PARK CITY, UTAH — The evening before the Sundance Film Festival kicked off its final appearance in Utah, Amy Redford stood on a temporary stage in a temporary gathering space and addressed a roomful of people.
“My dad loved this place and its people,” she said of her father, Robert Redford, and the state where, for more than 40 years, the Sundance Institute — with its series of labs for emerging filmmakers — and the festival have shaped the film industry, and to some extent American culture.
Related: Boulder City Council approves $17.3 million incentives package for Sundance
Robert Redford died last September at 89, and his absence, as well as his vision, permeated this installment of the first festival without the Sundance Kid turned Elder Statesman. It’s hard to decide if it was fitting or a poetic injustice that Redford will not be following the festival to Colorado, a state he knew well, where Sundance will move in January 2027.
Colorado, though, is a state he knew well. Redford had, at one time, wanted to start his film festival in Colorado before heading to Utah. “Even though Bob Redford enjoyed a successful acting and directing career, he was never just content to rest on those laurels. He believed that with space to create and experiment, independent artists were poised to have a tremendous impact,” Ebs Burnough, chair of the board of trustees, told a roomful of film writers and journalists.
“And of course, he was right. To this day, artists who get their start at the Sundance Institute and at the film festival go on to shape storytelling, independent cinema, and our collective culture. And that has never mattered more than it does in this moment, when we need the empathy and inspiration and new perspectives independent storytelling provides,” he added.
Place is a funny thing. The wilderness of Utah, coupled with the intimacy of the ski town, served and shaped the festival well for decades — and vice versa. Now it moves to a new location at the foot of the Flatirons and adjacent to the Rockies. Boulder is beautiful, but as a city, it has a wholly different aura. And it has a university and a tech corridor.
Fortunately, Sundance hired the Boulder-based producer Paula DuPré Pesmen (“The Cove,” “Chasing Ice,” “Porcelain War”) to help envision the transition.
In the meantime, here are four things (there’s plenty more) to know about the globally renowned festival that concludes Sunday and the one headed to Colorado in January 2027.
Colorado represented
Colorado was represented a couple of times this year. “See You When I See You,” a Jay Duplass-directed film, premiered at Sundance. It is based on beloved Denver stand-up Adam Cayton-Holland’s 2018 book, “Tragedy Plus Time: A Tragi-Comic Memoir,“ about grief and his sister’s suicide. It stars David Duchovny, Hope Davis and Cooper Raiff and Kaitlyn Dever as siblings.
Then there was writer-director Ramzi Bashour, who in 2023 was among the cohort of young filmmakers working on their first feature during the Sundance Directors Lab, held at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park. His debut feature, “Hot Water” — about a Lebanese mother and her son’s westward road trip — premiered in the U.S. Dramatic competition.
And the band DeVotchKa — with its roots in Colorado — returned to the place that launched them, as the festival celebrated the 20th anniversary of “Little Miss Sunshine.” “Yeah, everybody always says, ‘Man, I can’t believe it’s 20 years that flew by,’” frontman Nick Urata shared on a voice email. “But in this case, I have to say it doesn’t feel like that because that screening at Sundance 20 years ago was literally the first day of the rest of our lives. It was definitely the birth of our career as a band.”
They’d been touring and 21 years ago had self-released the album “How It Ends.” “Luckily, we got some airtime on listener-funded NPR stations, one of them being KCRW in L.A. And one morning they were playing us our song called “You’d Love Me,” he continued. “And Jonathan [Dayton] and Valerie [Faris], the directors, happened to hear it, and it sparked something. They got in touch with us about possibly using our music and doing some of the score for us. That is the coolest part of this whole story. The fact that those songs were released to little fanfare independently, and then it was repackaged along with this beautiful film, and the same exact songs were on the soundtrack album, and it got a Grammy nomination.”
Making young filmmakers household names
The Sundance labs are “a sneak peek at the artists you might see here … in the future,” Redford said in her speech. The next morning proved her prescient. When the Oscar nominations were announced, Sundance was well represented. Writer-director Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners” made history with 16 nominations. Nipping at its heels was Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another,” with 13. Chloe Zhao’s “Hamnet” garnered eight.
All three directors developed their first features in the Directors Lab: Coogler with “Fruitvale Station,” which starred his actor muse Michael B. Jordan; Anderson with the film that became “Hard Eight,” Zhao with “Songs My Brothers Taught Me,” set on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. And then there’s last year’s mournfully gorgeous meditation on a changing west, “Train Dreams,” which had four nominations, including Best Picture. The Oscar-nominated “Come See Me In the Good Light,” the tear-jerking, laugh-evoking documentary about the late Colorado Poet Laureate, Andrea Gibson, and her wife, the poet Megan Falley, as they faced Gibson’s cancer diagnosis, also won a nomination.
Colorado’s documentary filmmakers rule
Another world premiere was Daniel Roher and Charlie Tyrell’s “The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist.” As engaging as it is terrifying, the doc about the reasonable existential dread AI has engendered in some, including director Roher, was produced by Colorado-based filmmaker Shane Boris and multi-hyphenate Ted Tremper (“Borat Subsequent Moviefilm,” “The Daily Show.”)
“We did the film with the intention of making a work that would be engaging, that could bring people into this issue,” said Boris. “But, also with like clarifying very complicated topics in a very short amount of time and in a way that gave people a sense of agency in a moment where it feels like everything is just happening to us as opposed to us.”
In his young career, Boris has an Oscar for “Navalny” and two nominations for “Fire of Love” and “The Edge of Democracy.” The movie, which demanded a deft editor, had two: Daysha Broadway and Denver’s own Davis Coombe, a Primetime Emmy winner for Jeff Orlowski’s social-media indictment, “The Social Dilemma.”
In one fell swoop, Colorado became a global film hub
While Sundance will be Colorado’s — heck, the country’s — biggest film fest in 2027, it arrives in a place that already has a rich film festival tradition. Shoutout to XicanIndie Film, Fest Durango Film Festival, Mountain Film, the Dragon Boat Film Festival, Rocky Mountain Women’s Film, the Boulder International Film Festival, the Denver Film Festival, and more. In fact, the Denver Film Festival had one of its best-attended iterations last November and will soon celebrate its 50th anniversary.
Sundance also arrives in Colorado at a time when the state is undergoing changes. Earlier this month, Gov. Jared Polis and the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade announced the state’s new film commissioner: Lauren
Grimshaw Sloan, whose time at SeriesFest means she knows the ins and outs of festivals. The one-two punch of Sundance and the Telluride Film Festival (over Labor Day weekend) have seemingly made Colorado a global film destination.
At the end of her festival-eve comments, Redford encouraged the gathered. “Let’s make it a great festival celebration, remembrance and hope for all that is possible,” she said.
