Three Canadian documentaries will make their U.S. premiere at the Sundance Film Festival next January.

Sundance, the U.S. top festival of independent film, on Thursday released a list of 121 feature films selected for the 2008 festival.

Up the Yangtze documents life around and on a river in China that's about to be transformed by the biggest hydroelectric dam in history.
(Jonathan Chang/EyeSteelFilm)

The Canadian documentaries are:

• Triage: Dr. James Orbinski's Humanitarian Dilemma, an NFB-backed film directed by Patrick Reed about James Orbinski, former head of Doctors Without Borders, who returns to Somalia and Rwanda to revisit the state of humanitarian aid in those countries. 
• Up the Yangtze, by Montreal filmmaker Yung Chang, studies life in China in the shadow of the Three Gorges hydroelectric project. It is a co-production of the NFB, EyeSteelFilm and CBC Newsworld/SRC.
• Women of Brukman, by Montreal's Isaac Isitan, shows what happens when workers take over a Buenos Aires men's clothing factory and continue production on a self-management model.

"The creativity, urgency and passion of this year's filmmakers are palpable, proving that independent filmmaking is alive and well, not only in the U.S., but throughout the world," said John Cooper, director of programming for Sundance.

Festival programmers sifted through 3,624 feature films, including 1,600 from outside the U.S., to make their selections.

The dramatic competition includes The Last Word, Geoff Haley's film  starring Winona Ryder about a solitary writer who makes his living composing other people's suicide notes, and American Son, Neil Abramson's film about a Marine confronting his volatile home life on a Thanksgiving weekend before he is sent for active duty.

Director Clark Greg is bringing an adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk's novel, Choke, about a mother-son relationship.

Courtney Hunt has directed Frozen River, about a mother living on a Mohawk reservation bordering Canada who turns to illegal immigrant smuggling to help support her son.

Among the international feature films are:

• Absurdistan, by Germany's Veit Helmer, about a couple whose romance is threatened by a sex strike in their village.
• I Always Wanted to Be a Gangster, by France's Samuel Benchetrit, about four aspiring criminals trying to make their mark.
• Good Morning Heartache, by Italy's Anna Negri, about a young couple who break up while their lives are being filmed for a documentary.
• Strangers, by Israel's Erez Tadmor and Guy Nattiv, about an Israeli man and a Palestinian woman who meet in the carefree atmosphere of the World Cup finals and fall in love.

The 2008 Sundance Film Festival is scheduled for Jan. 17-27 in Park City, Utah.