The Sundance Film Festival is underway, and this year’s event could be the beginning of the end. Utah’s marquee film festival has taken place in Park City for the last 40 years, but its future is up in the air as other cities bid to host the festival. The final festival in the Beehive State could take place in 2026.
Even with big changes possible, some local filmmakers say losing the festival wouldn’t affect their work much.
Sundance is well known for its presentation of Hollywood-bound filmmakers and actors. That’s part of the reason why it’s so competitive to get a film accepted. In 2024, the acceptance rate of short films and films across the board was very low coming in at 0.4%. Filmmakers Lizde and Luis Puentes made the cut in 2023 with their short film “I Have No Tears, and I Must Cry.”
“It was a film that was very intentionally made for Sundance,” Lizde explained. “It was definitely a project made with the intentions of catering to those programmers and those audiences.”
The married couple call Salt Lake City home and Luis studied media arts at Brigham Young University. So for the Puentes, Sundance became more than just a film showing. It made a lasting impact on them as creators.
“It definitely caters to the filmmaker experience and it really does feel like a community there,” Lizde said. “I feel like some of the closest friends that we made that year with that film come from Sundance.”
The number of potential eyeballs on their film didn’t hurt either. Nearly 140,000 people attended Sundance in 2023, and the number of attendees increased in 2024.
Ben Mangelsdorf, global content and tour specialist with the Utah Office of Tourism, said Sundance leaving the state would deal a major creative and economic blow to everything from filmmakers to the overall economy. As an example, he explained that Kevin Costner’s latest western film “Horizon: An American Saga” was filmed here and brought in about $120 million to the state’s economy.
Film tourism also rakes in a pretty penny in Utah. Mangelsdorf said the industry has generated an estimated $6 billion over the last decade. The state has a big stake in the game and wants to see it preserved.
“That’s why the Utah Film Commission is part of the Governor’s Office of Economic Opportunity,” Mangelsdorf said. In his 2026 fiscal year budget proposal, Gov. Spencer Cox recommended $3 million to support Sundance sticking to its roots.
“I think it would be a huge mistake” if the festival left Utah, Cox told reporters at his Jan. 16 monthly news conference. “I think it would be, really, a death knell for Sundance.”
Colin Cunningham, an actor with several TV credits and a role in Costner’s “Horizon,” lives in Utah County. His current project is “The Curse of Crom 2,” a horror feature filming in Spanish Fork. As he puts it, it’s a film built on “two nickels and a corndog” — a shoestring-budget picture not likely to end up in Sundance’s lineup.
“Even as great as Sundance is, there’s content being overlooked,” Cunningham said. “There are bars of gold here on the sidewalk and nobody’s picking them up.”
Cunningham said the festival’s exclusivity led many local filmmakers to go rogue and create their own festivals to show off their work.
“There was a time when Sundance was so big that they were holding alternative film festivals in the back of their vans,” he said.
One of these alternatives became Slamdance, a film festival that goes by the slogan, “By filmmakers, for filmmakers.” However it, too, eventually left Utah for Los Angeles.
Because of its Hollywood focus, Cunningham doesn’t believe Sundance catapults local filmmakers all that far. Rather, he believes filmmaking in Utah would be more creative without the influence of a massive festival.
Sundance did not respond to KUER’s request for an interview, but the festival does have several grants, fellowships and workshops specifically targeted to independent filmmakers and new storytellers. Those are open to applicants worldwide.
Despite a positive experience with Sundance, the Puentes agree with Cunningham to an extent. In their view, Sundance was an open space for Utah filmmakers when it began in the 80s. But for young, local filmmakers today, that feeling is fading.
“Utah hasn’t been necessarily a core part of the festival’s identity,” Lizde said. “I hope that maybe with the conversations that have opened up, maybe that can positively change in the future.”
Both agree that perhaps it’s time Utah lets go of Hollywood and focuses on the new stories local filmmakers are creating here at home.
