Sundance is just around the corner. I'll be there. Will you?

Sundance Institute recently announced the lineup of films screening at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. Celebrating its 25th year, the 2009 Sundance Film Festival runs January 15-25 in Park City, Salt Lake City, Ogden, and Sundance, Utah.

As previously announced, the Festival opens on January 15 in Park City with the world premiere of Mary and Max, a clay animation feature film from Academy Award-winning short film creators Adam Elliot and producer Melanie Coombs. Starring Philip Seymour Hoffman and Toni Collette and narrated by Barry Humphries, Mary and Max is the tale of two unlikely pen pals: Mary, a lonely, eight-year-old girl living in the suburbs of Melbourne, and Max, a forty-four-year old, severely obese man living in New York. The story is based on the director's own pen-friendship that has also lasted over twenty years.

The screening of the Closing Film on January 23, the second Friday of the Film Festival, will signal the start of the final weekend. This year's Closing Film is the world premiere of Earth Days, a history of our environmental undoing seen through the eyes of nine Americans whose work and actions launched the modern environmental movement. The Salt Lake City Gala on Friday, January 16 will feature the world premiere of The September Issue, screening in Documentary Competition. With unprecedented access, director R.J. Cutler and his crew shot for nine months to capture Vogue editor in chief Anna Wintour and her team preparing the 2007 Vogue September issue, widely accepted as the "fashion bible" for the year's trends.