“We want opening night to get our audiences fired up, and ‘Other People’ will do that,” John Cooper, the festival’s director, said over lunch earlier this week. “It makes you laugh. It makes you cry. It makes you a little angry.”

One of the more ambitious entries belongs to Nate Parker, known for roles in “The Great Debaters” and “Non-Stop” who will make his feature directorial (and writing) debut with a provocative drama called “The Birth of a Nation.” It follows a literate slave and preacher in the antebellum South who, after witnessing atrocities against fellow slaves, goes on a rampage.

Trevor Groth, Sundance’s director of programming, said that “The Birth of a Nation” carried a similar theme to “Goat,” which features Nick Jonas as the younger of two brothers who belong to a college fraternity where brutal hazing occurs. (Along with Mr. Franco, “Goat” counts the indie powerhouse Christine Vachon as a producer.) “You see how human beings are forced into extreme behavior,” Mr. Groth said. “And it gives you a deeper understanding of how these things happen, and, hopefully, how you might stop them from happening moving forward.”