Who says gloom-and-doom makes for better indie cred than sunshine and puppy dogs?

Well, lots of people, but the films that will be contending for awards at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival show that filmmakers are broadening their reach, perspective and, in the process, their sense of possibility.

Meaning, directors and screenwriters have injected a dose of optimism into their politics, polemical documentaries and intimately filmed snapshots depicting families, relationships and human nature in general.

"It's a completely different horizon," longtime festival director Geoffrey Gilmore told the New York Times. "It feels as if we're at the cusp of a new era. There's a real change that's gone on from the insularity of a decade ago. It really brings you back to a sense of a new form of American independent film as an engaged cinema.

"You start to watch films gradually think about not only that sense that the world's about to change, but how to change it."

While the competing films seem to be a little light in the A-list celebrity department, the assortment of subjects, narrative styles, languages and cultures on tap will be more than enough to intrigue festival goers—including all the A-listers who attend to soak up a little culture, hit the slopes and partake of the infamous swag bags.

The 64 competition films announced Wednesday include John Cusack playing a grieving father whose wife was killed in Iraq in Grace Is Gone; an as-yet untitled Dakota Fanning project about an Alabama girl who discovers the blues; Zoe Cassavetes' feature debut, Broken English, starring her mom, Gena Rowlands, and Parker Posey; a documentary examining the life of Clash frontman Joe Strummer; and several docs examining aspects of World War II, in addition to the expected non-fiction looks at Iraq.

The selected films have been evenly slotted into one of four categories—U.S. feature films, U.S. documentaries, world cinema features and world cinema documentaries—where they'll compete for various accolades, including the coveted grand jury prizes and audience awards.

Overall, Sundance will screen 122 movies from 25 countries this year, a lineup that was whittled down from 3,287 feature submissions. Eighty-two films will be making their world premieres.

The non-competitive films on tap dip deeper into the big name pool, with stars ranging from Samuel L. Jackson (Black Snake Moan, Resurrecting the Champ) and Philip Seymour Hoffman (The Savages) to Gwyneth Paltrow (The Good Night) and Lindsay Lohan (Chapter 27) set to take a turn at Sundance in '07.

The brainchild of actor, director and little-film-that-could enthusiast Robert Redford runs from Jan. 18-28 in Park City, Salt Lake City and Ogden, Utah.

Here's a complete list of the American indie dramas in competition at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival:

• Adrift in Manhattan: The lives of a grieving eye doctor (Heather Graham), a troubled photographer (William Baldwin) and an artist losing his eyesight (Dominic Chianese) intersect.
• Broken English: Zoe Cassavetes' directing debut about an American woman (Parker Posey) who finds that she's the last singleton among her group of friends. She then falls for a quirky Frenchman with a lot of life experiences. Also starring Drea de Matteo, Griffin Dunne and Gena Rowlands.
• Four Sheets to the Wind: After his father's suicide, a Native American man leaves his family's reservation to start a new life in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
• The Good Life: Chris Klein, Zooey Deschanel, Bill Paxton and Harry Dean Stanton star in this drama about a "mostly normal" young man who runs an old movie theater in a small town, where he meets a mysterious girl.
• Grace Is Gone: John Cusack stars as an Iraq war supporter who learns that his solder wife has been killed in the Middle East and takes his two young daughters on a road trip as he struggles to break the news.
• Joshua: Sam Rockwell and Vera Farmiga star as a couple whose world is turned upside down when their brilliant eight-year-old son reacts badly when they bring his newborn baby sister home. Newcomer Jacob Kogan plays the bad seed.
• Never Forever: An American woman unable to conceive a child with her Asian-American husband starts an affair with a stranger in a well-meaning yet obviously misguided attempt to save her marriage.
• On the Road with Judas: A Charlie Kaufman-esque tale about a successful businessman who steals computers from college campuses on the side. He falls in love, we question what's real.
• Padre Nuestro: A young man on the run meets up with a group of illegal immigrants traveling from Mexico to New York.
• The Pool: A young hotel worker becomes obsessed with a swimming pool in a wealthy area of Goa, India. Life goes topsy-turvy after he attempts to meet the family who owns the house with the pool.
• Rocket Science: A teenage boy with a stuttering problem falls in love with the captain of the debate team and joins up to get close to her.
• Snow Angels: Kate Beckinsale and Sam Rockwell star in this drama about a teenager whose life becomes intertwined with his former babysitter, her estranged husband and their daughter.
• Starting Out the Evening: Lauren Ambrose is a grad student who tries to convince reclusive writer Frank Langella that her thesis is his ticket back into the spotlight.
• Teeth: Wedding Banquet star Mitchell Lichtenstein wrote and directed this dark comedy-horror film about a high school girl who finds that she doesn't have to take any more abuse from violent male classmates when she discovers she has a certain "physical attribute" that'll scare 'em away (and perhaps eat them), pronto.
• Untitled Dakota Fanning Project: Fanning plays a troubled girl in 1950's Alabama whose passion for Elvis and the blues helps keep the demons away. This is the film that features the much talked-about scene of Fanning's character being raped.
• Weapons: This disturbing drama shows the connections among a series of brutal, youth-related killings over the course of a weekend in a seemingly innocuous small American town.

(Originally published Nov. 29 at 7:56 p.m. PT)