In a highly unusual competition that has been going on over the past year, all of it related to the future location of the Sundance Film Festival (“Hey, American cities! Want to host a world-class independent film festival? Enter the drawing now!”), the most bizarre event was this week’s reveal of the three finalist cities competing to host the new Sundance home: Boulder, Cincinnati, and Salt Lake City/Park City. The latter choice was a real surprise, given that it’s where the Sundance Film Festival is currently held. It made you wonder: Was this entire competition some giant ploy, a way for Sundance to secure a new deal, or perhaps a better deal, with its original home?
Actually, it’s not that simple. If Salt Lake City/Park City wins (an announcement is scheduled for February 2025, shortly after the next Sundance), note the order in which these two cities are listed. Park City has hosted the Sundance Film Festival since 1981 (when it was called the American Film Festival), with a handful of screenings and events taking place in Salt Lake City. I’ve been going to Sundance since 1995, and I’ve never been to a screening in Salt Lake City. But in the new arrangement, if the two Utah cities win, Sundance will mostly move to Salt Lake; Park City will become a small satellite. That would represent a profound change, logistically and spiritually.
But in reality, you’re still surrounded by those beautiful, cold mountains in the winter. But Park City became home to Sundance after Robert Redford moved to the area, founded the Sundance Institute, and named the pristine, rugged countryside surrounding Park City “the Eco-Festival.” Since then, it’s been impossible to separate the Sundance vibe of Park City from the Redford vibe of Sundance. I’m not just talking about the golden glow of Redford’s celebrity. I’m talking about what he represented as an artist and why he sponsored Sundance in the first place: the belief that there should be a viable place for films made outside the Hollywood system (which he had begun to do in the late 1960s). Park City is a former mining town whose mystique, through Sundance, merged with the glamour of movie stars who were fast and furious. The festival made the town a lot of money, so all was well.
But money is the reason Sundance is considering moving. The Sundance Film Festival is still a lucrative business for Park City, but in an age of luxury winter vacations enjoyed by the top 1 percent, the ski season has become a more attractive proposition. Put simply, the city can make more money from skiing than from a film festival. So it’s less welcoming to everything Sundance has to offer, like a white carpet.
But if Sundance were to move to Salt Lake City, the graph of the overlap between what the festival represents and what Salt Lake City represents would be very thin. The festival is artistic, progressive, and cosmopolitan; Salt Lake City is the strict Western bastion of Mormonism. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but how do those two things fit together? No. I can imagine a Sundance Film Festival hosted by Salt Lake City as a barren, contradictory affair. And while it may be only a 45-minute drive from Park City, the prevailing sentiment might be: If Sundance were to leave its beloved home for all these years to come, it would be hard to imagine it happening anywhere else. hereSo why not move it to a place like Boulder or Cincinnati?
Of the three options, Boulder seems the most similar to Park City to me. So maybe Sundance would be better off, starting in 2027 (when the move is scheduled), picking up the pieces and moving to a beautiful former mining town in central Colorado. Why not?
But here comes the real problem. For the thousands of actors, filmmakers, executives, journalists and publicists who travel there every January, Park City has been a crucial part of Sundance’s identity. a lot From memories – at this point, you might describe it as the silver and turquoise think tank of Sundance. Park City is what created the Sundance brand. If you took Sundance away from it, the festival's identity would be something entirely different, and perhaps something much less so.
One reason for this is that Sundance Film Festival actually became a film festival in the midst of a slow-motion identity crisis. In the 1980s, the era of low-budget independent filmmaking, Sundance Film Festival, which had become a film festival in the United States, was still on the fringes of culture. But with the extraordinary rise of independent film, it became the seat of a cultural revolution. Starting in the 1990s, this was the place where you would find many of the new artists, the new storytellers who would either head to Hollywood or remain independent (or both). It was a key place to connect with the future, and the game-changing present, of American cinema.
Maybe it still is. But the special thing about Sundance is that it showed films that were works of art. and But this dual reality, in the age of streaming and popcorn, has become increasingly difficult to find. The films that come out of Sundance are less popular than they were in the past. This is no one’s fault; it’s just the way the structure of the film industry and audience tastes are evolving. Some might argue that Sundance (as I did last year when I asked, Have Sundance films lost their seriousness?) is in danger of slipping, slowly but surely, into a state of diminished relevance. If the festival loses its mythical identity as a venue, it will lose its market position. nowI can see a bunch of people showing up in Boulder, or Cincinnati, or wherever and asking: Where are we? What has become of this festival? Sundance will have a new location, but will it be the new home for American independent film or just the place to which it will be sent?
Let’s be clear where I’m coming from. I respect the Sundance Film Festival. I have friendly relationships with some of the people who run it (like Eugene Hernandez, the quintessential festival director), and I fully understand how the festival’s decision to uproot itself—and do so by confronting the city with reality show contestants—is rooted in the precarious economics of 2024. Yet just as the financials make sense on paper, and there’s probably a wealth of research to support the wisdom of Sundance’s decision to move, I’m chasing the research-backed financial rationale. Worst Marketing Decision for Businesses This was the first time a new Coca-Cola product was introduced to the market in 1985. Coca-Cola decided to replace the perfect product with a less perfect one. It was a disaster. The lesson learned from this experience was that some brands are so powerful that you could risk your life if you mess with them.
Almost every legendary film festival—Cannes, Venice, Telluride, Toronto—bears the name of the place where it takes place. Sundance isn’t called the Park City Film Festival, but it might as well be. It’s inextricably linked to where it’s always been. I wish Sundance all the best, even if it ends up in Cincinnati, but I pray that it doesn’t take what began as a cinematic event and turn it, through geography, into a ghostly tradition.
