Brooklyn-based filmmaker Philip Thompson first attended the Sundance Film Festival in 2025, but even that couldn’t have prepared him for the frenzy of the 2026 festival.

Some made friends with strangers in the standby line for in-demand films. Others wandered the streets simply to experience the energy. There was networking and industry veterans and greenhorns letting loose at parties. And every Uber driver Thompson talked to was hell-bent on making bank from the tourists one last time before the festival moved to Boulder in 2027.

“Boulder is way more spread out, so that’s going to have a different feeling to it. … Park City is so crammed in and compact and condensed, it’s like everyone’s bumping into each other, all the cars are about to hit each other, and you really feel that energy,” Thompson said. “Sometimes it is a lot. I was there for a week, and by the end of it, I was ready to go home. But it is this magical feeling that you really can’t get anywhere else.”

There was a much different feeling at the Sundance Institute’s annual, three-day Screenwriters Lab. 

Thompson, who is currently writing the script for his first feature film, had been invited to the Sundance Mountain Resort, along with 10 other fellows, to receive feedback from accomplished screenwriters like Michael Arndt, Lulu Wang and Meg LeFauve in the days leading up to the festival in January.

The lab’s vibe was exemplified by a screening of the 2016 Academy Award Best Picture winner, “Moonlight,” with co-writers Barry Jenkins and Tarell Alvin McCraney, two of the creative advisers who worked with the fellows on their scripts. Both hadn’t seen “Midnight” in years, Thompson said.

“I forgot that ‘Moonlight’ was about (McCraney’s) life. So, being able to talk to him and know him as a human being, and then watching the movie after was so emotional and devastating but beautiful. Both of them broke down in tears after the screening,” he recalled. 

Ilyse McKimmie, deputy director of the Sundance Institute’s Feature Film Program, said the feeling of the lab was especially reverent this year as the fellows and lab organizers honored Sundance Institute founder Robert Redford, who died in September, by discussing what the actor and director meant to them.

McKimmie, who has worked for the Sundance Institute since 1999, remembers Redford as committed to his craft, forthright and funny. 

“When he was there, he was just another person at the lab,” she said. “He always wanted to make it very much about the work and was very eager to get to know each fellow.”

While the death of Redford and the moving of the film festival to Boulder have left the Sundance Institute in a season of change, the Screenwriters Lab will continue to be held at Sundance Mountain Resort, the “ancestral home” of the Institute and Film Festival, as McKimmie called it.

The Directors Lab will also return to Sundance Mountain Resort in 2027 after it moved to the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado, in 2024 amid construction at the resort.

Redford founded the resort in 1969 and the Sundance Institute in 1981. Though he sold the resort in 2020, the location is rich with the Sundance Institute’s history and ties into Redford’s lifelong passions for nature and Native American rights.

“I have many wonderful memories of doing everything from snowshoeing in the winter to riding the ski lift in the summer and going hiking,” McKimmie said. “And traditionally, when our Directors Lab has been there in the past, we always kick things off by going up to Elk Meadows, which is a meadow a little bit up the road from the base of the mountain, and receive a blessing from a Ute tribal leader.”

McKimmie is hopeful that by maintaining a connection with Sundance Mountain Resort and continuing its outreach to Utah organizations, like the film programs of the University of Utah and Utah Valley University, that the Sundance Institute can “get away with having the best of both worlds,” she said, beginning “a version of our story in Boulder” while repaying Utah communities and ensuring they stay a key part of that story.

As for the Screenwriters Lab fellows, they’ll continue to walk away from the lab with their confidence shaken “in a good way,” as Thompson put it.

His script, “Dance Monkey Dance,” is a found-footage documentary about a fictional comedian, equal parts “Blair Witch Project” and a satire of fame and the commodification of Black artists by white audiences. He’s been working on it for well over a year.

He had to cut down his 180-page epic to 130 pages to even apply to the Screenwriters Lab. Now, he has a thousand new ideas — but the script is too long again.

Fellow Renee Zhan is also working through revisions. The London-based filmmaker has been working on her script, “BAOBAO,” for two years. 

“BAOBAO” follows an only daughter returning home to China to find that her parents have had another baby. It’s inspired by a true story from a friend, studying in London, who returned to China in her mid-20s to find her parents had brought a baby brother into the world without letting her know.

“They’d done this at the time because the one-child policy was revoked, so they could finally have, basically, the son that they’ve always wanted, because it’s still such an important thing for the patriarchal system in China to have that boy,” Zhan explained. “I’m a very much spoiled only daughter, and the thought of, suddenly, this new intruder of a baby arriving … I just could imagine how angry I’d be.”

With such a wacky premise that becomes even wackier as supernatural horror and baby puppetry enter the mix, Zhan’s greatest challenge has been ensuring that the characters remain relatable rather than cartoonish even as the tone becomes increasingly surreal. 

After receiving feedback from five industry veterans, Zhan is back to square one in developing her main character.

“To be honest, before I got to the labs, I was feeling pretty good about the script,” she said. “Now, I’m rethinking everything. I’m confused, but in a good way. I think the lab really challenged me to look deeper and to think about it in different directions, which I think, ultimately, is going to make it a much better script.”

And that, McKimmie said, is the point of the Screenwriters Lab.

“They’re not at the lab trying to find all the answers,” she said. “We always say, ‘Actually, if you leave asking the right questions, that’s a great result.’”

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A group of Park City government, business and not-for-profit leaders, and others from the community, in the early fall of 2017 boarded a bus headed east on Interstate 80 before turning south toward Colorado.

It was the annual City Tour and the first stop was Boulder, Colorado, a college town that, although significantly larger than Park City, could offer lessons to the travelers. Boulder, the location of the University of Colorado, has a popular pedestrian mall, has long protected open space and is a place where environmental activism is ingrained in the community. Those are all topics of interest to Parkites.

The City Tour, designed as a fact-finding mission that offers perspectives about the mechanics of the communities the group visits, in 2017 covered numerous issues in Boulder that seven-plus years later are notable again for people in Park City. Sundance Film Festival organizers in late March selected Boulder as the host of the event starting in 2027, opting to move after decades in Park City.

The top marketplace of independent films in the U.S. will be held in Park City in 2026 and then relocate to Boulder. The finalists in the Sundance selection process were Boulder, Cincinnati and a combined effort by Salt Lake City and Park City that would have moved much of the festival activity to Utah’s capital city.

A summary of the City Tour of 2017, drafted shortly after the travelers returned from Colorado, highlights what the contingent from Park City learned in Boulder in the pre-pandemic era and long before there was any notion Sundance may leave Park City. There are similarities, and stark differences, between the two communities, the summary underscores.

The summary recounts remarks made by officials in Boulder touting the community and comparing it to Park City. The mayor of Boulder at the time, Suzanne Jones, “pointed out some of the shared attributes of our two communities: outdoor settings that support a high quality of life; engaged public; politics making us pockets of blue in red states; and challenges such as affordability that come from our popularity.”

“She did admit Park City has better powder, but asserted that Boulder has better beer. (A claim with which some of our group would disagree.),” the summary says.

There was also talk of the real estate and rental situation in Boulder, with comments from officials there indicating “workers struggle to find housing.”

“Supply constraints mean half the city’s housing is out of the reach for even the middle income residents and community consensus supports affordable housing,” it says, explaining officials in city and county government cooperate on housing and, when new residences are developed, a bloc needs to be set aside as “permanently affordable.”

The City Tour also delved into the Boulder economy. That topic is consequential in the context of the Sundance move with the festival being a lucrative 11 days on Park City’s tourism-industry calendar in sectors like lodging, restaurant and transportation.

The summary describes commentary from Boulder presenters about the community being one that “thrives because of a diversity of industries from aerospace to clean energy to tourism.” Boulder’s “economic engine runs on innovative entrepreneurship fueled by UC Boulder’s R & D funding, as well as private and public innovation and collaboration,” it says.

The City Tour also learned about the pedestrianized Pearl Street Mall in central Boulder, a popular commercial district that will almost certainly attract the Sundance crowds. A business group spoke to the Park City travelers about “maintaining the social, cultural and economic vibrancy of the area encompassing the 49 square blocks around the Pearl Street Pedestrian Mall.”

“The organization markets to Denver day-trippers, affluent local families and downtown employees … not the college crowd,” the summary says. “It balances events appealing to both the local market and the tourist trade.”

The summary adds: “To protect local merchants, there is a 10-day break between big events on the Pearl Street Mall, an idea which captured Parkites’ attention.”

The longtime organizer of the City Tour, Myles Rademan, in an interview described Boulder as a “very cosmopolitan city.” Rademan’s professional background includes time in Colorado and he said he received a call from Boulder during the Sundance selection process that included talk about that city increasing hotel bookings in January with the festival.

Rademan said Boulder has had a left-leaning vibe for decades and he talked about the community’s efforts to preserve open space. The Boulder weather in January when Sundance is held is nice, he said, without as much snow as Park City. Rademan also spoke about the Pearl Street Mall, saying Boulder was an early adopter of pedestrianization. He said the Pearl Street Mall could play a similar role to the one Main Street in Park City holds during Sundance.

“They’ll really put together a whole program to activate the mall,” he said.

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