Attending the Sundance Film Festival in Park City every January is a masochistic exercise. With too many films to see in too short a time, and with the weather always complicating transportation to and from the sold-out events, the question every critic asks himself before boarding the flight to Utah is not what films he hopes to see, but which films he deems acceptable to miss.

What’s wonderful about the third annual Sundance Institute at BAM, which begins its 10-day program of selections from the 2008 Sundance Film Festival on Thursday, is that its titles have already been run through a few major filters. Only 22 features and 36 shorts will make the trip eastward for the event — still too much to absorb in a week and a half, but the filtration process ensures any ticket to the series is a safe bet.

The festival’s headliner of sorts is Nanette Burstein’s “American Teen,” which has been singled out for Thursday’s opening-night event. At Sundance in January, the film was awarded only one prize — the Documentary Directing Prize — but as it makes its debut for New York audiences before rolling out in wide release on July 25, it should emerge as one of the true gems mined from Sundance.

For a year, Ms. Burstein immersed herself in the lives of four teenagers in rural Indiana, capturing the unfolding joys, dramas, anxieties, and relationships that constituted the group’s senior year. It’s a gutsy proposition for a film to make — a promised inside look at a “year in the life of the average American teen.” But the proof, as they say, is in the pudding. After choosing her quartet of “stereotypical” teens — the jock, the nerd, the beauty queen, and the rebel — Ms. Burstein spent the ensuing year getting closer to the kids, keeping a steady eye on their daily lives while digging through their childhoods for the various pains and pleasures that came to inform the disorienting, pressurized, and chaotic reality of a dwindling high school career.

“It is an astonishing year for documentaries, and we are seeing directors working consistently at a level that we have never seen before,” the director of the documentary program at the Sundance Film Institute, Cara Mertes, said. “From ‘American Teen,’ where there was almost a partnership between Nanette and the community to make the movie, to something like ‘The Order of Myths,’ where Margaret Brown almost disappears into the background, there’s a mix of documentary and fictional elements that leads to a very sophisticated and authentic style of storytelling.”

“American Teen” is the figurehead of a group of documentaries that figure prominently in the Sundance Institute at BAM schedule, reflecting the catalog of innovative work that entertained Park City a few months ago.

Ms. Brown’s “The Order of Myths” examines the poisonous effect of racism, as seen through the lens of America’s oldest, still-segregated, Mardi Gras celebration in Alabama. Brooklyn filmmakers Carl Deal and Tia Lessin maintain the bayou theme with “Trouble the Water,” fusing archival news footage and home movies to provide an insider’s view of the havoc that Hurricane Katrina wreaked in New Orleans.

Elsewhere, “Flow: For Love of Water,” directed by New Yorker Irena Salina, advances a form of do-it-yourself investigative journalism as it tours the globe to film the front lines of the underreported global water crisis.

And “Man on Wire,” a quintessential New York story despite its focus on a French protagonist, relies on an extensive array of re-enactments to tell the story of Philippe Petit’s 1974 tightrope walk between the World Trade Center towers — not to mention his elaborate plan to infiltrate the WTC complex the night before to rig up his equipment.

But perhaps the most eagerly awaited title at BAM is Alex Gibney’s “Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson,” which turns a biography of the late journalist-junkie into a first-person journey through the highlights of Thompson’s unlikely life.

While documentaries outnumber features at this year’s event, there are still a handful of notable narratives set to make their debuts for Brooklyn audiences. “Frozen River” earned the New York filmmaker Courtney Hunt the coveted Grand Jury Prize (Drama), wowing audiences with the story of two downtrodden women in upstate New York who form an unlikely friendship as they help illegal Canadian immigrants enter America over the solid St. Lawrence River. And in case you thought there weren’t any comedies making the rounds at Sundance, Clark Gregg’s “Choke” features an unforgettably quirky performance by Sam Rockwell as a man addicted to sex who makes himself choke at restaurants so he’ll enjoy the rush of being saved.

As always, BAM has organized events that go beyond the movie theater. Concerts are planned for May 30 (Anthony de Mare), May 31 (Anvil Live!), and June 7 (Chien Du Faience); as a special midnight feature on May 31, the New York-based Graffiti Research Lab — an art collective that tags buildings around the world with a new form of light-based graffiti — will be demonstrating the equipment it showcased in Park City, allowing visitors to create their own digital designs. Later that night, the collective will also be hosting a special screening of the video that made its premiere at Sundance, “Graffiti Research Lab: The Complete First Season.”

ssnyder@nysun.com