Sundance 2025: Industrial Design

This article appeared in the January 24, 2025 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

A view from Main Street at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. © 2025 Sundance Institute. Photo by Breanna Downs.

In Film Comment’s March-April 2007 issue, critic Amy Taubin’s Sundance dispatch starts with this zinger: “A frat party with stars, a blogger convention, a bazaar that could easily share its exploitation wares with the AFM (American Film Market)—these were the most trying aspects of Sundance ’07.” Taubin goes on to center her criticisms on the festival’s increasingly unrelenting focus on the industry horse-trading that occurs in Park City, Utah, where “the thrill was not in seeing the merchandise but in watching Harvey Weinstein make a deal.”

The media coverage of more recent editions of Sundance reveals a continued emphasis on record sales prices and the Oscar track record of films that debuted at the festival. And the on-the-ground experience is now defined less by watching films than by standing in line for screenings (unless you can afford the $4,200 Express Pass), glitzy parties hosted by studios and sponsors, and all the corporate lounges on Main Street. Attending Sundance is increasingly challenging, given the ballooning number of festivalgoers (72,840 people attended in person last year) descending upon Park City and scrambling for tickets and hotels, and the exorbitant costs of travel and accommodations (pricier, by some measures, than at Cannes). So is organizing it, amid rising venue-rental prices, staff layoffs, and leadership turnover. For a festival synonymous with championing American independent cinema, it’s become prohibitively expensive for most of today’s indie-film enjoyers, workers, and makers to participate in and benefit from.

In April 2024, after months of rumors, the Sundance Institute admitted that the festival had outgrown the tiny ski town of Park City (year-round population as of 2023: 8,254), and announced an open-bid process for cities all over the U.S. to submit proposals to host from 2027 onward. By September 2024, the choices were narrowed down to three finalists—Boulder, Colorado; Cincinnati, Ohio; and Salt Lake City/Park City. The last of these bids seems intended to keep the festival partially in Park City but move the bulk of screenings and activities into Salt Lake City. (Currently, there are secondary screenings in Salt Lake City, but most take place in Park City, including all the press and industry screenings.) According to the Sundance press office, the final location will be announced “well after the 2025 festival.”

Speculation about Sundance’s new location has featured in many water-cooler conversations at festivals and industry events over the past year. It is exceedingly rare for festivals to change locations—except in cases of political exile, such as Vitaly Mansky’s Artdocfest, which moved from Moscow to Riga, Latvia; or Orwa Nyrabia and Diana El Jeiroudi’s DOX BOX, which moved from Damascus to Berlin. In both of those cases, the festivals legally transformed into different entities, severing ties with their origins. Sundance’s impending move is unusual, and will have major implications for both the festival and the broader industry. But this current location bid process isn’t the first time the Sundance Film Festival has changed locations, its name, or its patronage. Major shifts and constant evolution have characterized the festival from its very beginnings.

Sundance was founded in 1978 by Utah’s film commissioners and the producer Sterling Van Wagenen, who ran Robert Redford’s production company, Wildwood. Van Wagenen convinced Redford to chair the board of the inaugural edition, which took place in September of that year. It was called the Utah/U.S. Film Festival at the time, and took place in Salt Lake City. Programmer Sharon Swenson selected more than 20 repertory films—from A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and John Wayne westerns to ’70s breakout hits Mean Streets and Badlands (both 1973)—to attract their famous directors and stars to Utah. Future program director Lory Smith—a University of Utah graduate who was hired as part of a government grant offering opportunities to young people who had been unemployed for two years—established the festival’s indie creds with a sidebar competition for independently produced features. This tiny “Regional Cinema Competition” (the market category of “independent film” had yet to be defined) included only eight films, many of which are now considered classics and have been recently re-released or restored, including David Schickele’s Bushman (1971), Claudia Weill’s Girlfriends (1978), Martha Coolidge’s Not a Pretty Picture (1976), and Penny Allen’s Property (1978). (The first edition also famously rejected David Lynch’s 1977 feature debut Eraserhead—Smith expressed regret for this decision in his 1999 book Party in a Box: The Story of the Sundance Film Festival, blaming the oversight on the substandard resources for screening submitted prints.)

Though John Wayne wasn’t able to attend due to ill health, the fledgling festival managed to attract critics Andrew Sarris and Molly Haskell, editor Verna Fields (Jaws), and director Mark Rydell, and, perhaps apocryphally, occasioned the acquisition of Eagle Pennell’s competition title The Whole Shootin’ Match (1978) by New Line for a theatrical release. Despite this initial creative success at connecting indie filmmakers to the industry, the Utah/U.S. Film Festival lost money. Its organizers subsequently decided to hold a second edition to pay back creditors. That didn’t work, either. Sydney Pollack, who was also on the board, suggested that the ski slopes in Park City might attract more filmgoers, and so, in 1980, the festival was renamed the U.S. Film and Video Festival and relocated to Park City. It now took place in January, with the Park City Chamber/Bureau hoping that the festival could revitalize the traditionally dead tourism period (though a blizzard during the first Park City edition in 1981 worsened the festival’s financial problems). In 1981, Redford launched the Sundance Institute to incubate filmmakers who couldn’t otherwise find a home in Hollywood, with labs held at his new Sundance Mountain Resort between Park City and Redford’s home northeast of Provo.

From its very first edition, the festival’s M.O. was to use star guests to elevate new independent voices. But maintaining the delicate balance between commerce and art created new challenges in the early 1980s. According to Smith’s book, those years were beset by conflicts between the priorities of the Utah Film Office, a desire to attract more buyers, and the mission of platforming indie filmmakers. A video competition was scuttled; an international section and a documentary competition were added. In one of his book’s most telling anecdotes, Smith describes how festival leadership made a last-minute decision to split the $5,000 award for the 1985 Sundance Grand Jury Prize Documentary winner Seventeen (1983), intended for its co-directors Joel DeMott and Jeff Kreines, with the film’s commissioner, PBS producer Peter Davis, despite the fact that Davis had withdrawn it from public broadcast due to its depiction of an interracial high-school relationship and marijuana use. Smith thought that this compromise was the “first step down a long road” of the festival “playing politics” instead of “supporting filmmakers.” This concession for a film’s funder is significant because, for the first time in the festival’s history, it mixed the politicking of securing studio and broadcast titles for the repertory sections with the earnest mission of supporting independent films that had been rejected by traditional financiers.

After the 1984 edition, the Sundance Institute took over management of the festival and stabilized its finances. The competition program, now headed by Tony Safford, made space for new co-productions of studios and broadcasters like American Playhouse; film critics like L.A. Weekly’s John Powers, writing for Film Comment, lambasted the 1987 festival for its uninspiring TV-aesthetic fare. Still, there was room for radicality: Safford encouraged the curatorial instincts of Alberto Garcia, who started a shorts sidebar of daring young filmmakers called “Rogues Gallery” in 1988 (the first edition of which included Todd Haynes’s 1987 Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story). Garcia was later promoted to program director in 1990, which was Safford’s last year as festival director before departing to head New Line. The two co-wrote a cinematic manifesto for independent films in that year’s print program introduction: “The mechanisms of filmmaking should be appropriated without assimilating the structures of the dominant cinema.” At the time, the festival didn’t have strict world-premiere requirements. Films like Smooth Talk (1985) and Chameleon Street (1989) won the Grand Jury Prize Dramatic (in 1986 and 1990, respectively) after previously screening at TIFF (which was then called the Toronto Festival of Festivals).

In 1991, the event was finally renamed the Sundance Film Festival, aligning it even more closely with the Institute’s artist-development mission. Looking back, the ’90s seem like Sundance’s salad days, with low-budget fare like sex, lies, and videotape (1989) and Clerks (1994) finding great success at the fest. But At Sundance, the 1995 hangout documentary co-directed by Sundance favorite Michael Almereyda and producer Amy Hobby, shows that filmmakers were already aware then that the festival’s promises to uplift independent cinema couldn’t hold. Shooting in grainy Pixelvision, Almereyda and Hobby record Haynes and Gregg Araki as they sit on a couch and complain about “the tyranny of narrative” and audiences’ diminishing appetite for adventurous films. James Mangold, in front of what appears to be a condo TV, rails against cheesy, dialogue-heavy screenplays. Filmmaker and screenwriter Maria Maggenti talks about the difficulty of making films for “no money” in a society that worships blockbusters like the then-hypothetical Terminator 5 and Barry Levinson’s Disclosure (1994). Tom DiCillo complains about subpar Tarantino copycats—what we could now describe as a product of the “Sundance effect.” Richard Linklater, Danny Boyle, Edward Burns, Atom Egoyan, Abel Ferrara, James Gray, Rebecca Miller, Whit Stillman, and many others take their turns at the microphone.

In between interviews, Almereyda’s brief voiceovers muse on the festival’s “particular pitch of excitement and desperation.” He explains: “For the length of Sundance’s 10-day run, Park City becomes a virtual suburb of Hollywood . . . Cell phones aren’t working because the satellite signals are jammed. There are parties every night, people pressed to the walls.” Almereyda’s observations from 30 years ago still apply today. In the years since At Sundance, the event’s commercialization has proceeded at a rising pace. In a 2005 interview for IndieWire, then–Director of Programming John Cooper described the creation of the Sundance Industry Office: “We did a lot of work this year on the industry side of the festival, in general, making it an easier, kindler, gentler place to do film business.” The industry office launched a contact list of emails and phone numbers for all accredited industry personnel. Park City’s Main Street hub of corporate brand activations got folded into the festival infrastructure through official partnerships. For the last decade, the Sundance-sanctioned BrandStorytelling conference at Deer Valley has gathered speakers from corporations like Amazon, Meta, and Sephora to promote their work.

The festival’s imminent move is but the long tail of a nonprofit behemoth that has already severed many of its ties to Utah. Since 1987, there have been spin-off Sundance festivals in London, Hong Kong, Taipei, Mexico City, Chicago, and elsewhere. The Sundance labs are no longer exclusively held at the Sundance Mountain Resort, but also convene at different resorts across the country. And in 2019, the Sundance Institute launched an online platform for educational courses called Collab. The year-round staff are mostly based in Los Angeles (where the festival’s programming team meets) or New York, though the Institute maintains a small office in Park City. In its first two decades, Sundance shed its host city, multiple names, and several management structures in order to survive in the cutthroat U.S. film industry. Wherever the festival heads to next will tell us a lot about the cost of doing business today.