Sundance Film Festival BETTER

The Sundance Film Festival (formerly Utah/US Film Festival, then US Film and Video Festival) is an annual film festival organized by the Sundance Institute.[1] It is the largest independent film festival in the United States, with more than 46,660 attending in 2016.[2] It takes place each January in Park City, Utah; Salt Lake City, Utah; and at the Sundance Resort (a ski resort near Provo, Utah), and acts as a showcase for new work from American and international independent filmmakers. The festival consists of competitive sections for American and international dramatic and documentary films, both feature films and short films, and a group of out-of-competition sections, including NEXT, New Frontier, Spotlight, Midnight, Sundance Kids, From the Collection, Premieres, and Documentary Premieres.[3] Many films premiering at Sundance have gone on to be nominated and win Oscars such as Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor in a Leading Role.

Sundance began in Salt Lake City in August 1978 as the Utah/US Film Festival in an effort to attract more filmmakers to Utah.[4] It was founded by Sterling Van Wagenen,[5] head of Robert Redford's company Wildwood Enterprises, Inc, John Earle and Cirina Hampton-Catania [6]of the Utah Film Commission.[7] The 1978 festival featured films such as Deliverance, A Streetcar Named Desire, Midnight Cowboy, Mean Streets, and Sweet Smell of Success.[8]

Sundance Film Festival

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The goal of the festival was to showcase American-made films, highlight the potential of independent film, and increase visibility for filmmaking in Utah. The main focus of the event was to conduct a competition for independent American films, present a series of retrospective films and filmmaker panel discussions, and celebrate the Frank Capra Award. The festival also highlighted the work of regional filmmakers who worked outside the Hollywood system.[citation needed]

In 1979, Sterling Van Wagenen left to head up the first-year pilot program of what became the Sundance Institute, and James W. Ure took over briefly as executive director, followed by Cirina Hampton Catania, who was asked by Governor Matheson to help bring the festival into profitability as the governing board was preparing to disband it due to debts incurred in 1978. Catania generated sponsorships, in-kind contributions, and advertising revenue, and the festival continued. [9]More than 60 films were screened at the festival that year, and panels featured many well-known Hollywood filmmakers. Also that year, the first Frank Capra Award went to Jimmy Stewart. The festival also made a profit for the first time. In 1980, Catania left to pursue a production career in Hollywood.[citation needed]

In 1981, the festival moved to Park City, Utah, and changed the dates from September to January. The move from late summer to midwinter was done by the executive director Susan Barrell with the cooperation of Hollywood director Sydney Pollack, who suggested that running a film festival in a ski resort during winter would draw more attention from Hollywood. It was called the US Film and Video Festival.[citation needed]

In 1984, the now well-established Sundance Institute, headed by Sterling Van Wagenen, took over management of the US Film Festival. Gary Beer and Van Wagenen spearheaded production of the inaugural US Film Festival presented by Sundance Institute (1985), which included Program Director Tony Safford and Administrative Director Jenny Walz Selby. The branding and marketing transition from the US Film Festival to the Sundance Film Festival was managed under the direction of Colleen Allen, Allen Advertising Inc., by appointment of Robert Redford. In 1991, the festival was officially renamed the Sundance Film Festival, after Redford's character the Sundance Kid from the film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.[10]

The Sundance Film Festival experienced its extraordinary growth in the 1990s, under the leadership of Geoffrey Gilmore and John Cooper, who transformed the venue into the premier festival in the United States, on par of Cannes, Venice, Berlin, and Toronto International Film Festival (also known as The Big Five). That crucial era is very well documented in Professor Emanuel Levy's book, Cinema of Outsiders: The Rise of American Independent Cinema (NYU Press, 1999, 2001, 2011), the most comprehensive chronicle of Sundance and the Indie movement over the past four decades.[according to whom?]

Films shown at the 2019 event included the controversial dark tale The Nightingale, US comedy Corporate Animals, Lulu Wang's The Farewell (which won the Audience Award[20]) and Sophie Hyde's film based on Emma Jane Unsworth's novel about female friendship, Animals.[21]

From 2006 through 2008, Sundance Institute collaborated with the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) on a special series of film screenings, performances, panel discussions, and special events bringing the institute's activities and the festival's programming to New York City.[25]

Many notable independent filmmakers received their big break at Sundance, including Kevin Smith, Robert Rodriguez, Quentin Tarantino, Todd Field, David O. Russell, Steve James, Paul Thomas Anderson, Steven Soderbergh, Darren Aronofsky, James Wan, Edward Burns, and Jim Jarmusch. The festival is also responsible for bringing wider attention to such films as Saw, Garden State, American Psycho, Super Troopers, The Blair Witch Project, Spanking the Monkey, Reservoir Dogs, Primer, In the Bedroom, Better Luck Tomorrow, Little Miss Sunshine, Donnie Darko, El Mariachi, Moon, Clerks, Thank You for Smoking, Sex, Lies, and Videotape, The Brothers McMullen, 500 Days of Summer, Napoleon Dynamite, Whiplash, CODA, and Boyhood.

Three Seasons was the first in festival history to ever receive both the Grand Jury Award and Audience Award, in 1999. Later films that won both awards are: God Grew Tired of Us in 2006 (documentary category), Quinceaera in 2006 (dramatic category), Precious in 2009, Fruitvale (later retitled Fruitvale Station) in 2013, Whiplash in 2014, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl in 2015, The Birth of a Nation in 2016, Minari in 2020, and CODA in 2021.

At the 2016 Sundance Film Festival, three films went on to garner eight Oscar nominations.[26] Manchester by the Sea took the lead in Sundance-supported films with six Oscar nominations, including Best Picture.[26] The next year, about 40 films were acquired by distributors, among them including Amazon, Netflix, Lionsgate, and Universal.[27]

The festival has changed over the decades from a low-profile venue for small-budget, independent creators from outside the Hollywood system to a media extravaganza for Hollywood celebrity actors, paparazzi, and luxury lounges set up by companies not affiliated with Sundance. Festival organizers have tried curbing these activities in recent years, beginning in 2007 with their ongoing Focus On Film campaign[citation needed].

The 2009 film Official Rejection documented the experience of small filmmakers trying to get into various festivals in the late 2000s, including Sundance. The film contained several arguments that Sundance had become dominated by large studios and sponsoring corporations. A contrast was made between the 1990s, in which non-famous filmmakers with tiny budget films could get distribution deals from studios like Miramax Films or New Line Cinema, (like Kevin Smith's Clerks), and the 2000s, when major stars with multimillion-dollar films (like The Butterfly Effect with Ashton Kutcher) dominated the festival. Kevin Smith doubted that Clerks, if made in the late 2000s, would be accepted to Sundance.[29]

Numerous small festivals sprung up around Sundance in the Park City area, including Slamdance, Nodance, Slumdance, It-dance, X-Dance, Lapdance, Tromadance, The Park City Film Music Festival, etc., though all except[citation needed] Slamdance are no longer held.[30]

Included in the Sundance changes made in 2010, a new programming category titled "NEXT" (often denoted simply by the characters "", which mean "less is more") was introduced to showcase innovative films that are able to transcend the confines of an independent budget. Another recent addition was the Sundance Film Festival USA program, in which eight of the festival's films are shown in eight different theaters around the United States.[31]

Katie has been a Shorts Programmer at Sundance since 2010 and previously worked in short film distribution for Future Shorts and event production for Vimeo and Punchdrunk in New York. She is currently Video Commissioner for global video platform NOWNESS in London, commissioning editorial films and also overseeing short form content for fashion, design, tech & culture brands.

Mike Plante is currently a senior programmer for short film at the Sundance Film Festival, where he has worked since 2001. He has worked as a film programmer and projectionist since 1993, and he helped run CineVegas from 2002 to 2009. Plante also makes short and feature documentaries, including Be Like An Ant (2011), Giuseppe Makes a Movie (2014) and The Polaroid Job (2016), and We Were There to Be There (2021).

Sudeep is a Programmer for the Sundance Film Festival focusing on documentary feature films. Having started at Sundance in 2008 as a screener of international documentary features for the festival and a reader for the labs, he has previously been an Associate Programmer, Documentaries and Shorts Programmer. He is also Director of Programming for the Palm Springs International ShortFest where he has programmed since 2014. He has also worked in programming at many festivals including the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles, Aspen ShortsFest, LA Film Festival, AFI Fest, Tribeca, Indian Kaleidoscope Film Festival and was Director of Public Programming for the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Science. A native of New Jersey, Sudeep has a BA in English from George Washington University, MA and Ph.D. in Cinema and Media Studies from UCLA. He has taught film and television history, industry and criticism courses at universities throughout Southern California. e24fc04721