La Presse at the Sundance Festival | A festival as prestigious as it is intimate

(Park City, Utah) The reputation of the Sundance Film Festival is second to none. Big names in cinema come to present their works for the first time. Filmmakers at the start of their careers have the chance to show their colors there. For the first time since the start of the pandemic, the seventh art in all its forms is once again in the spotlight in Park City and Salt Lake City. The Press is on site.

Thursday noon, the day the festival kicked off, Park City gave the impression of being in a snow globe. The snowflakes fell relentlessly on this postcard-like town, with its log cabins, independent shops, welcoming cafes and bars where you could settle down for après-ski. Wherever you look, the mountains of the Wasatch Range tower above the city, gigantic and majestic.

In the streets, banners and posters announce the holding of the 39^e Sundance festival, the first edition to be held in person since 2020. Sundance is alive again and Park City’s main thoroughfare, Main Street, is teeming with people. In this city where the ski slopes line the sidewalks, many are those who come back from a descent or are about to hurtle down the snowy paths. These days, sports fans rub shoulders with tens of thousands of moviegoers from across the United States and abroad.

Most of those who have been there will say it and a few hours on site are enough to realize it: more than a festival, Sundance is a community united by a common passion for cinema. “The most important thing for Sundance is to create a communion in person, a magic that cannot be replaced by anything in the world,” says Joana Vicente, CEO of the Sundance Institute, which organizes the festival.

During a meeting with the media to kick off the festivities, the CEO of the organization, founded in the 1980s by Robert Redford to support independent filmmakers (particularly through the festival), said she was moved to finally see the festival in full swing. The last two years have been trying for the organization, which has turned to the virtual, like many others, but which has suffered from not being able to gather its community in cinemas.

The two previous editions, however, left their mark on the one being held this year. For the first time, the festival is hybrid. On the other side of the world, it is possible to access most of the works on the program. For very popular screenings, festival-goers on site have a chance to see the films for which there are no more tickets. “The festival is now much more accessible and we will continue to build on it,” says Joana Vicente.

Sundance is a staple on the film festival circuit. Under the theme “All eyes on the independents”, it presents short and feature films, documentaries, fiction films and works somewhere in between. Great filmmakers like Chloé Zhao, Damien Chazelle and Ryan Coogler cut their teeth there and many of them return regularly. Directors are selected to show their first films there, in the hope of attracting the attention of the public, but also of distributors or producers.

Shuttles and launches

It is moreover at Sundance that the fairy tale of the film CODA began: director Sian Heder’s second feature film, presented at the festival in 2021, caught the eye of Apple, which paid 25 million US dollars for its distribution rights. This adaptation of the French film The Aries family ended up winning the Best Picture Oscar.

“It is not necessarily the number of contracts signed at the end that allows us to measure the success of the festival”, notes however Eugene Hernandez, director of Sundance, also present at the press conference. “It’s bigger than that. Sundance programming director Kim Yutani agrees: “It opens up possibilities. People meet in the shuttle! »

And it is true that meetings are made in the buses which allow festival-goers to travel free of charge from one venue to another through Park City. Or in the queues. Or in cafes.

A polite smile often leads to a long discussion with strangers, about the movies you’ve seen or can’t wait to see, about the city and about life. Something at Sundance is breaking down barriers.

Park City is only 45 km² of area, and on almost every street corner, a volunteer is present to lend a hand. Same thing around the venues in Salt Lake City, capital of Utah, three quarters of an hour away.

The heart of the action, however, remains Park City. This is where festival-goers line up, sometimes for more than an hour, in front of cinemas, in tents set up to help them brave the cold. This is also where movie stars circulate. This year, high profile guests include Anne Hathaway, Alexander Skarsgård, Dakota Johnson, Tiffany Haddish, Gael García Bernal and Adèle Exarchopoulos. Michael J. Fox was present Friday for the premiere of a documentary about his life.

Craftsmen close to the public

Thursday, just before the screening of the film The Pod Generation, starring Emilia Clarke and Chiwetel Ejiofor, a dozen people shivered as they stood in front of the Eccles Theater, the largest hall in the city. All were hoping for a photo or an autograph of the stars of the feature film by French director Sophie Barthes.

Todd, who has traveled from Oregon every year since 2013 to attend the festival, waited with his friend under a heat lamp. Photos to be autographed in hand, this lawyer told us that his hobby was to meet the stars during the premieres. “It’s interesting to see the people who made the films,” he tells us.

At Sundance, no huge outdoor red carpet like in Cannes or Berlin. Park City maintains an intimate aura, while being a major stop, one of big fivei.e. the biggest film festivals (with Venice, Toronto, Berlin and Cannes).

The event is due to its main mission: to reveal new voices in cinema. Works from 28 countries are presented this year at Sundance, selected from 16,000 entries. Among these, the series The night Laurier Gaudreault woke up, directed by Xavier Dolan. While the health of the film industry has been very precarious in recent years, artists have more stories to tell than ever.

The Sundance Film Festival continues through January 29.