The Sundance Film Festival will have a new home starting in 2027: Boulder, Colorado. The Sundance Institute made the announcement Thursday after a year-long process.
"Boulder offers small-town charm with an engaged community, distinctive natural beauty, and a vibrant arts scene, making it the ideal location for the Festival to grow," the institute wrote in a press release.
The announcement says the festival will center in downtown Boulder, at theater and venues around the pedestrian-only Pearl Street Mall, as well as spots on the campus of the University of Colorado Boulder.
"Our walkable downtown, iconic venues, and beautiful landscape at the base of the Rocky Mountains sets the stage for the Sundance Film Festival to flourish in its next chapter," said Charlene Hoffman, the CEO of Visit Boulder.
Since 1985, cinephiles have trudged through the snow in the ski resort town Park City, Utah, to be the first to watch new, independent movies. It became an annual ritual after actor and filmmaker Robert Redford founded the nonprofit Sundance Institute to champion independent film.
"I thought, what if we start a film festival where at least the filmmakers could come and see each other's work and form a community?" he explained to NPR in 2017. "I thought, this is probably not going to work, but slowly it caught on and then it caught fire. Now it's almost out of control, but the mission was accomplished: to create the space for other voices in film to get their stories told and be seen."
The community has grown since that first year, when Sundance screened around 25 feature films and a handful of documentaries to about a hundred people. In the past few years, tens of thousands of movie lovers have poured into Park City from around the world. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, online offerings have gotten hundreds of thousands of views from fans watching at home.
Last year, Sundance organizers said the festival's 10-year lease with Park City would end in 2027. When they announced they were looking for a new host city, more than 100 locations indicated they were interested. The finalists were whittled down to Salt Lake City, Utah, Boulder, Colo., and Cincinnati, Ohio.
In a press release announcing the finalists, the institute wrote that the candidates were assessed on their "ethos and equity values, infrastructure, and capabilities to host the Festival, in addition to demonstrating ways in which they will continue to foster the diverse Sundance community and inspire the next generation of independent filmmakers."
The institute wrote they were looking to preserve their core principles. "Each finalist demonstrated how they would welcome and continue to foster the diverse Sundance Institute and Festival community and culture of independent creativity."
The 2026 Sundance Film Festival will continue to take place in Utah next winter.
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