Park City Film, the locally based arthouse nonprofit, will give the Park City Film Festival a world premiere in October.
The three-day event, which starts Oct. 23, will include film screenings, panel discussions, post-screening Q and As and filmmaker gatherings, said Park City Film Executive Director Katy Wang.
“The plan is to screen eight to nine blocks of films and host four panel discussions,” she said. “Films will screen at the Jim Santy Auditorium, and discussions will be at District F at Prospector Square. We’re intentionally trying to move people through Park City to spaces they might not have visited. Tourists visit Main Street, but there are so many great businesses and restaurants in Prospector.”
The festival will curate at least four documentaries, three narrative features and several short films, and Park City Film will announce the film lineup and discussion schedule on Aug. 17, Wang said.
“We’ll also have festival passes and individual tickets for sale then,” she said. “Details are still yet to come because we’re still locking the program in, but we’re super excited to be able to announce it and launch it. And we wanted to let people know it’s happening.”
The Sundance Film Festival planted seeds of the Park City Film Festival when it announced in 2025, after 41 years in Utah, that it was moving to Boulder, Colorado, Wang said.
“We’ve been having conversations with people in the film-festival world and people in the community about what’s next,” she said.
So far, The Snow League, founded by Olympic Gold Medalist Shaun White, has been confirmed for the last week of January, and the X Games may stop in town sometime in the future.
While these events are big, they aren’t like Sundance, which tapped into arts and culture, Wang said.
“We want to invite people back to Park City to engage with independent film and grow that over time into whatever the future for independent film will be in our community,” she said. “We were given that mandate back in 1995 to be the year-round representation of independent film, and we’ve grown that over time over the past 30 years.”
Park City Film came into being in 1995 while the city renovated the old Park City High School building at 1255 Park Ave. into the Park City Library, Wang said.
“Sundance needed another venue and said if the city restored the auditorium and allowed Sundance to use it, they would bring in the (film-screening) technology,” she said. “Because the space was designed as a high school auditorium back in 1923, it has amazing acoustics.”
Over the years, the auditorium came to be known at Sundance as the Library Theatre, Wang said.
“It has this palpable sense of history where you can kind of feel generations of people and communities who came through that space,” she said. “As I talk with filmmakers and people at other festivals about what’s next for film in Park City and tell them the venue we operate out of, they tell me how much they love the Library Theatre or that they premiered their Sundance film there.”
Last summer, Park City Film asked City Council to allow an expansion of its film screening cap to 200, according to Wang.
“We were at 130 before that because we knew it was in the cards for us to do more and the onerous task was on us to hold the line for independent storytelling and independent cinema,” she said. “So it was fantastic that City Council said yes for us to be imaginative, to be creative and pick up opportunities.”
Wang and her crew also looked at scheduling possibilities and decided on autumn.
“It’s beautiful then,” she said. “It’s shoulder season, and there aren’t that many people in town. So you’re not fighting for reservations in hotels and restaurants.”
Wang also felt it was important to do something quickly, while Sundance was still on the community’s mind.
“(Sundance had) a tsunami effect of creativity, imagination and art that went way beyond the movies you see in the theaters,” she said. “It’s also the people who come. It’s the conversations you have and it’s certainly the revenue it generates for businesses around town. So, we knew we needed to start somewhere, and we wanted to make our mark and expand our programming.”
The October festival will intentionally be a boutique experience, Wang said.
“We hand-picked films from this year’s festival circuit,” she said. “These are films you can’t see outside of the festival circuit, and we wanted to make them accessible for our audience here in Park City.”
Wang believes the films selected will resonate with Park City’s film-loving community.
“These are films that celebrate artistic vision, that sense of discovery and storytelling,” she said. “We, and Utah in general, have a sophisticated audience due to the Sundance Film Festival, and that’s the audience we’re reaching out to.”
Park City Film has already tested the waters for this type of programming this summer with the introduction of its America the Beautiful Series and the Midnight in Park City Series, as well as its partnership with the Ballet West Summit Festival.
“We wanted to see how people connect with us in different ways than we do our normal series,” Wang said. “These (initiatives) have been wildly successful. We’ve had great feedback and great conversations, so we feel like we’re on the right track.”
The underlying goal of the Park City Film Festival is to get back to the roots of what Robert Redford started 40 years ago, Wang said.
“It’s to connect audiences with filmmakers and create a sense of community that sparks imagination in new and exciting ways,” she said.
Park City Chamber/Bureau is on board and has given Park City Film grants, and Park City Lodging stepped in as Park City Film Festival’s lodging partner, Wang said.
“Utah Film Commission has come on, and the Summit County RAP & Restaurant Tax has always been supportive of us,” she said. “And we’ve had the support of a couple of private sponsors. So it’s been good, and I think people are interested in being along for the ride as we plant our flag in what we want to do.”
Wang emphasizes that the Park City Film Festival will never replace Sundance.
“Sundance still exists, and we want them to be successful wherever they are,” she said. “This is the general vision, the general idea, of creating something new and interesting when we look at what the world of independent cinema needs in 2026.”
Once this year’s festival ends, Park City Film will reflect on what resonated and where it can make improvements, Wang said.
“We want to invite people back to Park City to engage with independent film and grow that over time into whatever the future for independent film will be in our community,” she said.
For information about the Park City Film Festival, visit parkcityfilm.org/festival.
For information about Park City Film, visit parkcityfilm.org.