The actor Ethan Hawke wouldn’t be Ethan Hawke without the Sundance Film Festival. The director Cathy Yan might have given up her filmmaking dreams without it. And the producer Matthew Greenfield may not have become president of Searchlight Pictures if Sundance had not accepted his first film, “Star Maps,” into the festival in 1997.
As the thousands of movie industry insiders and fans make their annual pilgrimage to Park City, Utah, for the Sundance Film Festival this week, their memories about the event’s past are threatening to overwhelm the films.
That is because this is the last year that the event will be held in Park City, its home for 40-plus years. (Its future home is Boulder, Colo.) And because this is the first festival since the death of its founder, Robert Redford.
“As a generation that grew up on ‘Star Wars,’ it’s hard not to feel a disturbance in the force,” said Mr. Hawke, who first came to Sundance in 1994 as an actor in “Reality Bites.” He returned the next year with “Before Sunrise” — a movie chosen by Mr. Redford for the opening night.
Or as Mr. Greenfield put it: “I feel sad in a nostalgic way, but I also feel hopeful that it’s an opportunity for the next phase.”
Mr. Redford founded Sundance in 1985 as a place to showcase new voices, and it quickly became the top festival for independent film. Along with the Sundance Institute, which started in 1981 sponsoring a host of programs to develop new filmmakers, these nonprofits have fostered a long roster of talented artists and their movies, including three of the five best directors in this year’s Oscar race and all five of the documentary features.
Along the way, the festival has weathered the highs and lows of the business.
The festival was central to Miramax’s first commercializing indie films, when the company acquired Steven Soderbergh’s “Sex, Lies, and Videotape” in 1989. Later came the advent of all-night bidding wars for movies like “Reservoir Dogs,” “Napoleon Dynamite” and “Little Miss Sunshine,” which set a Sundance record in 2006 when Fox Searchlight bought the film for $10.5 million.
The festival has also survived becoming a media circus at times, such as when Paris Hilton and Britney Spears created more attention on Main Street than the movies playing in theaters. (“Sundance is weird,” Ms. Spears said in 2003. “The movies are weird — you actually have to think about them when you watch them.”) And it overcame the financial crisis, when funding became scarce, and the pandemic, when the event was shuttered for two years.
Along the way, Park City changed, too. The town became a bigger draw for skiers after it helped host the Winter Olympics in 2002, and it changed again during the pandemic, when many people moved to the snowy mountain town to escape big city living. And eventually, the festival outgrew it.
“The festival has ridden these ebbs and flows of the industry and either expanded to account for that or had to contract a little bit to respond to that,” said Eugene Hernandez, who was named the director of the festival in 2022.
“There’s still a really great artistic community here,” Mr. Hernandez added, “but there’s been a transformation of the city and you observe it when you’re sitting in traffic or seeing the capacity challenges a big event brings to a place like this.”
Still, the Sundance Film Festival has remained steady in its goals of championing new voices and being a place of discovery. This year, like most, 60 percent of its programming showcases first- or second-time directors.
“They’ve stayed remarkably true to their mission,” said John Sloss, a lawyer turned sales agent who has played a major role in turning the festival into a marketplace for buying and selling independent films — much to Mr. Redford’s annoyance.
“Clearly he was wrong,” Mr. Sloss said with a wink. “The market brought the press, it brought the buyers. We’re a commercial art form.”
Indeed, much of what is heralded out of each year’s festival is the quality of the sales. A big year with lots of buyers and lots of dollar signs means the business is healthy. New talent is crowned. Impossible dreams come true. When it’s the opposite, Sundance is considered the canary in the coal mine, the harbinger of doom for a business that is constantly in a state of flux.
So far this year, the sales market has been slow as buyers debate what films will get moviegoers into theaters. The queer horror film “Leviticus” sold to Neon for $5 million, and a bidding war for “The Invite,” directed by and starring Olivia Wilde, is pitting most of the indie distributors against one another. Other films, like Beth de Araújo’s harrowing drama “Josephine,” starring Channing Tatum, and “Wicker,” featuring Olivia Colman and Alexander Skarsgard, are also likely to get picked up.
According to Mr. Sloss, the documentary side of the business, while still challenged, has been an easier sale postpandemic, thanks to the streaming services. If the subject is commercial enough, like “Summer of Soul” or “Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story,” a large sale is still possible. He sold both films to streamers for $15 million each. This year, he expects “The Last First: Winter K2,” about a tragic mountaineering expedition, to sell soon.
“Platforms understand the commercial value of documentaries, platforms really do not understand the commercial value of scripted films,” he said. “They don’t know how to market them. What’s Netflix going to do to announce a new voice that’s going to get people to watch? It’s an inherent flaw in the system.”
To the directors of “Little Miss Sunshine,” Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton, the dream situation they experienced here in Park City — fresh-faced directors, high-profile sale, nationwide promotional tour, box office grosses and the Oscar stage — feels like an impossible thing for younger generations to replicate because the movie industry is in such turmoil right now.
“I feel badly for our kids because they witnessed this storybook,” said Ms. Faris, who has children now getting into filmmaking. “We never allowed ourselves to dream that something like that could happen because the process of getting it made was so hard. But now they’ve seen that and they think it’s a real possibility.”
Still, the dream lives on for many. Ms. Yan returned to Sundance this year for her second indie feature, “The Gallerist,” a sendup of the art world starring Natalie Portman and Jenna Ortega. The film marks her return to independent filmmaking after Warner Bros. scooped her up in 2018 to direct “Birds of Prey” just months after her first movie, “Dead Pigs,” won a jury prize at the festival.
“It’s really nice to be back for the last Park City one,” she said. “It’s a very different experience this time, because we are no longer the kids. But it’s that same indie scramble.”
And now, the show will go on elsewhere — a different city with a different host of challenges and opportunities.
“The thing about Sundance is, though it’s always been connected to the place, it’s really about the community: the filmmakers, the audiences, and how do you bring independent films to a broader audience,” said Mr. Greenfield, the president of Searchlight Pictures. “That will remain, and in some ways, being in a new place will help revitalize that.”
Nicole Sperling covers Hollywood and the streaming industry. She has been a reporter for more than two decades.
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