Many in the movie industry are still looking back at 2007, busily handicapping an unpredictable awards season and speculating as to whether Sunday’s Golden Globes ceremony will go on as planned despite a planned boycott by actors. But more than a few newcomers are already looking forward to 2009, eager to make a name for themselves. And for those fresh faces, the next two weeks are crunch time.

On January 17, the Sundance Film Festival will kick off in Park City, Utah, featuring, among its 121 selected features, 55 works crafted by first-time filmmakers, with 32 of those going head-to-head in the festival’s official competition. In the best-case scenario, these rookies will catch the eye of a distributor and go on to tour the festival circuit before launching a theatrical campaign in the fall of 2008 or winter 2009 — maybe hitting New York and Los Angeles in December just in time to qualify for a nomination for next February’s Academy Awards.

Yet for every feature filmmaker who will be packing his suitcase and jetting to Utah next week, there are about 30 directors who must now devise an alternate strategy for capturing the industry’s attention. More than 3,600 features were submitted for the 2008 Sundance festival (up from the previous record of 3,287), meaning that there are now about 3,500 rejected projects that will navigate the year’s festival circuit, struggling to cut through the noise.

No doubt many of the first-timers mixed into this pack are looking eastward to New York and its 37th annual New Directors/New Films festival for a glimmer of hope. Scheduled to begin in late March, New Directors/New Films, hosted by the Film Society of Lincoln Center, has yet to announce a final slate of titles. In fact, directors have until Wednesday to put their films in the hands of the screening committee (the Tribeca Film Festival follows suit shortly thereafter, with a Friday deadline for late submissions).

Much like Sundance, the annual onslaught of submissions for ND/NF has intensified in recent years. In both 2006 and 2007, organizers said they received upward of 1,000 entries — a mix of movies submitted by directors and sought out by curators — and given the continuing surge of movies being produced with increasingly affordable digital cameras and the mounting congestion of the film festival world, there’s reason to believe that this year’s numbers will exceed precedent. All of which makes ND/ NF that much more essential to the year’s movie conversation, standing alongside Sundance as one of the pre-eminent places for new filmmakers to get their work seen not just by audiences but by critics and distributors.

Richard Peña, an ND/NF selection committee member and the program director at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, said the New York event has been able to deflect many of the pressures that have tugged at the core mission of the festival’s Park City counterpart.

“Sundance is a very important, and dominant, festival, but it has also changed in certain ways with the influx of Hollywood,” Mr. Peña said. “Obviously, many people go to see the films, but many are less interested in the films as films than films as shop — as a way for agents to find new clients, for producers to find new directors, for directors to find new camera people.”

By contrast, Mr. Peña said, ND/NF has kept its focus on the work, limiting the size and scope of the event (which is noncompetitive and offers no prizes) and, even as the number of submissions has peaked, maintaining a screening schedule that consists of fewer than 30 features. He pointed to the impressive legacy that this strategy has built through nearly four decades. It has called attention to the very first achievements by such filmmakers as Spike Lee, Richard Linklater, and Wong Kar Wai, and championed such recent, critically acclaimed titles as “Half Nelson,” “Junebug,” and “Real Women Have Curves.” Last year’s program featured four titles that appeared on many critics’ year-end lists for 2007 — “Day Night Day Night,” “Great World of Sound,” “Once,” and “Red Road” — as well as “War/Dance,” which was short-listed for this year’s documentary Oscar.

While ND/NF has always been something of a unique festival — not only for celebrating unknown filmmakers but for operating as a joint venture between two artistic staples of the city, the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art — this year’s event is especially noteworthy for the addition of Rajendra Roy to the screening committee. At just 35 years old, Mr. Roy became the curator of MoMa’s film department after serving five years as director of programming and artistic director of the Hamptons Film Festival and working on the staff of the Berlin International Film Festival.

“This is a group that has always been the standard-bearer of excellence in New York, and I can feel the weight of the next generation in being invited to the table for the first time,” Mr. Roy said over the phone from Berlin. “Many of my predecessors in New Directors/New Films were nurtured by the French New Wave and the auteur cinema in the 1970s, but it was a different spirit in the ’80s and ’90s that nurtured my generation — more of an intimacy on the production end, and artists being a little less rarefied because anyone could really pop up through that system. I feel a responsibility to those voices, that this is something I can bring to the table.”

As the hundreds of titles pile up, all eager for the chance to capture the imaginations of New York’s independent-minded film community, Mr. Roy has become the wild card of the ND/NF process. And for some young filmmakers rejected by Sundance who look instead now to ND/NF as a potential 2008 launchpad, he might just be their new best friend.

“I’ll definitely be lowering the average age of the committee,” Mr. Roy said with a chuckle. “But I’ve been the ‘new guy’ before, so I know how to deal with that kind of pressure.”