“I want you to close your eyes,” said Jess, a perfumer from Napa Valley. “I want you to imagine: You’re sitting in a place where the land seems to hold opposites at once. From the dry desert of the Great Basin and the Colorado plateaus, to the rocky slopes and foothills, to the alpine forests where the air is cooler, sharper. This is Utah. This is Park City. This is Sundance.” She paused. “You may open your eyes.”
There were twelve of us at the World of Hyatt brand activation event. We were seated in a basement, surrounded by black leather sofas, LED candles, and jars of freshly cut flowers. Elsewhere in the room, women in pastel-colored flat-brim fedoras lined up for aura readings. On the table in front of us were vials of essential oils made from local plants — subalpine fir, ponderosa pine, pinyon pine, great western sage. Soon, we’d mix and match them to design our own Sundance-themed room spray.
“Welcome to the Scents of Sundance,” Jess announced. “Let’s get started.”
There was hardly any snow in Park City when I arrived in January. A month earlier, a warm and dry high-pressure weather system had settled over much of the Western United States, worsening Utah’s snow drought. The Wasatch Mountains, usually white by the start of the Sundance Film Festival, were bare.
Sundance means big business for Park City. Last year, the festival’s 85,000 visitors brought almost $200 million into the town’s economy, and major sponsors like Chase, Acura, United Airlines, and Adobe took over entire restaurants and event spaces up and down Main Street. In March 2025, however, the Sundance Institute — the nonprofit that operates the festival — announced that Sundance would be moving to Boulder. Sundance officials had spoken for years about the possibility of moving the festival out of Park City. In 2022, the institute lost millions of dollars after being forced to shut down in-person screenings in response to that winter’s omicron outbreak. Now Colorado was offering more than $34 million in state tax credits to incentivize the move. The 2026 Sundance Film Festival would be the last to take place in its original home, as well as the first not overseen by Sundance’s talismanic founder, Robert Redford, who died at 89 in September 2025.
If the move to Boulder naturally felt like the end of an era, in the lead-up to this year’s festival the mood was dim for more existential reasons. Covid had an especially devastating effect on the fragile architecture that supports indie film. Independent and art house theaters had closed; windowing — the process of staggering a film’s release across different formats — had disintegrated; moviegoing numbers had collapsed; and streamers had doubled down on mass-produced crap. Worst of all, Netflix and Paramount had been jockeying for months to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery in a frenzy of cash throwing and deal hashing. No matter who won, for independents the result would be the same: a further erosion of autonomy, and subjugation to either a massive streamer or a mammoth new studio.
In indie film, the saying goes, the sky is always falling. But now it appeared that the worst had come to pass. Sundance would go elsewhere — would there be an indie film industry to go along with it?
This year’s festival began with a welcome event for press. Held inside the Park, a private event space in a parking lot next to a Walgreens, the ceremony was upbeat, with an open bar and a spread of vegan corn dogs, pretzel bites, and Utah fry sauce. One by one, Sundance’s boundless ranks of senior executives — including the board chair, Ebs Burnough; the longtime head of the Sundance labs, Michelle Satter; and the festival’s director, Eugene Hernandez — took the stage to speak.
“The Sundance Film Festival would not be what it is today without the press,” Hernandez told the room, a statement whose openhearted generosity felt somewhat undermined by the fact that Hernandez had gutted Film Comment during his tenure as the magazine’s copublisher. “You’ve helped bring the festival to life, not only for audiences in Park City but for independent film lovers all over the world.” As the festival went on, his speech began to feel like a thin rallying cry, meant to steel us for the hazing ritual to come.
Park City, it should be said, is neither a park nor a city. As a location for a festival it is, and always has been, a giant pain in the ass. Getting to Park City is pricey, and driving and parking are impossible. There are only a handful of hotels in town, and all of them jack up their usual prices by criminal orders of magnitude. Most people end up sharing cramped rooms in condos that still cost thousands of dollars. Eating and drinking are equally outrageous. Utah state law requires restaurant patrons to buy food to order a drink, and liquor-based drinks may contain only 1.5 ounces of any primary spirit, measured through a calibrated dispensing device called the Berg. This is a serious problem for bored, overworked critics who must sit through dozens of the nation’s least ambitious films every year.
There is a fine line between selling a dream and living a delusion. At Sundance, that line has always been blurry.
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Then there are the lines. Lines to corporate-sponsored events that snake up Main Street; lines to parties that take hours even when your name is on the list; lines to press screenings longer than the film’s runtime. In 2026, a single ticket to one of these films cost $35; a package of ten tickets, with the ability to reserve screenings in advance, was $920. For filmmakers it’s even worse. Sundance sometimes provides a small stipend to productions to help offset the costs of participating in the festival. This year, the payment was around $1,000, hardly enough money to fly in a director, let alone a cast and crew, to spend several days posing for photos in front of step and repeats, participating in interviews, and attending Q&As — standard but punishing procedures for selling a film at Sundance. Add in the price of hiring a publicist and throwing a party for the film’s premiere — as well as meals, hotels, and transportation — and launching a low-budget film at Sundance can quickly run up tens of thousands of dollars in expenses.
“It has become harder and harder to produce a festival of the caliber and scale and size and scope that we want to produce and need to produce here in Utah,” Hernandez conceded to the Washington Post. “We can’t hide that fact.” Nearly everyone I spoke to who was involved with the institute expected Boulder, which has a population more than ten times that of Park City as well as far greater housing and transportation capacity, to mean lower costs. Then again, Boulder may not alter any of the dynamics that made Park City so challenging. After all, Sundance is facing the same problem that traffic engineers encounter whenever they try to relieve highway congestion by expanding the number of lanes. Sooner or later, the traffic always returns.
I asked the film producer and Sundance board member Jason Blum if he was worried that the move might not be the panacea people expect. This, he felt, was beside the point. “Look, if those problems reappear, that means we’ll have outgrown Boulder,” he told me. “Which means we’ll have been very successful.”
Robert Redford was an unlikely champion of independent film. As the face of polished 1970s studio filmmaking and the decade’s biggest box office star, he was the ultimate Hollywood insider. His name was listed in dictionaries under words like glamour and idol, and he was too good-looking to be anything but a leading man — a point the actor famously learned early in his career after auditioning for the lead in Mike Nichols’s The Graduate. “I said, ‘You can’t play it. You can never play a loser,’” Nichols later told Vanity Fair. “And Redford said, ‘What do you mean? Of course I can play a loser.’ And I said, ‘OK, have you ever struck out with a girl?’ and he said, ‘What do you mean?’”
But Redford was always ambivalent about his success. He disliked the trappings and never-ending demands of celebrity, and mistrusted the studio executives and yes-men around him. By the early 1980s, the major Hollywood studios had shut out most of the successful creative filmmakers of the previous decade and pivoted to family-friendly, cash-fueled spectacles like Star Wars, Superman, and E.T. Redford saw Sundance as the solution. The next generation of pathbreaking auteurs would come to the actor’s compound, which included a ski resort near Mount Timpanogos, to receive artistic guidance and mentorship far from the corrupting influence of the Barry Dillers and Jerry Bruckheimers of the world.
When Redford founded the organization in 1980, it wasn’t with a festival in mind. To Redford, festivals were little more than competitive hype machines. Instead, inspired by George C. White’s theater incubator at the Eugene O’Neill Center in Connecticut, the actor wanted to host a series of seminars — “labs,” as they would become known — in which up-and-coming independent filmmakers could workshop their screenplays with established directors and producers, perhaps even securing funding in the process.
In its first decade, Sundance failed to generate much interest. The organization’s funding model was a mess. Sundance was heavily reliant on donors, and Redford hated groveling to them. Sterling Van Wagenen, Sundance’s first director and a relative of Redford’s, came up with a plan. Years earlier, Van Wagenen had cofounded the Park City–based US Film Festival, which was now facing financial troubles. Van Wagenen believed that if Sundance absorbed the festival, the organization would acquire a “shopwindow to the world,” opening up funding streams through sponsors and ticket sales. Redford agreed, assuming control of the US Film Festival in 1985.
For every Hollywood suit who visited Sundance, the opposite kind of person also continued showing up.
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Van Wagenen’s prediction eventually came true, though it had little to do with his or Redford’s maneuverings. In 1989, Steven Soderbergh premiered his debut feature, sex, lies, and videotape, at Park City’s Prospector Square Theater. The film caused a frenzy. Tickets were scalped at one of the film’s final screenings — a first for the festival — and Soderbergh took home Sundance’s Audience Award on closing night. Distributors began to circle. The most aggressive of the bunch was a relative newcomer, Miramax, founded by Harvey and Bob Weinstein. Desperate for their first hit, the Weinsteins paid an unprecedented $1 million for the film’s theatrical rights. “Up until then,” the former Sundance director Tony Safford told the journalist Peter Biskind, “companies tended to sit back and wait and see what showed up on their fax machine. That kind of extremely aggressive approach to finding, getting, negotiating materials changed the business.” A few months later, Soderbergh won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, and the Weinsteins plowed money into publicity and put the movie in multiplexes around the country. A new model was born.
“Before sex, lies, Sundance was never really thought of as a market per se,” Ira Deutchman, a producer who had worked on the film’s release and later ran New Line Cinema’s specialized film division, told me. “But the fact the film did as well as it did created this sense that anybody who was interested in acquiring American independent films really needed to be there.” By the mid-1990s, Sundance was regularly launching, and in some cases workshopping, era-defining films that would have a major impact on the rest of the industry, like Slacker, Reservoir Dogs, Gas Food Lodging, Hoop Dreams, The Doom Generation, and Welcome to the Dollhouse.
For the institute, this was an ironic development. Suddenly, the nonprofit designed to curb the excesses of Hollywood became the crucible of the American film market. Major sponsors rushed in. Hotel prices spiked. Park City became a hunting ground for Hollywood distributors, producers, agents, and managers mining for the next hidden gem.
Despite its emerging reputation as a place where big fortunes could be made, the institute spent the next several decades devoting itself to its nonprofit mission. In 1994, it launched the Indigenous Program to support Native filmmakers, and in 2013 it introduced Catalyst, a financing arm that brought together philanthropists and potential backers with aspiring young filmmakers. And so for every Hollywood suit who visited Sundance, the opposite kind of person also continued showing up. These were people in the mold of Redford himself — “an intellectual cowboy who blazed his own trail,” as Barbra Streisand eulogized him at the Oscars — idealistic do-gooders who continued to believe that Sundance could offer real correctives to an industry led astray.
At Sundance, everyone is a publicist, and buzz is everywhere. On the festival’s free shuttle service, which transports attendees between theaters, I overheard five blond women in matching green fur coats discussing Josephine, the sophomore feature by Beth de Araújo starring Channing Tatum and Gemma Chan as parents of an 8-year-old girl (Mason Reeves) who witnesses a brutal rape. The film quickly became a critic and audience favorite, later winning the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award. “It was like someone was cutting onions in the theater,” one of the women told me. She then gestured to her coat. “It’s from Marshalls,” she said. “We get a new color every year.”
And yet among filmmakers, dread over money seemed to outweigh any sense of buzz. By the first weekend the lack of major sales had already become a central topic of conversation. As it happens, two of the best films in Sundance’s slate confronted the industry’s distribution crisis head-on. The first was John Wilson’s debut feature, The History of Concrete, a documentary that, in addition to earnestly exploring the story of the ubiquitous construction material, also examines the difficulty of the film’s own financing and survival in an industry that’s more hostile than ever to originality.
Like any good documentarian, Wilson aspires to historical depth, traveling to Rome to see the earliest, most solid forms of concrete, only to find out he’s blown his budget on the trip. His pitch meetings for more funding go nowhere. He hangs out on the set of Marty Supreme, where he watches Josh Safdie re-create 1950s New York. “It seems like there are movies getting financed, but only if they take you to a different time and place,” Wilson narrates. “It seems like we often spend more money re-creating the stuff that we miss than actually trying to preserve what’s currently disappearing.”
After a mix-up with potential backers, who take Wilson at his word that he’s making “a rockumentary,” Wilson finds himself following a guy named Jack Macco, a liquor salesman who moonlights as the lead singer and guitarist of a Long Island rock band called Nebulus. A cross between Johnny Ramone and Tommy Wiseau, Macco plays White Stripes and Metallica covers to empty barrooms in Astoria and crowds in Montauk who cheer louder for the basketball game on television. “The state of music is fine,” says one club owner. “The creativity hasn’t been stifled. Only the ability for guys to make a dollar out of it.”
Like Wilson, Macco knows that the best days of his medium are behind him and carries on anyway. “That feeling that you get from playing a gig, even if it’s terrible, it’s one of the greatest feelings of magic in reality,” he says. The film finds solace in Macco’s persistence. “If you run around in circles for long enough, you’ll eventually just get somewhere new.”
Walking out of The History of Concrete, my sense of melancholy about the future of cinema was tempered by my pleasure in encountering a surprising work of art in a strange place. But any sincere belief in the medium or its stewards was successfully dislodged by a screening of another headline film from this year’s Sundance, Aidan Zamiri’s The Moment.
Zamiri’s film stars the pop artist Charli XCX as herself in the churning wake of “brat summer.” (The film was one of three at this year’s Sundance to feature the singer.) Shot as a frenetic, behind-the-scenes mockumentary, The Moment reveals the machinery of pop culture to be vacuous and artless, engineered by label executives who can only speak in corporate nonlanguage like “connect heads” and “bouncing off of that.” Charli’s label, Atlantic, is led by an icy executive named Tammy (Rosanna Arquette), who sics increasingly preposterous promotional engagements on the singer. This includes an Amazon Studios concert film, whose director, Johannes (Alexander Skarsgård), dresses Charli in a Tinker Bell outfit and wired harness and flies her around London’s O2 Arena over a giant sculptural pyrotechnic lighter and cigarette.
Tackiness and artistic compromise don’t matter to Tammy, who sees Charli as a fandom-generating machine whose followers are piggy banks waiting to be cracked open. “How do we keep this ‘brat’ thing going?” Tammy asks her staff. This note would have sounded familiar to anyone who had recently visited the Impact Lounge, a popular meeting place for Sundance’s intellectual cowboys. Shortly before watching The Moment, I had attended a panel at the lounge titled “The Next Era of Entertainment: Ownership Is Impact,” during which a former Lucasfilm executive more or less repeated Tammy’s line in the form of advice. “Ask yourself a question: How long can you stay in the long tail of your value corridor?” The Moment ridicules these questions — the only ones industry executives seem capable of today — by presenting increasingly extreme answers. When Charli fumbles the launch of a brat-themed credit card, she accidentally sets off a chain reaction that causes the bank to collapse.
Zamiri’s film wants us to understand that Charli’s creative success happened in spite of her record label and the morons who run it — a lesson for anyone trying to rebuild indie cinema. Much like the boom that followed sex, lies, and videotape, any future indie renaissance will be built first and foremost around great films by singular artists. It will not be reverse engineered from above, by industry executives and nonprofit operators whose ideas consist of crackpot marketing stunts and who use the words value corridor in conversation. But that won’t stop any of these people from trying.
By the third day of the festival, the Sundance hype machine had kicked into high gear. A publicity email appeared in my inbox:
HERE IN PARK CITY – WE ARE IN FULL SWING AT THE LAST DANCE PARK CITY! MOVING AND INSPIRING REAL-LIFE & MIDNIGHT MADNESS! – STORIES FROM SYRIAN REFUGEES, PLUS AN INSPIRING YOUNG LATINA WHO BRINGS BRAVERY AND INSPIRATION IN THESE CHAOTIC TIMES, TO THE UNSUNG MLK JR. SPEECH WRITER DIRECTED BY FIRST TIME DIRECTOR – NBA BASKETBALL LEGEND STEPHEN CURRY & OSCAR WINNER BEN PROUDFOOT, TO A MIND-BOGGLING HORROR FILM SET IN THE PHILIPPINES – OUR FILMS AIM TO INSPIRE ENTERTAIN AT PARK CITY
That was just the subject line.
On Main Street, a real-life version of Buddy, the eponymous axe-wielding orange unicorn from Casper Kelly’s horror film, shook hands with tourists and did media hits with content creators. The 82-year-old tennis champion Billie Jean King showed up to the premiere of Give Me the Ball!, a documentary about her life and career, and racketed tennis balls into the audience like a mascot with a T-shirt cannon.
One evening I received an invitation to watch Alec Baldwin play chess. The event, hosted by Netflix, was a promotion for Rory Kennedy’s latest documentary, Queen of Chess, about the Hungarian grandmaster Judit Polgar. The match was held in a private residence up the mountain with a guesthouse the size of a standard suburban home. On my arrival I was shuffled into a white colossus of a living room, which had floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Park City. Everything smelled like pinyon pine.
Baldwin had nothing to do with Queen of Chess, but he had been the subject of the director’s previous documentary, The Trial of Alec Baldwin, a sympathetic account of the actor’s accidental killing of the cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the set of Rust. Now he sat across from Polgar at a table surrounded by white sofas and a large fireplace. “If I win,” Baldwin hammed, “I get to buy Warner Brothers.”
The actor had no hope of winning, or drawing, so Polgar played blindfolded. Even so, the game didn’t last long. Baldwin blundered his way through a Berlin Defense and lost in fourteen moves.
Afterward he and Polgar fielded questions from the audience. “How do computers and AI factor into the world of professional chess?” one man asked. IBM’s supercomputer Deep Blue first beat Garry Kasparov in 1997, decades before the current furor over AI, so chess players like Polgar had gotten a head start on asking the same questions that artists were now asking themselves. For Polgar there was a clear difference between using chess engines to train for tournaments and allowing engines to completely take over the sport. After the Deep Blue match, “many people thought that chess [was] over,” Polgar said, but no one ever seriously considered letting machines compete in professional tournaments. “We don’t make a fool of ourselves playing against computers, because there is no fun at all to do that,” Polgar said. “We play against humans.”
If only the executives distributing Queen of Chess shared her sentiment. A few weeks after the festival ended, Netflix announced that it had acquired Ben Affleck’s AI film start-up, InterPositive, in an eight-figure deal. By training an AI model on production dailies, InterPositive’s technology allows filmmakers to reconfigure lighting, adjust backgrounds, reframe shots, and even create new ones that were missed on set. In a statement announcing the acquisition, Netflix was adamant that InterPositive would benefit filmmakers. “Innovation should empower storytellers, not replace them,” said the streamer’s chief product and technology officer, Elizabeth Stone, whose company has disempowered and replaced more artists than any Hollywood studio before it.
It’s not hard to imagine Netflix’s technology being used on a documentary like Queen of Chess, a film composed of static talking heads, faceless reenactments of historical events, and cheaply animated intertitles. In fact, InterPositive could probably re-direct the whole thing in post-production, no Kennedy required.
“It’s a disaster, this place,” Abel Ferrara once told an interviewer. “All these LA agents on skis.” The agents are still skiing, even in the near absence of snow, but filmmakers are much less likely to encounter them on the public slopes. Kate Lips, a ski patroller at the Park City Mountain Resort, told me that “these days, there are a lot of far bougier, more private options to be had for skiing.” The buzziest of these enterprises is Powder Mountain, a resort owned by Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings.
In Netflix’s early years, Hastings shut down the company every January to fly the entire staff out to Sundance, where they watched movies and socialized in the old church he had purchased and transformed into his vacation home. But in 2014, after Vail Resorts, the private equity–backed ski behemoth, acquired Park City Mountain Resort, the town swelled in size. Hastings, a longtime skier, got sick of the crowds.
In 2016, a friend invited Hastings to Powder Mountain, eighty miles north of Park City. He liked what he saw. The resort was cheap and uncrowded. A few weeks later, he sold his home in Park City and bought a plot at Powder Mountain. Like Redford, he eventually bought the whole resort. Unlike Redford, Hastings had no ambition to do anything that would ever benefit the public. The Netflix founder proceeded to carve out 2,000 acres of the resort’s public skiable terrain to develop a private enclave known as Powder Haven, where membership costs a minimum $2 million for a plot of land, plus an annual fee of up to $100,000. On the public side of the resort, he jacked up the price of a season pass to $1,700; day passes now cost as much as $250.
For Hastings, pricing people out was the point. When he took over the resort in 2023, Powder Mountain adopted a new slogan: “Uncrowded by Design.” He invested at least $100 million to achieve his vision, which included something called the Powder Art Foundation. On their well-groomed pistes, ultrarich skiers can now admire artworks like Kayode Ojo’s series of twenty-one crystal chandeliers, which are strung between pine trees and transform the “forest clearing into an exuberant, outdoor ballroom,” per the foundation’s website.
“It’s essentially a membership program,” Hastings told the luxury lifestyle magazine Robb Report last year:
Powder is more expensive than Netflix, but, you know, it’s the basic idea of focusing on membership — whether that’s a season pass on the public side or full membership on the private side. There are a lot of great lessons of the positivity that that creates if you nurture the membership, and how then happy members bring their friends in. And so really focusing on member satisfaction, that whole positive growth spiral that we had at Netflix is here also.
I’d been in Utah for four days when word started to spread that a major sale was in the works. The Invite, Olivia Wilde’s sex comedy starring herself and Seth Rogen as a frustrated married couple who get invited to an orgy, had received multiple bids. Focus Features, Neon, Netflix, Apple, and Searchlight were all in the mix. The Hollywood Reporter called it “an old-fashioned Sundance bidding war.”
A24 ended up paying $12 million for the rights to Wilde’s film, but the sale proved to be an outlier. “Pretty bad,” was how the Film Sales Company president, Andrew Herwitz, described this year’s Sundance market to me weeks after the festival ended. “I saw a lot of films which I could enjoy myself, but which I thought wouldn’t sell,” he said. His company declined to take any on.
It wasn’t just distributors and sales agents avoiding Sundance products. The historic Egyptian Theatre — the festival’s showcase venue, which had hosted countless premieres and midnight screenings — also sat out this year’s festival. “We are no longer set up for film,” the theater’s executive director, Randy Barton, told the local public radio station, KPCW. “Live performances is what we do.” During the festival, but not under Sundance’s auspices, the Egyptian staged “A Tribute to the Music of Little Miss Sunshine,” a series of live performances by DeVotchKa, the aughts-era band best known for its accordion-forward score to Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris’s indie darling.
Little Miss Sunshine, which celebrated its twentieth anniversary at this year’s festival, is perhaps the defining film of the indie model that dominated Sundance in the 1990s and 2000s: packaging recognizable actors (Toni Collette, Steve Carell, Alan Arkin) with new faces (Paul Dano, Abigail Breslin) into a conservatively shot story with surface-level pathos (families are fucked up) and a commercially friendly ending that flatters the audience (your fucked-up family is actually OK). Fox Searchlight bought Little Miss Sunshine out of Sundance in 2006 for a record $10.5 million and carefully built the release up to thousands of screens. By the end of its theatrical run, the film had grossed more than $100 million over its $8 million production budget, winning several Academy Awards.
“It’s a disaster, this place,” Abel Ferrara once told an interviewer. “All these LA agents on skis.”
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Sundance marked the anniversary with a special screening — a celebration that felt more like a funeral. “I was just told this is the last premiere at the Eccles Theater, and I started crying,” the actor Greg Kinnear, one of the film’s costars, told the Washington Post. Over at Swede Alley, just off Main Street, Searchlight installed a pop-up replica of the film’s yellow Volkswagen bus that served hot chocolate and pastries — a shrine to the dead.
It wasn’t all bad news. For IndieWire’s editor in chief, Dana Harris-Bridson, the decline of “the old-school Miramax world of what independent film means” might allow for a new model to take its place, she explained at a panel. “The new rules have not been written yet. The lens has to open a little wider around what is considered worthy of attention at Sundance.” For Harris-Bridson this meant YouTubers. “They might not have films yet, but they do have audiences, and they’re surrounded by filmmakers who are desperate to find audiences.” Perhaps both groups would find each other in Boulder.
In 2014, Dan Sickles brought his debut feature film, Mala Mala, a documentary he codirected with Antonio Santini about the trans community in Puerto Rico, to the Tribeca Film Festival. When the film failed to sell, Sickles fired his sales agent and tried to distribute it himself: “I ended up stalking the programmers from IFC. They gave me a week [in theaters].” He promoted Mala Mala at New York’s Puerto Rican Day and Pride parades. His efforts paid off. The film was extended at IFC Center for three weeks and opened on more screens. Eventually Netflix bought the streaming rights and put the movie on its platform globally.
The experience was edifying. “Indie filmmakers are all trying to prove that they have an audience, so that maybe they can be bought by one of the bigger streamers for a really sexy price,” Sickles told me. “But there’s no real metrics that they can get anywhere to prove that.”
By 2024, with marketing increasingly taking place on social media and pirated movie clips flooding Instagram and TikTok, Sickles saw an opportunity. Like many of Sundance’s good guys, he, too, could solve an industry problem. Moonbeem, which Sickles has been developing for the past two years, is his attempt to systematize the work of digital marketing. The website allows distributors to upload media assets like stills, trailers, and scenes, and it tracks who is viewing and posting clips. All this activity takes place on the blockchain, making the assets traceable and controllable. If a distributor doesn’t like how its content is being used, it can cut off access. Sickles believes that Moonbeem’s precision data can give producers and filmmakers leverage when selling a film. “It gives them a leg into the conversation with distributors to be like, ‘Actually we know this many thousands of people are already messing with this media or this trailer or this exclusive clip.’”
Inside the small cottage Sickles had rented, Moonbeem’s chief technology officer, Adam Lesh, walked me through the process of “remixing” a clip. He clicked on Bob Trevino Likes It, a sappy 2024 drama starring John Leguizamo that Roadside Attractions had made available. “So you have the video. You can make a shorter clip out of the scene, you can then change the volume, the speed. You can add text. You can change the color of the text, change anything you want,” said Lesh, as he placed a diamond emoji next to Leguizamo’s face. The video could then be cropped and exported directly to YouTube, ready to be consumed by spaced-out doomscrollers in viral vertical form. “Clipping culture has become prominent only in the last eighteen months,” he added. “No one anticipated needing this.”
It was hard for me to imagine a mass of clippers needing this. When I encounter film clips on social media, they’re usually of movies from major studios, like The Big Short and Ford v Ferrari, not anything by the smaller distributors that Moonbeem has partnered with. The films are often uploaded by AI accounts and broken up into forty-five one-minute clips, with hallucinatory saturation and an added layer of music, seemingly there to fool the copyright filters. In other words, they come from sources with no intention of ever downloading anything from an official channel.
A few weeks after I got back from Sundance, I spoke with the film critic and editor Ray Pride, who recalled that at the turn of the millennium, just before the dot-com crash, the festival had been packed to the gills with tech start-ups. “There were so many different places coming up with different ideas for distribution and publicity involving digital video and all sorts of superfluous, now anachronistic technology about shipping your queue with your data file, blah, blah, blah,” Pride told me. “A few years ago I emptied out a cupboard that was overflowing with shoulder bags, backpacks, and merch from these different places that I couldn’t remember ever seeing again after their festival manifestation. There were probably eighty lunch boxes, and I couldn’t even remember what they were selling.”
To Pride, Moonbeem was no different from past start-ups. “Because you’ve got a film or publicity still on the blockchain, it’s useless, it’s pixels, it’s not even yet an object,” he told me. The real problem was the absence of people like his late friend Bingham Ray, whose visionary distribution company, October Films, brought directors like Mike Leigh, Lars von Trier, and Jafar Panahi to the United States. What was needed, Pride said, were “people who know every circuit, every buyer, every room and screen, and who know what they are selling — and how to sell it. Not adding layers of superficially useful things to naive users.”
The real problem with Hollywood today, according to Allison Josephs, is that there aren’t enough Jews in it. Like any trade show, Sundance attracts advocates alongside artists and entrepreneurs, and Josephs, the founder of the Jewish Institute for Television and Cinema, was in town to make her case. She was speaking with JITC’s director, Cindy Kaplan, to a small crowd of people in the basement of a black box theater. The talk, “Rethinking Jewish Representation amid Rising Antisemitism,” was one of several partner events that Sundance hosted throughout the festival’s first weekend. “No one had ever done a Jewish representation panel at Sundance before we came around,” she told the audience.
In 2021, Josephs stumbled upon on an essay in Variety that linked a rise of antisemitic incidents in the US to what the writer perceived to be the stubborn persistence of antisemitic Jewish caricatures in Hollywood productions. While researching ways she could help, Josephs learned about the Muslim Public Affairs Council’s Hollywood Bureau. “And I’m both in awe and completely jealous,” Josephs said. “Not only is this organization putting culturally competent consultants and proud Muslim writers in the room, the studios are funding the work that they’re doing.” She then discovered the NAACP Hollywood Bureau. “And I’m like, wait a second. The Black community has this, too? At this point I google ‘Asian Hollywood Bureau,’ I discovered the Asian community has this too. And at this point I realized that everybody has this, but the Jews.”
As Josephs and Kaplan explained onstage, the “ancient tropes” contributing to “Jew hatred” were rampant. The evil “money Jew” was on the rise, best captured by a poster for a Netflix documentary about Bernie Madoff, in which the Wall Street bull was positioned behind the criminal financier, giving him the appearance of devil horns. (On her blog, Josephs said “Jews with horns” should be “as verboten as blackface.”) There was also “the bloodthirsty, baby-killing Jew,” a trope Josephs claimed was “alive and well, and unfortunately making a resurgence in Hollywood.” She seemed to be referencing the widespread opposition to Israel’s mass killing of Palestinian children in Gaza.
I learned of other, more novel examples of antisemitism. For example, the belief that Ashkenazi Jews “are white and therefore oppressors,” according to Josephs, was in fact a neo-Nazi canard. “One of the reasons that Jews couldn’t get out of Europe when they were fleeing before the Holocaust is because there was an Asiatic immigration ban,” she claimed. “An Asiatic immigration ban is why many Jews perished in the Holocaust — because they were considered Asian, because that’s where Israel’s from.” (This isn’t true.)
As Josephs insisted onstage, a key piece of the JITC’s mission is “standing up for the land of the Jewish people and recognizing that this is where we come from originally, no matter what our diverse diaspora experience has been.” Kaplan added, “We’ve now made the case to people at every single major studio that Jews are not overrepresented [in Hollywood], that there is a problem here.” Fortunately, the JITC has a powerful ally in David Ellison, the new owner and CEO of Paramount Skydance, whose billionaire father, Larry Ellison, is close friends with Benjamin Netanyahu. After Ellison bought Paramount last year, the company created a blacklist for Hollywood talent it deemed “overtly antisemitic.” Ellison also installed the Zionist ideologue Bari Weiss at the top of CBS News. A month after the festival ended, the news broke that Paramount had succeeded in buying Warner Bros. With the Warners film studio, HBO, CNN, and dozens of other media properties now potentially within his control, Ellison will have unprecedented power to reshape a vast swath of American media at a pro-Israel tilt.
The panel was still going, but I had another screening to catch. I gathered my things and headed for the door. “And on that note,” Josephs said, “we have some breaking news from JITC Hollywood Bureau. We are launching, you heard it here first, the Jewish Screenwriters Collective — ”
Not long after arriving in Park City, I received a tote bag emblazoned with the words hulu on disney+ and proudly streaming independent cinema. At the time I wrote this essay, there were just six films in Hulu’s “indie” section. The oldest was from 2013: Joe Swanberg’s Drinking Buddies, a tedious mumblecore romance starring Olivia Wilde and Jake Johnson as brewery employees.
And yet the slogan was fitting for a festival whose founder, the great western sage, spent his entire career telling journalists and friends that he wanted “independence,” and to “experiment,” only to continuously return to big Hollywood star vehicles that could fund his extreme overhead. Redford only acted in the kinds of independent films that Sundance was known for toward the end of his life. Even so, the last film he appeared in was Avengers: Endgame. There is a fine line between selling a dream and living a delusion. At Sundance, that line has always been blurry.
“Look, I can’t sugarcoat it,” Trevor Groth, Sundance’s former director of programming, told me. “It’s been an extremely challenging time for independent film, especially for the kinds of films that Sundance showcases. But that said, I think Boulder can spark a new creator-led renaissance. Budgets are going to have to be pulled back. But what can come from that is an innovative new voice, a new way of making films. And Sundance can discover those voices. Some of them will start off being successful with some type of self-releasing, direct-to-fans model. And then new businesses will pop up around that. It’s almost like we can go back to 1989 and have the next Stephen Soderbergh come in and make some movie that pops out of Sundance and creates a different type of distribution opportunity, and we can enter into a new chapter of independent film distribution.”
By this point, Groth was almost laughing. It was as if even he couldn’t believe what he was saying.
As the festival entered its final stretch, I took a walk up Main Street, where the corporate lounges were already closing their storefronts. Crews were breaking down setups and taking away barricades. Families in big down coats and sunglasses were packing their luggage into black SUVs. The agents were flying back to LA.
I stuck around a few more days to catch up on movies. On the morning of my flight, I was waiting for a car when something on the mountain caught my attention. It was the ski resort’s snow-making machines, at least a dozen of them. Their long tubes rose like smokestacks, billowing plumes of white particulate into the cold, juniper-scented air.
The machines have become crucial for resorts like Park City, which are vulnerable to now frequent spells of warm and dry weather. They can give the appearance that everything on the mountain is normal, at least for a while. But they can’t disguise a mountain forever, let alone a range. Fabricating snow is water- and energy-intensive. Also the machines are loud. When enough of them run at the same time, the noise reverberates down the mountain, an ambient drone that had been indistinguishable from the din of the festival’s crowds and cars all week.
In 1970, Redford appeared in a film called Little Fauss and Big Halsy, in which he (Halsy) and his sidekick (Fauss, played by Michael J. Pollard) tour the American Southwest’s dirt bike racing circuit. Halsy is a drunk and banned from racing bikes, yet continues to believe he’s one of the best, fooling everyone around him, and himself. He spends a year stealing Fauss’s identity so he can race, only to learn that his partner is better and faster than him. It is a minor role in Redford’s career, perhaps the only one in which the actor played a true loser.
It’s hard to live like Halsy, haunted by ambitions that have no hope of coming true. This has always been Sundance’s challenge. Next year, the challenge will be the same, only rockier. Like trying to ski without snow.
