Tom Bernard wasn’t having a good night. As dawn approached one Monday during last year’s Sundance Film Festival, the co-president of Sony Pictures Classics sat in his rental car outside a condo belonging to Cinetic, one of the biggest sellers in independent films, awaiting his turn to meet the makers of La Misma Luna, a hot new drama about crossing the U.S. border that had premiered the night before.

Bernard recalls circling the block for two hours. Meanwhile, inside, Cinetic founder John Sloss and his fellow lawyers ushered distribution execs from one room to another, giving each their 20 minutes to woo the filmmakers.

“It’s like speed dating,” Bernard says. “To meet people interested in buying your movie for only 20 minutes, something you’ve worked on for years, always seems kind of bizarre.” He did not go home with La Misma Luna; Fox Searchlight Pictures took it for $5 million. The movie is set for commercial release March 21.

Bernard’s long night was all part of the usual frenzied, secretive bidding process at Sundance, where negotiations go on until 5 a.m. and buyers are kept in the dark and as discombobulated as possible. In their search for information about the competition, distribution execs stake out the biggest sellers’ condos, make furtive cell-phone calls from bathrooms, bust in on meetings with other buyers, and stalk agents. “If you leave, someone else will come and do it,” says Ruth Vitale, former president of First Look Pictures and a veteran Sundance buyer. “You sit there and stalk them until you get the movie.”

This year the pressure to acquire films at Sundance is even greater, thanks in part to the 10-week-long (and counting) writers strike. Some of the smaller distributors with more modest movie stockpiles will be eager to pounce. There are also more buyers than in previous years, as Wall Street gets into the fray and more private equity firms are financing film companies. Many buyers—including Summit Entertainment, with $1 billion in funds from Merrill Lynch, and new kid Overture Films, backed by Liberty Media—have deeper pockets. Plus, last year’s Sundance was deemed “darker,” with its dramas and its host of Iraq war documentaries. And independent films performed disappointingly: Out of the 20 titles that sold for a collective $53 million, only 14 made it into theaters, grossing just $34 million. This year’s lineup is said to have a strong commercial potential, thanks to a number of star-powered comedies.

“Sundance has the reputation that a lot of films that are enjoyed at Sundance don’t have a life beyond that. Feels that there’s less of that this year,” says Randy Manis, head of acquisitions for ThinkFilm. “There are a lot of films this year that have the potential to cross over.”

The roster includes The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, an adaptation of the Michael Chabon novel; Hamlet II, a comedy starring Catherine Keener about a teacher who writes a sequel to Hamlet to save the school’s drama department; Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind, with Jack Black and Mos Def; and American Teen, a documentary about high school cliques in a small Indiana town, by the co-director of The Kid Stays in the Picture.

Manis expects fierce bidding. “Cooler heads never seem to prevail at Sundance,” he says. “Particularly with the writers strike, everyone is going to be concerned with filling their slate.”

Regardless of the buzz and the sellers’ hype, buyers try to proceed with caution. “I call it Sundance fever—people get caught up in the moment of the hype of the Sundance marketplace and end up overpaying for movies,” Bernard says. “When people gamble at Sundance, they win the Happy Texas booby prize,” he says, referring to the 1999 film that Harvey Weinstein bought for $10 million, which grossed $1.94 million.

“The air up there is thin. You don’t want to inflate your asking price,” says Polly Cohen, president of Warner Independent. “I think it’s a great strategy to look at films everyone [else] is ignoring.”

Aside from reading the scripts, buyers put together priority rankings according to films’ directors and starring casts. “We always spend some time going over the films that were acquired last year and the path they took. People significantly overpaid,” Manis says. “But, at the end of the day, no one really knows anything. All of your analysis doesn’t amount to anything.”