In case you somehow haven’t heard, the Sundance Film Festival might be coming to Boulder in 2027.
“The Sundance Film Festival has a deep history in the Mountain West, and we can think of no better home for its next act than Colorado,” Gov. Jared Polis said in a June press release. “With the Rocky Mountains as a backdrop and our deep commitment to the arts, we can help the festival achieve even greater success while preserving what makes it special, building on Colorado’s iconic creative brand and our strong arts community.”
Then again, the festival’s next act might bind itself to the strong arts communities of Atlanta, Georgia; Cincinnati, Ohio; Louisville, Kentucky; or Santa Fe, New Mexico. Or maybe it’ll stay put in Park City, Utah, and expand 30 miles northwest into Salt Lake City. Sundance is considering all six as “potential host cities for the festival,” per a July 19 press release.
Naturally, the six potential hosts are excited about the economic impact the Sundance Film Festival could bring. According to the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade, last year’s event boosted Utah’s economy to the tune of 1,608 jobs, $63 million in wages and more than 21,000 out-of-state visitors.
How did we get here?
Publically, speculation began this past January at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival during a live recording of Matthew Belloni’s podcast, The Town with then-Sundance Institute (which organizes the festival) CEO Joana Vicente. Sundance’s current contract with Park City expires following the 2026 festival, prompting speculation about the festival’s future.
Sundance attendance has been declining — exacerbated by virtual-only festivals in 2021 and 2022 — while the streaming boom of the past decade has disrupted the production-to-platform pipeline so totally that every film festival has felt the sting. That’s the cloud Vicente was under when she revealed Sundance’s future might no longer be tied to the ski resort town it has called home for 40 years.
“Yes, there is a negotiation coming up,” Vicente said on The Town. “We’re also spending time doing a lot of strategic thinking: Where can we be most relevant? What’s the role of the festival? What’s the role of the Institute? How do we evolve in an ever-changing industry?”
Two months later, Vicente stepped down as CEO of the Institute.
Behind-the-scenes, the wheels have been turning a lot longer. The Sundance Film Festival, which champions new and emerging voices — primarily in the American independent and documentary scenes — has grown into one of the biggest players on the cinematic calendar. (The 2024 festival has extensions in Chicago, London, Mexico City and Taiwan.)
In April, the Sundance Institute opened the Request for Information (RFI) and subsequent Request for Proposal (RFP) for locations interested in hosting the festival for 10 years.
“We are in a unique moment for our festival and our global film community,” Sundance’s director of festival and public programming, Eugene Hernandez, said in the press release. “With the contract up for renewal, this exploration allows us to responsibly consider how we best continue sustainably serving our community while maintaining the essence of the festival experience.”
How strong is Boulder’s bid?
Colorado is no stranger to film festivals. Boulder already has the Boulder International Film Festival (BIFF), held in late winter, while 30 miles southeast, Denver hosts the Denver Film Festival (DFF) in November. Between the two are a smattering of smaller but no less significant fests: Boulder Jewish Film Festival, Boulder Environmental / Nature / Outdoors Film Festival, CinemaQ, Mimesis Documentary Festival, Women+Film Festival, and so on.
Then there’s the University of Colorado’s First Person Cinema and International Film Series, two long-running series with dedicated followings.
“We have a real homegrown audience that’s into more artistic cinema,” CU professor and filmmaker Kelly Sears tells Boulder Weekly. “Thinking about folks who come to the Brakhage Symposium, who come to the Celebrating Stan series, who come to the Mimesis Documentary Festival … I think there is a big population that is eager for cinema that skews toward the margins here.”
Sears, who’s had five of her shorts screen at Sundance, thinks “Boulder is a very interesting fit for Sundance” because the festival’s “interest is in finding new voices, new visions and new aesthetics.”
The emphasis there is “new.” Sundance is a marketplace. Save for a couple of locally produced movies, everything you see at BIFF or DFF — who did not respond to requests for comment from Boulder Weekly by the time of publication — has already acquired distribution. The majority of the movies that play Sundance do not. Invited filmmakers show up with hope and a prayer that they’ll leave 10 days later with a deal from a studio or a streamer and a check to cash.
A brief history of the Sundance Film Festival
Before it was Sundance, it was the Utah/US Film Festival. The year was 1978, and Sterling van Wagenen, a Brigham Young University film school graduate, and Utah State Film Commissioner John Earle wanted to put on a show.
Like a lot of projects in their infancy, the Utah/US Film Festival bounced around the calendar and locations before settling in Park City in 1981, thanks to a suggestion by board member and filmmaker Sydney Pollack. He figured that as the only film festival held at a ski resort during ski season, “Hollywood would beat down the door to attend.”
Pollack was right. That same year, the festival changed names to the US Film and Video Festival, finally taking the moniker of the Sundance Film Festival in 1991.
Before there was Utah, there was Boulder
If there’s one name synonymous with Sundance, it’s Robert Redford. Married to van Wagenen’s cousin, Lola, at the time, Redford was attached to the festival from the get-go.
If you read any article or press release about Boulder’s bid for Sundance, they will invariably mention Redford’s ties to CU — he attended in 1955 and was kicked out after one year — and the time he was a busboy at The Sink. What they tend to leave out is that Redford offered the festival to the university in 1978, and they turned him down.
“I thought I’d throw this feeler out and see if the university was interested,” Redford told Denver Post movie critic Steven Rosen in 2000. For the pitch, Redford gathered then-Governor Dick Lamm, CU film studies professor Virgil Grillo, resident filmmaker Stan Brakhage and Telluride Film Festival’s Bill Pence, and offered to put up the seed money. “Then hopefully there would be either a group of investors or community leaders or the university itself. I never got any response. So I went on my way.”
Boulder’s loss was Utah’s gain. Nearly 50 years later, a reversal might be in the works.
Who wants Sundance to come to Boulder?
Turns out, a lot of people. The consortium behind Boulder’s $1.5 million bid for the Sundance Film Festival is a partnership between the State of Colorado and the Boulder Convention and Visitors Bureau (Visit Boulder) in collaboration with Colorado Office of Film Television and Media (COFTM) and the Business Funding and Incentives division of the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade (OEDIT). Other players include the City of Boulder, the Boulder Chamber, the University of Colorado and the Stanley Film Center in Estes Park — which is currently hosting the Sundance Institute’s Directors Labs in 2024 while the Sundance Mountain Resort in Utah is under construction. (Redford sold the property in 2020.)
“Colorado’s creative industries contribute $16.8 billion to our economy every year and account for nearly 4% of jobs,” OEDIT Executive Director Eve Lieberman said in a June press release. “Hosting the prestigious Sundance Film Festival will grow the sector’s contributions to our state while raising Colorado’s profile across the globe, benefiting the many small businesses that depend on tourism and out-of-state visitors for their livelihoods.”
This sentiment was echoed by the Boulder community in a recent Sundance Film Festival Engagement Survey conducted by Visit Boulder and distributed through local arts organizations like BIFF and the Conference on World Affairs email lists.
“Responses were overwhelmingly positive,” Karleen Lewis, Visit Boulder’s director of marketing and communications, told Boulder Weekly, “with more than 80% of respondents indicating they are excited about Boulder potentially hosting the Sundance Film Festival.”
Lewis explains that the survey was “distributed to gauge interest” if Boulder was selected to host the fest. Those results will be “used to help inform the selection committee’s decision.”
Though the full results of Visit Boulder’s survey are confidential, Lewis says they are “overwhelmingly positive” despite some concerns which “revolve around logistical questions or practical issues.”
And those logistical questions and practical issues — from where the festival films will screen to what kind of impact this will have on the already established film festivals — amount to an awful lot. Then there are the questions of lodging and logistics, infrastructure and environmental impact.
But before we get to all that, there’s still the lingering question of Sundance’s next act.
“This is a good time for Sundance to pivot to a new location,” CU professor and local filmmaker Emilie Upczak tells Boulder Weekly. “When we move locations, we also clean house and look at what we need and what we don’t. I hope that Sundance, in this move, would take the opportunity to look at their strengths and build on those.”
The announcement for the location of the 2027 Sundance Film Festival will come sometime between now and early 2025. The 2025 Sundance Film Festival will take place in Park City from Jan. 23 to Feb. 2.