Another Sundance Film Festival has come & gone, but this time, as the red carpets get rolled up and we put our snow boots back in storage, we're also saying goodbye to Park City, Utah, the fest's historic home since it was founded over 40 years ago by the late Robert Redford. And though its new location in Boulder, Colorado promises to take the annual celebration of independent cinema to a state decidedly
NPR's Mandalit del Barco reports the annual festival had celebrations and protests. UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTERS: (Chanting) Love melts ICE. Love melts ICE. MANDALIT DEL BARCO, BYLINE: Cinephiles and filmmakers at Sundance took to the streets to protest the fatal shootings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good by immigration agents in Minnesota. UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTER: (Chanting) Shoot films. UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTERS: (Chanting) Not people. DEL BARCO: Shoot films, not people, they chanted.
The last Sundance Film Festival in Utah is drawing to a close this weekend.The Park City gathering was a wistful farewell to the place Robert Redford's brainchild has called home for over 40 years and launched so many careers. Although the festival isn't ending - it will start anew in Boulder, Colorado, in 2027 - it did have many, from filmmakers to volunteers, feeling nostalgic about the change whether their Sundance story began in 2022 or 1992.
The Sundance Film Festival's days in Park City are drawing to a close, but its online component, which allows viewers to stream every movie in its competitive sections and a handful of others, is still going strong, at least through midnight on Sunday. The lineup excludes some of the festival's starry premieres-sorry, you'll have to head to a theater to see the Charli XCX mockumentary The Moment, out this Friday-but there's still plenty to sample, even from a relatively weak lineup.
Sometimes, as with Dawn Porter's documentary When a Witness Recants, which follows three exonerated men who were framed by the police for the murder of a Baltimore high school student, it served to tie their movies to the current political reality, which lit up phones in darkened theaters with news of the killing of Alex Pretti. Sometimes it was just taking advantage of the spotlight,
PARK CITY, UTAH - San Francisco may be one of the most cinematic cities in the world, but it isn't necessarily the easiest place to film a movie. Or is it? This year's Sundance Film Festival saw two breakout hits that filmed in the city: "Josephine," which was filmed fully in SF, and "The Invite," which spent two days in the city on location. Along with the recent filming of "Artificial" and 2024's "Man on the Inside," there's a growing mound of evidence that despite popular belief, San Francisco can be a welcome place for filmmakers.
The news began to spread through the Sundance film festival on Saturday morning, as people emerged from early screenings or long nights out at the bars on Main Street. If you all have not heard what's going on in Minnesota this morning, someone else was murdered by ICE, director Ava DuVernay told the audience at a panel on freedom of expression, referring to the shooting that morning of Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, by Immigration and Customs Enforcements (ICE) agents in Minneapolis.
It's the most wonderful time of the year - for film buffs and fashionistas, at least. Awards season is here, and celebs are busy vying for a spot on annual best-dressed lists. Plus, Hollywood's best and brightest have been flocking to Park City, Utah for the Sundance Film Festival, which kicked off on Jan. 22. The festival may not have as flashy of a fashion reputation as New York or LA red carpets, but style stars like Jenna Ortega came to deliver nonetheless. The actress attended the festival to promote her upcoming film, The Gallerist. On Jan. 24, the Wednesday actress stepped out in two preppy corpcore fits, including a designer minidress and monochromatic skirt suit.
I was a struggling filmmaker. I was trying to find myself and it wasn't happening. I was ready to give up on filmmaking as I was about to turn 30. I didn't feel like I could do this to myself, my family and friends any longer. I was living in South Austin making the minimum amount of money, eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and making bad art. But then Sundance gave me my career with this $3 short film that we submitted to the festival on a lark.
It's the sort of small, character-driven American indie that has served as the festival's lifeblood for almost 50 years and, as the system has expanded in some ways and shrunk in others, the sort that has often struggled to make it far out of Park City. Back in 2023, a quiet, disarming and perfectly Sundance film called A Little Prayer premiered yet didn't get released until late last summer and was seen by a precious few.
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It's hard to believe that an era is going to end this month. After January 2026, the Sundance Film Festival, still one of the key events on any film-lover's calendar, will be leaving Park City, Utah, and heading to Boulder, Colorado, for the foreseeable future. Going into this final Utah Sundance, there was a question of whether it would be a deserved celebration of what was accomplished or an understandable wake for what's being lost.
Shortly, the Oscar fate of hundreds of feature and short documentary hopefuls will be decided during what is known as "preliminary voting" (December 8-12), when the 736 documentary branch members give each film they've seen a numbered score. This will yield the shortlist of 15, from which they will rank those films on a preferential ballot. The shortlist announcement will come on December 16. The whole Academy will vote on the final five. But only those who have seen all five can vote.
I was a newspaper reporter with USA Today at the time, and I'd arranged an hour-long sit-down with the bandwhich they abruptly canceled shortly before we were set to meet. Why? Well, Robert Redford had made them a better offer. The Sundance founder (and Sundance Kid) had invited them to his mountainside Sundance Mountain Resort to have a drink at his personal watering hole.
