiences, press, and industry that come for the films. For the artists across this site’s XR, interactive-art, and community beats who work in story rather than pure spectacle, that crossover exposure is distinctive: it connects immersive practice to distribution, funding, and critical conversations centered on narrative and meaning, not just technology.
What it looks for and how to approach it
The program spans a wide range of forms united by a commitment to storytelling that uses immersive or interactive means with genuine purpose — where the technology serves the narrative rather than the reverse. As with the other open calls this site tracks, prospective applicants should review the current edition’s categories, eligibility, deadlines, and submission requirements on Sundance’s site, and study past New Frontier selections to understand the balance of craft, story, and innovation the program rewards. It sits alongside festivals like Sónar+D, Transmediale, and FILE, and prizes like STARTS and Lumen, as a key destination — distinguished by its roots in film and its focus on narrative told in new dimensions.