The uncertainty of the future home of the Sundance Film Festival

By Harlan Jacobson – March 1, 2025

DD: The biggest story out of Park City this year is that the festival that Robert Redford built outgrew the town that the festival built. And so, it is moving, or so it says. Our film critic Harlan Jacobson has more.

HJ: The need has been apparent for years, way before the festival renegotiated its 10-year contract that ends in 2026. Tempers have been short on both sides, between the residents of the town that Bob built, and the industry and press attendees, tired of paying prices that climbed from a bargain to unapproachable some years back and still not getting in to see films. So as Redford turned 88, Sundance this past year took bids to move out of Park City in 2027. The finalists are Cincinnati, city of my childhood, Boulder, CO, which mimics Park City in key ways—mountains and snow, with a university and ummm… a film festival of its own. And nearby Salt Lake City, at the base of the Wasatch Mountains. More about the Move in a minute.

Two films I thought worth parachuting in on this year in Sundance’s penultimate year in Park City, were:

Seeds by Brittany Shyne won the grand jury prize in the US doc competition this year. Shyne went to black Georgia farmer cotton country to deliver a stunning portrait of the state of farming in general and minority farming in particular. It’s leisurely, it opens on a funeral, then lingers on a cotton gin moving across the landscape toward the screen looking like a city powerplant on wheels, clipping, vacuuming, piling up and compressing the little white puffs of cotton into a stacking cage. From thence, it’s the story of the Head and Williams families, their dogged refusal to let go of farms that have been in the family for over 100 years, who make the soli and the culture rich while having to wage a fight for their small cotton farm’s share of government support that it gives more freely and easily to big agriculture. Seeds is two hours that quietly tracks families comfortable in their own black skin connected deeply to the green world. Shyne produced, directed and shot the film in gorgeous Walker Evans black and white, a color scheme that captures the red blood of its subjects better than technicolor ever could.

SEEDS – Brittany Shyne / Sundance Film Festival

Prime Minister, charts the groundbreaking ascent of Jacinda Ardern as the 40^th Prime minister of New Zealand in 2017 until her support cratered to 30% and took down the Labor Party in 2023. Ardern’s five years were tumultuous — an attack on a Mosque in Christchurch (50 dead), a catastrophic volcano, the complete shutdown and walling off of the nation during Covid, the opposition to her anti-gun, pro-abortion and pro-vaccine initiatives. The film won the Sundance Audience Award overseas docs category, and here co-directors New Zealander Michelle

PRIME MINISTER – Radio NZ / Sundance Film Festival

Walshe and Illinois native Lindsay Utz make the case for Ardern abroad in a way the locals are still divided over.

Ardern was 39 when she won—and had to confess to voters just weeks into the job that she was pregnant. Looking back, she was the perfect storm for feminists in one female package in a hyper-manly man culture, where even Ardern credits for inspiration Sir Ernest Shackleton, who led the shipwrecked crew of the Endurance to safety in Antarctica in 1915. Remember kindness, she reminds in a speech to a Harvard commencement.

Now about Sundance moving out of Utah: I don’t see the industry trooping off to Cincinnati every January, but ya never know. Boulder, maybe, but there may be infrastructure limitations there, too. I think Sundance will move back down the canyon to Salt Lake City, which can accommodate it better, and then delegate Park City as an elite campus for filmmakers, the marauding business folk, movie stars who are now a regular feature of the indie world, and the fatcat Taco Bell franchise owners from the likes of Tucumcari who want bragging rights back home they talked to Brad Pitt in line for a latté. In some ways, Sundance may have leveraged bids from Boulder and Ohio to pressure Utah into a super deal to stay in the Beehive state. Did they play the city of my birth for fools? Answer to come soon.