The Sundance Film Festival announced Thursday that it may move to Boulder, Colorado or Cincinnati, Ohio if it doesn’t remain in its current home of Park City and Salt Lake City, Utah.
The beloved festival — one of the most influential in the world — has been pondering a move to anothr host city for months, and narrowed down its options to all three cities, as well as Atlanta, Louisville, Kentucky, and Santa Fe, New Mexico. But now the latter three are out of the running.
The Sundance Film Festival will remain and Salt Lake City, Utah in 2025 and 2026, and will either stay put in 2027 or move to Boulder or Cincinnati.
“As we move to the next phase in our search for a sustainable home for the Sundance Film Festival, we see great promise and potential in Boulder, Cincinnati, and Salt Lake/Park City. Each has shown us the blend of exciting possibilities, values, and logistics needed to produce a vibrant, inviting, and inclusive Festival. We’re excited for a future Sundance that can discover, support, and inspire artists and audiences for the next forty years,” said Eugene Hernandez, Festival Director and Head of Public Programming.
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“We are deeply grateful to all the finalists and appreciate the partnership and ingenuity we found in the three moving forward. as well as Atlanta, Louisville, and Santa Fe this summer. Leaders and locals in each community generously welcomed and inspired us as we explored the potential for our Festival in 2027, and beyond. On behalf of the entire Sundance Institute team, thank you,” said Ebs Burnough, Sundance Institute Board Chair.
The Rise of Sundance
Since 1985, hundreds of films have launched at the Sundance Film Festival, including the 2022 Best Picture Oscar winner CODA. Other recent acclaimed films to debut at the festival have included Past Lives, 20 Days in Mariupol, The Eternal Memory, Theater Camp, Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie, Fair Play, A Thousand and One, Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields, Rye Lane, Navalny, Fire of Love, Flee, Passing, Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised).
The list of Sundance premieres also includes Minari, Clemency, Never Rarely Sometimes Always, Zola, O.J.: Made in America, On the Record, Boys State, The Farewell, Honeyland, One Child Nation, The Souvenir, The Infiltrators, Sorry to Bother You, Top of the Lake, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, Hereditary, Call Me by Your Name, Get Out, The Big Sick, Mudbound, Fruitvale Station, Whiplash, Brooklyn, Precious, The Cove, Little Miss Sunshine, An Inconvenient Truth, Napoleon Dynamite,
The Sundance Institute, which oversees the festival, was founded in 1981 by Robert Redford, and incudes Sundance Collab, a digital community platform that brings artists together to develop their works in progress.
Main image: The Egyptian Theater in Park City, Utah,