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What I Saw, Heard, and Felt as Sundance Bid Farewell to Park City—and Robert Redford
Photo by Tomris Laffly “What I’m saying is, if you want to go, I won’t stop you.”
At the final Park City edition of Sundance last week, my 14th consecutive one, I contemplated this line from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid daily. That’s because a gorgeous, Western-style artwork painted on plywood by local artist Ryan Williams stood not far from The Library Theater, displaying the dearly departed Sundance Kid Robert Redford (who passed away last September at age 89) next to these famous words spoken by his character. The quote felt like a homegrown farewell steeped in bittersweet resignation, an ingenious marking of the end of an era, and an invitation to feel the significance of the last hurrah in Utah, before the festival that has long outgrown its ski-town origins relocates to Boulder, Colorado, next year.
That misty-eyed melancholy was a shared emotion during what was among Sundance’s most consequential years. Before every screening, the collective nostalgia soared through Redford’s own inspirational words with a rapturously applauded clip that preceded the movies. “The work of independent film defies the odds. And it does so because it has the strength of its conviction,” Redford said in the video. “The result of that is what sustains us and keeps us alive.” It was a fitting reminder to those of us who flocked to those scenic mountains every year in the hope of seeing something life-changing, something to make all the crowded shuttle rides, frosty queues, and unfortunate slips on ice worthwhile. A parallel sentiment kicked off the festival at a press welcome event where the filmmaker and actress Amy Redford, daughter of Robert Redford, spoke as a member of the Sundance Institute’s Board of Trustees, saluting the “shivering filmmakers you’d never heard of, who might be the next ones who will change the world.” Amy Redford saved some of her most touching words for Park City itself. “Maybe when you eat your meals, walk the streets, or get a parking ticket like I did this afternoon, pay attention to the people,” she said. “I invite you to look out and up when you can. These mountains have a funny way of adding perspective. My dad loved this place and its people.”
“Everyone has a story.”
Embraced as the festival theme this year, these words used to be frequently spoken by Robert Redford as Sundance continued to beat the odds stacked against underrepresented and struggling film artists. Indeed, with over 40 editions to date, the festival successfully launched and advanced the careers of innumerable names, among them Todd Haynes, Dee Rees, Ava DuVernay, Jay and Mark Duplass, and Gregg Araki, who had his 11th Sundance premiere this year with the provocatively funny I Want Your Sex, starring Olivia Wilde and Cooper Hoffman. Before the packed Eccles premiere of the fiendishly sexy and playful art-world satire, Araki said of Redford: “There’s been nobody in the history of Hollywood who said, ‘I want to use my incredible star power and all my clout to create this place in the world for those weird outsider filmmakers, those different voices’.” Araki, who was also in attendance later for a legacy screening of his cult classic, Mysterious Skin, added, “I was this punk-rock, queer, Asian-American kid wearing a Nine Inch Nails shirt and a black leather jacket. I was so far from Hollywood, and the mainstream. They gave me a platform.”
Next to artists like Araki who found an artistic home in Sundance, there are those like Ryan Williams, whose family called Park City home for three generations. They are the locals Amy Redford encouraged us to pay attention to. “Sundance has always been a part of my life,” Williams said in a recent conversation. “My mom has been volunteering for Sundance for 25 years, and saw like 25 movies this year.” Along with countless locals, Williams petitioned to keep Sundance in Park City. (“I think we have the means and the transportation to handle it,” Williams observed). But as he was painting his artwork featuring that apt Butch Cassidy quote, he thought to himself, “If it’s going to leave, then I guess we gotta let it go.” In fact, he may well follow in its trail. “At the start of the festival, my mom said, ‘It started here with me and it’s going to end here in Park City with me.’ But when we were watching her 20th movie, she was like, ‘I think I am going to go to Boulder.’”
But what will a Boulder Sundance look like?
The truth is, nobody knows. And in fairness, a certain unknowability has always been the core proposition of the Sundance energy, where the buzz builds on the ground and an unknown could be on the road to superstardom overnight. Still, this question mark is different, as it concerns existential queries around Sundance’s identity. Will the intimate mountain town festival-feel persevere in the considerably larger Boulder? Will Sundance finally become more affordable to attend by those who kept getting outpriced by Park City’s brutally rising accommodation costs? And what about all the disappeared venues of the festival (The Marc, The Prospector, and the Egyptian among them) that used to host convenient second and third screenings of world premieres—will we get back those stacked Sundances of yore?
The festival surely can’t control everything immediately, but it did appoint a terrific industry veteran to oversee the transition with Paula DuPré Pesmen. Working as Managing Director, Sundance Film Festival Relocation since September 2025, the recently Oscar-nominated producer of The Porcelain War (a 2024 Sundance premiere) seems uniquely experienced to make the impossible happen—not only as a producer of a logistically challenging war documentary that she miraculously pulled off, but also as a Boulder local with deep community ties, including in the University of Boulder’s film department. During a chance encounter with Pesmen, she told me that she was keeping an eye on everything in the final Park City Sundance, from venue needs to parking and volunteers. In other words, she was there to observe and take logistical notes. (Sundance declined the request for an official interview with Pesmen.)
What about the movies?
While the 2026 edition played host to a number of impressive films from around the world (50 of which I was able to screen), the pickings seemed slimmer than usual, especially in the US Dramatic Competition section. One reason might be a certain reluctance to be programmed in competition, which means having to agree to be a part of Sundance’s online platform that becomes active in the second week of the festival. (Several critics and industry colleagues I spoke to in the last couple of years share this inkling.) A resourceful solve for the pandemic era when Sundance took place virtually in 2021 and 2022, the online platform since then became both a reliable income generator for the festival, and an open space inclusive of everyone who couldn’t travel to Utah. And yet, communal festival screenings are designed to generate early momentum and anticipation in person, as opposed to providing prematurely broad, country-wide access from the convenience of our homes. It remains to be seen how Sundance will decide on the future of this offering—both useful in getting more movies seen by more eyeballs and, in all honesty, vibe-killing in its antithetical embrace of streaming that goes against its brand. Additionally, it’s now hard to convince anyone to stay beyond the festival’s first few days during which “I’ll catch that on the platform later” became an unfortunately overused phrase for competition titles.
The most notable US Dramatic movie this year was writer-director Beth de Araújo’s stunning Josephine (winner of both the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award in its category), following the eponymous San Francisco kid (breakout Mason Reeves) and her parents (Channing Tatum and Gemma Chan) after she witnesses a brutal sexual assault. Loosely inspired by the filmmaker’s own experiences as a child (Araújo couldn’t hold back her tears in the post-screening Q&A), Josephine sensitively portrays its young protagonist’s point of view, while insightfully observing the intricacies of contemporary parenthood in a heartbreaking tale of survival that resolves to a pitch-perfect end note. In my screening, an audible gasp took over The Ray Theater after an exquisitely constructed reveal early on in the film—the moment served as a reminder of Sundance’s powers as a memorable in-person launchpad.
Hossein Keshavarz and Maryam Ataei’s secretly filmed drama The Friend’s House Is Here was another noteworthy entry, celebrating Tehran’s underground artists and courageous women with verve and a jovial sense of defiance. Stephanie Ahn’s Bedford Park (Sony Pictures Classics), meanwhile, served up an intricately written and superbly acted New York tale, as well as one of the strongest titles in competition. Following two lonely but kindred spirits who meet under less-than-ideal circumstances but gradually become inseparable, Bedford Park, like Josephine, felt like the kind of movie one travels to Sundance for (even though both titles were available online later). Elsewhere, bittersweet comedy Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty! (Sony Pictures Classics)—about a grieving Tokyo widow’s reawakening through dance and romance—and addiction recovery drama Union County, demanded attention for their leads Rinko Kikuchi and Will Poulter, respectively.
In World Cinema, Visar Morina’s Grand Jury Prize-winning Shame and Money offered a searing portrait of class divides in a capitalistic society, through the story of a displaced Kosovar family. Other standouts in this section were Olive Nwosu’s Lady and Molly Manners’ Extra Geography, two female-centric tales of personal significance. The former follows a hardworking Lagos driver as she cuts an eventually doomed deal with a colorful group of sex workers. The latter is an instantly quotable, droll high school comedy about a Ghost World-adjacent friendship.
Premieres: where most of the buzz was for narratives…
It’s tough out there for independent film with the ever-shrinking acquisition deals. Still, Sundance this year played host to one of those truly old-fashioned bidding wars for Olivia Wilde’s third directorial effort, The Invite. (A24 eventually won the 72-hour marathon, buying the film for a reported $10M+.) A biting comedy on marital strife by way of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Overnight (Sundance 2015), Rashida Jones and Will McCormack’s crackling script follows two couples—played by Wilde, Seth Rogen, Penélope Cruz, and Edward Norton—over the course of one eventful night at a stylish San Francisco apartment where secrets are revealed and grudges take center stage. Uproariously funny until it settles into its heartrending finale, The Invite marks Wilde’s best film to date, walking a tricky tonal line with panache.
Another comedy arrived with Josephine Decker’s elegantly sexy Chasing Summer, written by and starring an exceptionally upbeat Iliza Schlesinger matched by Decker’s propulsive style. A familiar yet irresistible homecoming tale from Texas with a riotous reveal that left the Eccles in stitches, Decker’s ode to the aging millennial angst is poised to land distribution soon enough.
A week before opening at theaters nationwide, Aidan Zamiri’s Charli xcx mockumentary The Moment had its sold-out premiere screening in Sundance, reinforcing the multi-hyphenate artist Charli xcx as a formidable performer and creator in both film and music. A mazy, and gradually darkening plunge into Charli xcx’s (fictionalized) rise to stardom and featuring a hilarious turn by Alexander Skarsgård, The Moment owes much of its character to Rob Reiner’s This Is Spinal Tap, a connection that Zamiri celebrated in the post-screening Q&A with a touching tribute to Reiner. Alongside Olivia Colman, Skarsgård also headlines Eleanor Wilson and Alex Huston Fischer’s wonderfully oddball Wicker, about a horny medieval community who can’t handle a fisherwoman’s new basketweave husband of many talents and sexual powers. (The wicker man in question is played by, yes, a very game and agile Skarsgård.) Padraic McKinley’s Depression-era survival thriller The Weight (starring Ethan Hawke) and Noah Segan’s somber Big Apple caper The Only Living Pickpocket in New York were two additional notables that felt like throwbacks to a bygone era of filmmaking, with the John Turturro-led Pickpocket lamenting a waning past of tactile pleasures in an increasingly cold, mannerless world.
As usual, some of the finest films were non-fiction.
Marking All These Sleepless Nights filmmaker Michał Marczak’s return to Sundance, Closure proved to be a singularly stunning experience in its portrayal of a desperate father’s methodical search for his missing son. Meanwhile one of the best films of many a Sundance, Once Upon a Time in Harlem was a unique premiere in being a project that William Greaves started more than five decades ago, and his son, David Greaves wondrously completed after his father’s death in 2014. It was 1972 when William Greaves hosted a mind-boggling group that included the finest names of the Harlem Renaissance, and filmed their soul-enriching conversations as artists and thinkers of various stripes. It’s an immersive bliss to witness their elegant banter, and an often stinging feeling to detect the urgent parallels between the past and present. A magnificent historical artifact, Once Upon a Time in Harlem is also an elegy for an analog time when discussions were built on knowledge, attention, and camaraderie, uninterrupted by individualistic digital distractions.
The premiere of Alex Gibney’s Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie remarkably hosted Rushdie and his wife Rachel Eliza Griffiths, who captured much of the previously-unseen original footage of Rushdie’s recovery after the near-fatal attack he survived in 2022. After the compellingly assembled film that serves as a tale of audacious resolve, Rushdie remarked, “I think it’s about a larger thing. That thing is violence, unleashed by the unscrupulous, using the ignorant to attack culture. For the authoritarian, culture is the enemy. The uncultured and ignorant and tyrannical don’t like it. And they take steps against it.”
Knife was hardly the only political documentary in the line-up. Abby Ellis’s terrific The Lake, on the impending demise of Utah’s Great Salt Lake, landed with startling urgency at an alarmingly snowless Sundance, and Gabriela Osio Vanden and Jack Weisman’s eccentric Nuisance Bear also rang subtle environmental alarm bells with the story of a polar bear forced into the human world. Felipe Bustos Sierra’s Everybody to Kenmure Street perhaps delivered the most powerful and startling statement, telling the story of a successful case of civil disobedience in Scotland. The film follows the events of May 2021, when the residents of a diverse Glasgow neighborhood flooded the streets and stopped the deportation of two of their immigrant neighbors. Partly reenacted by actors (including Emma Thompson), Everybody to Kenmure Street features many jaw-dropping lines, one spoken by a nurse: “The fact that I’m a nurse gives some level of protection to me that other people wouldn’t experience.” On the heels of the murder of the ICU nurse Alex Pretti by ICE agents, the line packs a painful punch about injustice in our own country.
Elsewhere, Charlie Tyrell and Navalny Oscar-winner Daniel Roher’s very entertaining and high-level The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist attempted to deliver a measured take on the future of artificial intelligence. Except, the disturbing realities the co-directors eloquently articulate about the perils of AI feel more critical than its supposed promises in education and healthcare.
A legacy, the sequel…
There were several other buzzy titles across different sections like NEXT (The Incomer and If I Go Will They Miss Me come to mind as two wonderful entries), as well as Midnight (with A24’s superbly sound-designed horror Undertone and the NEON-acquired Leviticus that I sadly missed). There were also other legacy screenings in addition to Mysterious Skin, like Guillermo del Toro’s 1992 fantasy-horror Cronos. It was an occasion Netflix celebrated with del Toro (whose Frankenstein received 9 Oscar nominations recently), over an intimate night of Mexican food and live music, some made and performed by del Toro himself. But few screenings felt as meaningful as my final one at the Eccles, a 20th anniversary showing of Little Miss Sunshine, followed by a reunion Q&A that included producers, directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, screenwriter Michael Arndt, as well as actors Toni Collette, Greg Kinnear, Abigail Breslin, and Paul Dano (met with “We love you, Paul!” chants). A surprising number of hands went up when Festival Director and moderator Eugene Hernandez asked who was seeing the film, one of the most legendary Park City world-premieres, for the first time.
There was laughter and tears (as Breslin admitted) throughout the passionate screening and Q&A, and the feeling of a world premiere, reincarnated, as cast lovingly recounted their memories of the set and their momentous bow in Park City 20 years ago. “I just hope people make more comedies,” Faris meaningfully wished in her parting remarks, drawing attention to an industry that has largely abandoned comedy as a genre. “How amazing that this film is responsible for two of the most memorable and electric nights in the history of this festival in Park City,” Hernandez concluded. The night ended up being an impossibly emotional parting note for this critic and journalist, one that underscored what we already know: when it comes to building on Sundance’s existing legacy, Boulder has large shoes to fill.
