Justin Change writes about the Sundance Film Festival, which has bade farewell to its Utah roots.
Another absence: there were no screenings at the Egyptian Theatre, whose old-fashioned marquee had long made it the festival’s most recognizable venue. The theatre, situated on the city’s Main Street, is to become a live-event space; the film projectors have already been removed.
I find that reality strangely terrifying, if not quite as terrifying as some of the Sundance movies I’ve watched at the Egyptian. This is where I cowered in my seat at a midnight screening of “Hereditary” , a blood-chilling calling card for a new talent named Ari Aster; it’s where I thrilled to the chainsaw-wielding climax of “Donkey Punch” , a satisfyingly sleazy horror cheapie that has never drifted far from my thoughts, even though it scarcely found an audience; and in 1999, before my time, the Egyptian was where audiences first glimpsed “The Blair Witch Project.” That film is one of a few instant classics—including “sex, lies, and videotape” and “Reservoir Dogs” —that helped make the festival’s reputation as the country’s most important and exciting launchpad for new independent cinema. Most painfully of all, there was no Robert Redford at Sundance 2026—at least, not in the flesh. The actor and filmmaker died in September at his home near the Sundance Mountain Resort, a forty-five-minute drive from Park City. He nonetheless remained a spectral, frequently acknowledged presence. Every screening kicked off with a video tribute to him, and each replay drove home the sheer heroic improbability of what Redford had accomplished. Here was a Hollywood legend who carved out a rocky, high-altitude perch from which a different kind of film artist—one less beholden to the Hollywood doctrine of the bottom line—might emerge. The Utah/U.S. Film Festival, as it was then known, began in Park City in 1978. In 1980, Redford founded the Sundance Institute, the non-profit organization that now oversees the festival and, through year-round labs and workshops, has nurtured several new generations of indie moviemaking talent. On Tuesday, hundreds of filmmakers—many of them alumni of those labs and workshops—gathered at the resort for an annual directors’ brunch. It had been a tradition for Redford to address each class of Sundance filmmakers. Now the task fell to one of his children, the filmmaker and actor Amy Redford. It was her father’s dream to share this mountain retreat with others, she said, and to transform it into a place of creative revitalization and refuge. “Dad knew that place matters,” she said. “It was in this landscape that he thought it fitting for you to frame your own.” The festival was renamed Sundance in 1991, inspired by Redford’s role in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” . Redford himself fought the name at first, which struck him as “self-serving,” as he said in an interview in 2015. He was wisely overruled. Renaming the event Sundance—as opposed to, say, the Park City Film Festival—liberated it from the nomenclatural constraints of a single defining location like Cannes, Venice, or Toronto. The very word “Sundance,” with its intrinsically cinematic evocations of light and movement, became synonymous with the festival’s dedication to the art. That mission, in turn, helped launch Sundance satellite events in cities around the world, such as London and Hong Kong. The irony is that few major film festivals have felt more grounded in their environs than Sundance or have conveyed a more physically overpowering sense of place. Of the various reasons that the festival eventually chose to move to Boulder—as opposed to Salt Lake City or Cincinnati, both of which were also in the running—the chance to preserve a wintry, high-altitude milieu surely ranked high. As to the other reasons, the generally accepted narrative when Sundance first announced it was looking for a new home was that the festival had outgrown Park City, which, with a population of roughly eight thousand three hundred, has long been an improbable setting for an event that, last year, drew more than eighty-five thousand in-person attendees . Boulder, in the end, seemed an intuitive solution. It’s twelve times larger than Park City, with a population of more than a hundred thousand. There are more hotels, more restaurants, more potential venues. It’s also in a blue state, and therefore, the logic goes, better suited than either Ohio or Utah to the politics of inclusivity, anti-racism, and social justice that have been foundational principles of Sundance’s programming. There is, of course, a more worrisome narrative in play: what if the real crisis isn’t that Sundance has outgrown Park City, but, rather, that the industry has outgrown Sundance? Sundance is a festival that made its reputation, in part, on the robust novelty of the American independent-film movement in the late eighties and early nineties. It shaped the careers of young auteurs such as Quentin Tarantino, Steven Soderbergh, Paul Thomas Anderson, and the Coen brothers. The festival also conferred a new kind of alt-movieland mystique on the buzzy negotiations of the film business. Inside-baseball details became sources of enormous excitement. The industry trades teemed with reports of films scoring through-the-roof audience reactions, all-night bidding wars between potential buyers, and coveted seven- or eight-figure distribution deals that sometimes emerged from the fray. I encountered a version of this phenomenon on the first morning of my first Sundance. Trying to find my way around festival headquarters, I ran into a colleague from Variety, my employer at the time, who blurted out the news that Fox Searchlight Pictures had just bought “Little Miss Sunshine” for a whopping ten and a half million dollars. What the hell was “Little Miss Sunshine”? I found out at a press screening a few days later: a crowd-pleasing dysfunctional-family road-trip comedy that left most of the audience in stitches and that, in time, would become a major indie hit and a multiple Oscar winner. It was the kind of breakout success, in short, that keeps Sundance in business. For the next few years, the festival seemed to operate under a kind of residual “Little Miss Sunshine” haze, with filmmakers, publicists, and distributors trying—and generally failing—to replicate the film’s formula for commercial and critical success. Alas, though sales activity naturally ebbs and flows over the years, it does feel like such boom-town phenomena are artifacts of yesteryear. From a purely acquisitions standpoint, the most hotly chased title at this year’s festival was “The Invite,” a bickersome marital dramedy directed by Olivia Wilde and starring Wilde, Seth Rogen, Penélope Cruz, and Ed Norton. The movie’s eventual purchase—by A24, which spent more than eleven million dollars—certainly generated buzz, but, given that the director and cast are known quantities, it was hardly the surge of excitement and discovery that was once a mark of the festival. The crises that Sundance faces—the lingering shadow of the pandemic, the perilous state of theatrical exhibition—are hardly Sundance’s alone. They reflect a film industry in existential turmoil. But they are problems that might require more than a new host city and additional infrastructure to solve. My fellow-jurors in the American documentary section, the filmmakers Natalia Almada and Jennie Livingston, were both Sundance laureates, too. Almada has won two directing prizes at the festival, for “El General” and “Users” , and Livingston has won the Grand Jury Prize, for “Paris Is Burning” . Together, we screened ten nonfiction movies from emerging American filmmakers. For now, I’m going to stay quiet about what I thought of them , and mention instead the movies outside that pool—or at least the few I was able to slot in—that caught my eye. On a chilly Monday afternoon, I succumbed to the overpowering heat of “Chasing Summer,” a nimble, sexy, and infectiously funny collaboration between the director Josephine Decker and the comedian and screenwriter Iliza Shlesinger. The movie follows Jamie , a fortysomething humanitarian-aid worker who, after being blindsided by personal and professional uncertainty, returns to her home in suburban Texas for a summer of ribaldry and revelation. There she endures unceasing verbal jabs from her mother and her older sister and also renews her acquaintance with old friends and an old flame from high school. In other words, on paper, “Chasing Summer” sounds like any number of flat, formulaic indie quirkfests about the unspeakable horrors of going home again. But that just goes to show that you can never judge a movie from its plot. Although the film skews surprisingly more mainstream than Decker’s previous work—her film “Madeline’s Madeline” was a wildly imaginative, form-blurring fantasia—the conventionality of the material throws the bristling intelligence of the filmmaker’s approach into sharp relief. As the camera glides in and around a roller-skating rink, where much of the action takes place, Decker and Shlesinger achieve and sustain a terrific balance of comic velocity and erotic languor. A more fitful kind of funny-sexy alchemy is at play in Josef Kubota Wladyka’s “Ha-chan, Shake Your Booty!,” an uneven but enjoyable comedy about a woman trying to dance her way out of bereavement. Rinko Kikuchi plays Haru, a ballroom dancer in Tokyo who, after losing her husband and dance partner, Luis , begins a tentative fling with a new dance instructor, Fedir . Kikuchi, as she demonstrated in “Babel” and “Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter,” has a gift for playing women at odds with the world, and she taps into a freewheeling, fantastical sense of possibility, both on and off the dance floor. As the comedy progresses, its buoyant tone clenches and darkens, and the plot bends and lurches, in ways that, to me, felt unnecessarily punitive toward both Haru and the audience. And yet the moves keep you watching. Wladyka choreographs the dance sequences—chief among them an obligatory but irresistible shout-out to “Dirty Dancing”—with a disarmingly loopy expressionist verve. I caught “Chasing Summer” and “Ha-chan, Shake Your Booty!” at the festival’s largest venue, the Eccles Theatre, a high-school auditorium that seats about twenty-five hundred moviegoers. Because it’s one of the best places to see a movie in Park City, more than a few festivalgoers have been known to camp out at the Eccles for the day, filing in and out of screenings and subsisting on a better-than-nothing diet of concession-stand snacks. As I purchased an overpriced bottle of water at the Eccles this past week, I was grateful for the young employee who warned me, shortly before a screening of Adam Meeks’s drama “Union County,” that he had heard that the movie was devastating, and that I might require handkerchiefs. He was right, damn it. Meeks’s film, set against the backdrop of the opioid epidemic in rural Ohio, movingly explores the rhythms and routines of a county-mandated drug-court program, and does so with considerable patience and authenticity. Will Poulter, playing a young newcomer to the program, gives a superb performance; so do the nonprofessional actors cast as his comrades-in-recovery. I missed more than I saw—but that’s every Sundance. I was glad to catch “Queen of Chess,” Rory Kennedy’s thrilling documentary portrait of the Hungarian chess grandmaster Judit Polgár. I was sorry to miss “Give Me the Ball!,” Liz Garbus and Elizabeth Wolff’s documentary about Billie Jean King, which I heard got a rapturous reception, enhanced by the post-screening presence of King herself, cheerfully lobbing balls into the Eccles balcony. Did I regret not catching a retrospective showing of “Little Miss Sunshine,” in a special valedictory program of Sundance sensations from over the years? Perhaps—though not as much as I regretted missing the screening of Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden’s “Half Nelson” . That’s the title that I remember most fondly from my first year at Sundance and, to this day, I’m convinced that Ryan Gosling, who starred in the film, has never been better. The festival wound down, as it usually does for me and my friends and colleagues, at Grub Steak, a rustic Park City fixture, where diners can sit beneath a mounted stag’s head and tear into prime rib—or, if so moved, into more local offerings, such as elk and bison. I don’t think it was until I found myself unexpectedly misting up at the salad bar—which had vanished during the pandemic and taken its sweet time coming back—that I fully grasped that it really was happening. Sundance as we knew it, the Sundance that had turned Park City into a delightful, exasperating annual destination, really was coming to an end. At our table, we wondered what the Boulder equivalent of Grub Steak would be. Probably an Outback, someone quipped. And then we said our farewells. Some of us headed off to bed; for others, another movie beckoned. ♦
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