Professional critics — that is, those paid for their insights — declared this year’s Sundance Film Festival “muted” and “melancholy,” in part lamenting that only two big purchases were made at the indie festival of indie films by establishment buyers.
I’m a little melancholic myself at the thought of a proudly independent festival that proudly shares a smidgen of the fruit of guerilla filmmaking finding itself evaluated by its ability to attract Big Hollywood money.
That is, it’s a bad year when there’s less selling out going on?
I suppose that’s only because I’m still new to Sundance, still enamored with the myth of a pure celebration of the indies, and Sundance as the mecca. But far more ingrained pundits than me waxed on in similar fashion these past couple of weeks, stoking the legend in their own words as well as quoting believers in and out of the biz.
I know this can’t be true, though, given the connection to the Hollywood so intent on Academy Awards, box office sales, worldwide distribution, flooding the festival in chunky black-framed glasses to go with a kind of uniform attire, sometimes adorned with scarfs, not exactly screaming independence.
The reality is that Sundance is more bridge between worlds than celebration of the rebel. The glue was always Robert Redford. The pretty boy movie star moved to the Wasatch Back and evolved into a true artist. Along with growing the festival, he set up the institute to train and nurture budding filmmakers, some of whom would go on to great things, including Academy-worthy projects.
Word among the professional critics this year seemed to speak to sunset for Sundance as they knew it over the decades. At least that’s what I got from The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, the small horde of trade press including The Ankler.
The Redford era has passed, at least in terms of Robert’s active presence, with natural aging. He’s 88 now and can’t make his Park City appearance. The industry is at a crossroads, having endured crises in close succession after peaking just before the pandemic, technologically disrupted in ways it has yet to digest, and culturally as well.
The LA wildfires serve as apt metaphor as well as actual tragedy, especially Pacific Palisades where many in the film industry live, like New Orleans on a different coast escaping the inevitable for over a century until each didn’t.
The New York Times made several references to Sundance “outgrowing” Park City, which was curious considering the festival has struggled to get back to where it was before Covid. Sundance is more priced out than too big in Park City. That’s the chief complaint, anyway.
Meantime, independent filmmakers put on brave faces in at least one panel, saying all this transition qualifies as challenge, sure, but mainly opportunity even with a coming siege on public broadcasting, a prime funder of documentary projects, and the retreating tide of corporate support for the work. Back to good ol’ fashioned hustling, basically.
And the fans, how about the fans? Well, they very happily crowded onto a Main Street free of cars and traffic, and seemed to enjoy the films as much as ever, no fretting about how many would luck into establishment millions, the state of the industry, any of that.
The Sundance organization itself, between permanent CEOs and with the Redford era waning fast, on top of everything else is making a crucial decision about the future of the festival’s next location between a trio of remaining suitors.
Naturally, you could expect me to be a homer, and I am, like Utah’s governor who wondered aloud why the festival would want to wreck itself by moving away. Maybe self-serving, as a New York Times critic snarked, but he also made sense. The set matters more than anyone at Sundance seems to have thought about. Also curious, considering how much a part of any film that is.
There are other indie festivals — less celebrated, with fewer film submissions — that do attract audiences who fill the bars, restaurants, lodging and venues for the sake of the films themselves. No critics melancholic at the lack of $20 million buys, no corporate pop-ups, no stars dropping by or slumming with side projects. Just that close-up focus on the films and talented unknowns who made them.
The point being, Sundance is a wonderful juggernaut, even if the critics are 100% correct in their crimped takes. Film submissions this year totaled over 16,000 and the 150 selected to show during the festival amounted to under 1%, reflective in that lottery way of hoping for discovery as worthy of the mainstream, and mainstream payouts.
The fuel for this engine might be less creativity than the execs, the stars, the critics continuing to flock to the big event, along with all the regular crowd there to see the whole spectacle. That crowd, by the way, is made up of two-thirds Utahns, at least according to a Salt Lake Tribune story. I wonder how much this seemingly key piece of the puzzle is overlooked in the zeal for a new setting.
Sundance can’t still be Sundance states removed from the actual Sundance and divorced from Redford’s legacy. The organizers are at least flirting with burning down the house in an attempt to renovate and revitalize a classic in Park City, which has waxed and waned before. I don’t think the issues with the festival will be solved by moving away from here, in short, which is part of the foundation, yes, the very set itself.
There’s no magic awaiting in Boulder or Cincinnati, or even Salt Lake City. Just another film fest in a country littered with them in whichever ordinary town by comparison to Park City is selected. Cue the credits as darkness falls, then, the end of a truly great story too soon. There’s your real melancholy.
Don Rogers is the editor and publisher of The Park Record. He can be reached at [email protected] or (970) 376-0745.