Chances are strong that if you saw a movie in theaters over the past year, you’ve felt the impact of the Sundance Film Institute. Since the 1980s, Sundance has fostered the careers of countless filmmakers whose work has played a significant role in shaping the state of the medium. Whether you live in a big city or a small town on the East End of Long Island, Sundance has launched talent in your direction.
Over the past year, Sundance alumni have delivered major commercial hits like Minecraft (from Napoleon Dynamite director Jared Hess) and Sinners (whose debut Fruitvale played at the festival 2012), which scored a record-breaking 16 nominations this week. Paul Thomas Anderson, whose Oscar juggernaut One Battle After Another seems most likely to claim Best Picture, brought his first feature Hard Eight to Sundance in 1996. Marty Supreme superstar Timothée Chalamet, now a frontrunner for Best Actor, first left an impact with his Sundance premiere Call Me By Your Name in 2017. And Chloé Zhao, only the second woman in history to be nominated for Best Director for Hamnet, brought her debut Songs My Brothers Taught Me to the festival in 2015. What change a decade can bring.
Each year, Sundance has plenty of movies worth writing home about in its program, some more obvious than others, and that’s exactly what I plan to do in the days ahead. However, the real legacy of Sundance belongs to the community it brings together. As I head to the festival for my nineteenth consecutive year, the legacy of Sundance is at a historic turning point. More than 40 years after Robert Redford’s non-profit supporting independent film took over the U.S. Film Festival, a few months after the actor-turned-activist’s death, Sundance will hold its final edition in Park City.
The limitations of the ski town’s infrastructure and other practical issues have mandated a big change. In 2027, Sundance heads to Boulder (a walkable college town, thank god!). It will look and feel different, much like independent film itself. When Sundance started, there weren’t thousands of ways to stream your entertainment at home. It has become harder than ever for original storytelling to get financed and find an audience. But Sundance has played a critical role in cultivating talent in a country in a field that has never made it easy. Redford himself was frustrated by the limitations of the projects at his disposal in the late 1970s when he created a safe haven for creatives in Utah. The challenge is nothing new.
Some might argue that, in the process of developing the independent film community, Sundance enhanced the rift between small-scale movies and large Hollywood fare. More often than not, it created a bridge. At the Golden Globes earlier this month, Hamnet director Zhao accepted her award for Best Drama while acknowledging Sinners director Coogler in the audience, citing their time together in the Sundance Labs in 2012. Thanks to the resilience of the labs (still run by Michelle Satter after 40 years), smart and original movies have a fighting chance to secure partners in crime. Making movies is a social experience, just like watching them with a crowd. When an engaged community tells stories, audiences feel that impact in the end result.
Of course, the movies that come out of the community have to be worth fighting for. This year, I’m excited to report back on a range of intriguing new work. There’s Long Island filmmaker’s soulful and irreverent New York essay film The History of Concrete (the follow-up to his HBO series How To With John Wilson) to Buddy, a zany midnight movie about two kids escaping a TV show from Adult Swim cult figure Caspar Kelly, best known for his viral video Too Many Cooks. (I gravitate toward the weird stuff first.)
More overtly commercial offerings have potential as well: There’s Olivia Wilde’s marital dramedy The Invite, which stars Seth Rogen, Penelope Cruz, Edward Norton, and Wilde herself, promises the sort of starry crowdpleaser that helps much of the press and industry justify turning their attention to the event. Another day brings the father-daughter thriller Josephine, starring Channing Tatum, and Natalie Portman in the dark comedy The Gallerist, set at Art Basel. There are documentaries on Courtney Love, Salman Rushdie, and the Wu-Tang Clan sure to stir up attention.
Some of these movies will win prizes, secure major distribution deals, and launch new stars into the stratosphere. Or…maybe they won’t. The joy of a good film festival journey is that you never quite know what will come out at the other end. It’s an embodiment of the leap into the unknown that defines the moviegoing experience as a whole.
These days, Sundance buzz is more of a national event than it may seem. Since 2020, the festival has created opportunities to watch its competition films online during the second half of the 10-day event. (More details here.) Of course, nothing encapsulates the experience of watching movies with an engaged audience and talent in the room. But if Sundance is going to remain relevant in the decades ahead, its talons have to keep reaching well beyond whatever city it calls home.
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