Can the Sundance Film Festival Survive Leaving Park City?

In a highly unusual competition that’s been taking place over the last year, all pegged to the future location of the Sundance Film Festival (“Hey, cities of America! Want to host a world-class independent film festival? Enter our sweepstakes now!”), the most unusual moment had to be the unveiling, this week, of the three finalists that are vying to be the new seat of Sundance. They are: Boulder, Cincinnati, and Salt Lake City/Park City. That last option was a real eyebrow-raiser, since it’s where the Sundance Film Festival takes place right now. You were led to wonder: Has this entire contest been a giant subterfuge, a way for Sundance to simply secure a new deal, or maybe a better deal, with its original home base?

Actually, it’s not that simple. If Salt Lake City/Park City does turn out to be the winner (the announcement is scheduled to be made in February 2025, shortly after the upcoming edition of Sundance), notice the order in which those two cities are listed. Park City has hosted the Sundance Film Festival since 1981 (back when it was called the U.S. Film Festival), with a sprinkling of screenings and events taking place in Salt Lake City. I’ve been going to Sundance since 1995, and I have never once been to a screening in Salt Lake City. But in the new arrangement, if the dual Utah locales were to win out, Sundance would mostly transplant itself to Salt Lake; Park City would become a minor satellite. This would mark a profound change, logistically and spiritually.

You would still be surrounded by those crisp beautiful wintry mountains. But Park City first became the home of Sundance after Robert Redford moved to the area, founded the Sundance Institute, and branded the pristine rugged countryside surrounding Park City with his environmentally conscious presence. Ever since, it’s been impossible to separate the Park City-ness of Sundance from the Reford-ness of Sundance. And I’m not just talking about the golden glow of Redford’s celebrity. I’m talking about what he stands for as an artist and why he cultivated Sundance in the first place: the belief that there should be a vital place for films made outside the Hollywood system (something that he began to take steps toward doing in the late ’60s). Park City is a former prospector town whose mystique fused, through Sundance, with Redford’s electric-horseman movie-star glamour. And the festival made the town a lot of money, so all was good.

But money is now the reason that Sundance is looking to move. The Sundance Film Festival is still profitable for Park City, but in the age of upscale winter vacations for the one percent, the ski season has turned out to be an even more gilded prospect. Simply put, the town can make more money from skiing than it can from a film festival. So it’s a lot less welcoming, in that roll-out-the-white-snow-carpet way, to all things Sundance.

But if Sundance were to move to Salt Lake City, the Venn diagram of overlap between what the festival represents and what Salt Lake City represents would be very small indeed. The festival is arty and progressive and cosmopolitan; Salt Lake City is the austere Western seat of Mormonism. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but how do those two things go together? They don’t. I can imagine a Sundance Film Festival hosted by Salt Lake City feeling like an arid and oxymoronic affair. Though it would be just a 45-minute ride from Park City, the prevailing attitude might be: If Sundance was going to leave its beloved home for all those years to come here, then why didn’t it just go to someplace like Boulder or Cincinnati?

Boulder strikes me as the most Park City-like of the three options. So maybe Sundance, starting in 2027 (which is when the move is scheduled to kick in), would do well to pull up stakes and move to a beautiful former prospecting town in the middle of Colorado. Why not?

But here’s where we come to the real problem. For the thousands of actors and filmmakers and executives and journalists and publicists who travel there each January, Park City has been a crucial element of Sundance’s identity. The place contains a lot of memories — at this point, you might describe it as a silver-and-turquoise Wild West institutional Sundance brain trust. Park City roots the Sundance brand. If you tear Sundance away from it, the festival’s identity is going to be something very different, and maybe something much less.

One reason for that is that Sundance is already a film festival in the middle of a slow-motion identity crisis. In the 1980s, which was the low-budget earnest wheat-farm era of independent filmmaking, the U.S.-turned-Sundance Film Festival was still on the margins of the culture. But with the extraordinary rise of independent film, it became the seat of a cultural revolution. Starting in the ’90s, this is where you would find so many of the new artists, the new storytellers who would be heading to Hollywood or remaining 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 sweet spot of Sundance is that it showcased movies that were works of art and that could find a place in the greater marketplace. That double reality, in the age of streaming and popcorn dominance, is harder and harder to come by. The films that emerge from Sundance have a lower profile than they used to. It’s not anyone’s fault; it’s just the way the structure of the movie business and audience taste is evolving. Sundance, you could argue (as I did last year when I asked: Have Sundance movies lost their danger?), is in danger of slipping, slowly but surely, into a boutique diminishment of relevance. So if it were to lose the mythic identity of its location now, I could see a bunch of people showing up in Boulder, or Cincinnati, or wherever and asking: Where are we? What has this festival become? Sundance would have a new location, but would that location be the new home for American independent film or just the place where it got sent?

Let’s be clear where I’m coming from. I revere the Sundance Film Festival. I’m friendly with some of the people who run it (like Eugene Hernandez, the festival’s exemplary director), and I fully understand how much the festival’s decision to uproot itself — and to do it through this city-as-reality-show-contestant faceoff — is rooted in the dicey economics of 2024. Yet just as the financials make sense on paper, and there’s probably a ton of research backing up the wisdom of Sundance’s decision to move, I’m haunted by the financially driven, research-backed worst corporate marketing decision of the last half century: the introduction, in 1985, of the New Coke. The Coca-Cola company took the perfect product and decided to make it…less perfect. It was a disaster. The lesson was that some brands are so powerful that you mess with them at your peril.

Almost every legendary film festival — Cannes, Venice, Telluride, Toronto — is named for the location where it takes place. Sundance isn’t called the Park City Film Festival, but it might as well be. That’s how wedded to the place it has always been. I wish Sundance the best, even if it winds up in Cincinnati, but I pray that they don’t take what began as the reel thing and drain it, through geography, into a ghostly imitation.