If you go down to the Sundance film festival this year, you may get a big surprise. Along with stars such as Al Pacino, Katie Holmes, Jennifer Connelly, Kevin Spacey, Tobey Maguire, Demi Moore and Sigourney Weaver, who are all expected to be in attendance, there's likely to be a delegation from the rightwing Westboro baptist church.

Controversial pastor Fred Phelps hopes to protest against Kevin Smith's new film Red State, which is showing at the event. It will be one of more than 100 full-length features screened at the festival, which kicks off in the winter resort of Park City, Utah tomorrow and runs for 10 days.

Red State is Smith's first foray into horror territory, and centres on three horny high-school boys who come face-to-face with a terrifying fundamentalist priest with a fatal agenda. The character, Pastor Abin Cooper, is believed to be based on Phelps. The film also stars John Goodman, Melissa Leo and Kevin Pollak.

Other highlights include Supersize Me director Morgan Spurlock's latest documentary The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, a satirical look at the power of the advertising world, which the film-maker amusingly funded via product placement and advertising. There's also Project Nim, British Man on Wire director James Marsh's look at an experiment which aimed to prove that a chimpanzee, if raised like a human baby, could communicate through sign language.

In fact, there is plenty of British talent on show at the festival, with more than 20 UK-produced films being screened. One of the most intriguing is Life in a Day, which was masterminded by The Last King of Scotland's Kevin McDonald. It's a compendium of user-generated content drawn from YouTube videos uploaded by more than 80,000 people, and is intended to form a kind of time-capsule document of life in 2010.

The Sundance Institute announced on Monday that Simpsons creator Matt Groening, directors Kimberly Peirce (Boys Don't Cry) and Jason Reitman (Juno), and actor America Ferrara would be among those who will sit on its five juries to award prizes this year. The winning films will be announced during a ceremony at the Basin Recreation Field House in Park City on 29 January, hosted by O Brother, Where Art Thou? actor Tim Blake Nelson.

For those of us not able to make it to Park City this year, a number of short films from Sundance directors are currently available on YouTube.