Sundance 2012 Goes Big: Drake, Wiz Khalifa, Chris Rock and Spike Lee to Show

This Year, the Sundance film festival will be pushing both relatively unknown indie filmmakers and incredibly famous Hollywood stars onto the stage. Along with the gritty stories from indie film makers on shoe string budgets, the festival will have big performances from big names lined up.

Throughout the festival, from Jan. 19 - 26, famous names will grace the auditoriums of Park City, Utah, where the festival will take place. The musicacts will include Drake, Wiz Khalifa, Jason Mraz, Cobra Starship, LMFAO and Afrojack. The Sundance Channel will host an after-party special featuring performances by Estelle and DJ Jesse Marco, after artist talks with Mary.J Blige and Mos-Def about the documentary Invisible War.

Over the years, the festival has evolved from a quaint, nonprofit event, to a large showcase for perfomance; the deglitzed Oscars for the Indie film community, with many filmmakers holding their breath to be the next big thing picked up at the festival, like Precious, Little Miss Sunshine, and The Kids are Alright, all movies that debuted at Sundance. The festival features more than 100 films every year, picked from an average of 4,000 submissions. The competition is fierce, without the added pressure of more famous and experienced filmmakers also showing some of their stuff and potentially wooing buyers at the festival.

This year, not only will 117 feature-length films compete for the spotlight, with 45 of the films by first-time filmmakers, but seasoned film makers like Spike Lee will be showing their work (though it will be in the out of competition section). Spike Lee's Red Hook Summer, which he claims was not Hollywood produced because he needed complete freedom to make the movie, has already created some buzz. Other stars like Catherine Zeta-Jones and Richard Gere will be around, and Chris Rock will star in Julie Delpy's 2 Days in New York, a follow up film to her 2007 hit, 2 Days in Paris.