Read: What to expect at this year’s Sundance Film Festival

Since arriving at Park City last week, I’ve seen 17 movies, cramming in screenings in search of breakout hits, exciting new voices, and less heralded gems that could easily get lost in the mix. Sundance is a place for movies to make a splash and get picked up for large sums of money by big studios, but it’s also where unproven directors can debut work alongside veteran filmmakers. In fact, some of the strongest projects I’ve seen so far come from names I’d never heard before.

The most outstanding movie I saw during the festival’s first, packed weekend of programming was Lulu Wang’s The Farewell, the second film from the Chinese-born writer and director, who moved to the United States at a young age. The Farewell dramatizes an incredible personal story, one that Wang told on an episode of This American Life: Her grandmother is diagnosed with a terminal illness, and her extended family decides to keep the news secret from the matriarch during a big reunion. Awkwafina plays an American-raised granddaughter, Billi, whose desire to tell her grandmother what’s really happening is tied to her larger unresolved sorrow over leaving her homeland as a child.

The script is packed with mundanely funny observations, its family dynamics are keenly observed, and Wang is a confident presence behind the camera, playing her intergenerational ensemble off one another and rarely resorting to impassioned speeches to make her points. This is no My Big Fat Greek Wedding–type broad comedy. There’s humor in every scene, but a kind rooted in the unspoken bond between Billi and her grandma (played by Zhou Shuzhen) and the very different connection Billi has with her parents (Tzi Ma and Diana Lin). The indie-studio heavyweight A24 acquired The Farewell for a reported $6 million, possibly setting the stage for the movie to get the sort of wide audience and Oscar success that prior projects such as Room, Moonlight, and Lady Bird enjoyed.

The splashiest buy at the festival thus far has come from Amazon, which ponied up $13 million for the rights to Nisha Ganatra’s Late Night, a buzzy satire of life in the world of comedy, written by and starring Mindy Kaling. She plays Molly Patel, an untested writer who’s hired by the sharp but disaffected talk-show host Katherine Newbury (Emma Thompson) after the program is criticized for not employing female writers. The film is way too stuffed with plot—Newbury is trying to rescue a show in decline, Molly is trying to establish herself, and there are a few unnecessary story twists. But as a Devil Wears Prada–like tale of an intense boss-employee relationship, it works. The movie’s actual joke-writing could be sharper, and at times it feels like Kaling is shying away from really tackling the structural sexism of her industry, inexplicably giving her character an absurd fairy-tale origin story (she’s hired from a job at a chemical plant rather than from the comedy world). But Thompson’s performance is imperious and cutting enough to keep the whole project afloat.

For the past few festivals, Netflix and Amazon have scooped up multiple projects at Sundance. But this year, the companies seem to have throttled back, relying more on their own productions. As a result, A24 has been the biggest powerhouse here, screening several movies worth recommending. Chief among them is Joe Talbot’s debut feature, The Last Black Man in San Francisco, co-written by and starring his friend Jimmie Fails. The film is a whimsical, sometimes heartbreaking story of how gentrification has swallowed up the duo’s beloved hometown. Fails plays a character based on himself who surreptitiously moves back into his old family home while it stands empty on the market—his way of trying to reclaim a place in a neighborhood he can no longer afford. Talbot supplies painterly visuals and a somewhat abstract storytelling style, while Fails and Jonathan Majors (who plays the protagonist’s best friend) give deftly funny, melancholic performances.

Another splendid A24 title is The Souvenir, a coming-of-age drama directed by Joanna Hogg, a British filmmaker who has drawn acclaim but little attention overseas for her previous movies Unrelated, Archipelago, and Exhibition (all of which star a young Tom Hiddleston). The Souvenir is based on Hogg’s life in her early 20s—the experience of trying to be a director in 1980s London and falling in love with an older, arrogant, but undeniably compelling man.