United States' premiere event for independent movies, the Sundance Film Festival has unveiled a wide-ranging list of competition films (60). The chosen movies will vie with each other at its 25th award ceremony in January 2009.

With adequate backing from Robert Redford's Sundance Institute for filmmaking, the festival will spotlight 188-low-budget and art films, blending different styles, genres, cross national and cultural borders, even while boosting careers of little-known actors, directors and writers, outside of Hollywood's mainstream studios.

A happy mix of romance, sci-fi, politics, the festival opens with the clay animation film 'Mary and Max', the story of an older man in the United States and a young Australian girl, who become pen pals and strike-up an enduring friendship.

'Push', 'Humpday' are some of the American films competing in the festival, including 16-US documentaries like 'The Cove' (about dolphins), 'Crude' (about oil), 'Dirt the Movie' (about how people are destroying the soil), 'Over the Hills and Far Away', a chronicle of a family, journeying through Mongolia to find a shaman, who can heal their autistic son, 'The End of the Line' (about overfishing), and 'Big River Man' (about a swim down the Amazon). All basically, a call to action.

Geoffery Gilmore, festival director says: 'One of the themes of the festival is the kind of new-generation love story. There's this way of telling love stories right now by a new, younger generation that's different, that's fresh, that's original.' In the non-fiction category, films continue the trend of crossing over from plain observation to explicit activism.

To see a list of films competing in the Sundance festival, log on to sundance. org/festival.