Michael Rapaport's doc about A Tribe Called Quest is among the films in competition.

The Sundance Film Festival has announced the 25 films that will compete in next month's annual extravaganza of parties, panels, Mormons for Obama, awards, odd smells, subpar dining, music, activism, and fistfights. (And yes, all of those links lead to articles I filed two years ago from Park City; consider this my bid to attend the 2011 festival on TBD's dime.) Two names leap out of the lineup, both first-time directors: actors Michael Rapaport (True Romance), with a documentary about A Tribe Called Quest (Beats, Rhymes and Life), and Vera Farminga (Up in the Air), with a drama about "a frustrated young mother [who] turns to a fundamentalist community for answers" (Higher Ground).

The U.S. and world documentary categories, always the strongest, feature films about assisted suicide, the man behind Elmo the Muppet, our broken legal system, the Earth Liberation Front, the 2008 presidential elections in Ghana, coal mining in Appalachia, a Bengali detective, the New York Times, AIDS in San Francisco, Ukranian orphans, James Taylor and Carole King, Brazilian race car driver Ayrton Senna, the financial meltdown, and — a perennial subject, but as important as ever — the war in Afghanistan. The top doc on my list, though, is James Marsh's portrait of Nim, a chimpanzee "who was taught to communicate with language as he was raised and nurtured like a human child." Marsh directed the finest film yet made, however indirectly, about 9/11: Man on Wire.

The full list can be found on Sundance's website.