It's a dark, cold night outside a Park City high school. Young fans pressed up against a metal barricade, bundled together as they wait for pop star Charli xcx.
"She has a cult following," said Joey Pierson, huddled with friends near an outdoor heater. "And that's us."
Charli xcx was premiering a new film during the festival's opening weekend, a mockumentary called "The Moment." Most of the fans lined up don't have tickets; they're just hoping to see the star walk by.
Valentina Rodriguez lives nearby but was attending Sundance for the first time.
"We just never thought to go," she said. "But this is the last year, so we thought — last hurrah."
Four decades of independent film in the Utah mountains
Sundance has been rooted in Park City for more than 40 years. In 1981, actor Robert Redford started the Sundance Institute, creating a space in the mountains, far from Hollywood, for new artists to find their voices.
A few years later, he launched the festival, which has grown into the top showcase of independent film. More than 100,000 people attended the festival a few years ago, and tens of thousands of filmmakers regularly submit their work for consideration.
In 2004, festival organizers announced they were looking for a new location. Boulder ultimately won the bid, offering a walkable downtown, Flatiron views and more than $30 million in state tax incentives. Starting next year, Sundance will be based there.
As the festival closes this chapter, many in Park City are looking back. Events, screenings and jacket patches honor the legacy of Redford, who died last year.
"It really stinks," said Clayton Scrivner, the city's communications manager. "I don't want it to leave."
He said Sundance put Utah on a map. For him, as a young person, it was a cultural lifeline.
"It was something that I met some of my lifelong friends volunteering and working at. It was where I saw the coolest bands that would not have come and performed in a small club in Utah, ever," he said.
In the 1990s and early 2000s, artists like Snoop Dog and Kid Rock put on surprise performances. Women in fur coats and heels brushed past ski bums on Main Street.
Scrivner thinks moving the festival to Boulder, which is about 10 times the size of Park City, will inevitably change the vibe.
But the festival has already changed, said Erin Evans. She has worked at Mountain Trails Gallery on Main Street for almost two decades and once hosted a local TV program called "Festival After Dark." Events have become more exclusive, she said.
"Now, to get into parties, you have to pay for them," she said. "It's a super tight invite list. And if you're not on that, and if you don't want to spend $500 for a ticket to go see Diplo, you're out of luck."
The festival also slowed down during COVID-19, which forced programming primarily online for two years. Evans said she probably won't follow Sundance to Boulder.
Some insiders welcome the shake up
In 2004, Sundance screened "Super Size Me," Morgan Spurlock's documentary in which he ate nothing but McDonald's for a month to explore the health effects of a fast-food diet. David Magdael, who served as a publicist on the film, watched it become a hit.
"That was one of the most amazing experiences that we had, seeing how that film had taken off," said Magdael, founder and president of David Magdael & Associates, a Los Angeles public relations and marketing firm specializing in documentary and independent films.
He's also been a Sundance Institute mentor. Magdael believes the festival's role as a career launchpad will persist, despite the move to Colorado.
"It's just the location," he said. "What hasn't changed is people are still making art. People are still consuming art."
"For a lot of people, Park City and Sundance are synonymous," said Christine Vachon, a leading independent film producer. "But that's exactly the kind of thing you want to disrupt."
Vachon, a co-founder of Killer Films, grew her career alongside Sundance. The first feature film she produced, "Poison," won the grand jury prize in the dramatic category in 1991.
This year, she is the executive producer of "Barbara Forever," an archival documentary about prominent lesbian filmmaker Barbara Hammer.
Years ago, Vachon said, filmmakers came to the festival simply to find community and watch movies.
"We just kind of went from theater to theater to theater, and sat on the floor if we had to, and sometimes saw four or five movies a day," she said.
Now, tickets, travel and lodging are more expensive. Vachon hopes a new location might help younger filmmakers reclaim the festival. What matters most to her is that Sundance stays relevant.
"What I've always loved about the festival is it's really kind of stuck to its guns," she said. "It has a penchant for showing movies that people can't always agree on — that aren't always crowd pleasers."
There are crowd pleasers, too. Back at the high school, it's gotten later, darker and has even started to snow as fans wait for Charli xcx. Finally, she appears, and the crowd erupts in a brief, piercing cheer.
For one last year in Park City, the spectacle and spirit of Sundance carry on.
This story was produced by the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration between Boise State Public Radio, Wyoming Public Media, Nevada Public Radio, KUNR in Nevada, KUNC in Northern Colorado, KANW in New Mexico, Colorado Public Radio and KJZZ in Arizona as well as NPR, with support from affiliate newsrooms across the region. Funding for the Mountain West News Bureau is provided in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Eric and Wendy Schmidt.
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