All films for the 2020 Sundance Film Festival have been selected with the film program to be released this Friday. The annual Film Festival is set to run from January 23rd to February 2nd.
Those who have purchased Sundance Festival packages will be able to fulfill their tickets January 6th through the 9th. Local individual ticket sales begin January 16th and public individual ticket sales begin January 21st. The festival holds a certain amount of tickets for each screening, Sundance Institute Managing Director Betsy Wallace says the hard part is figuring out how to properly balance the distribution of tickets.
“It's a hard part on two fronts which is trying to get the filmmakers and their teams in, because it's their films and we want to make sure they get to see them and see their competitor films,” Wallace explained. “But it's also our passes and pass holders wanting to have them slot in. It's hard to understand what they may want to see. You know, we have a great slate of films and we started announcing last Wednesday our feature films. We have close to 118 feature films.”
Wallace also spoke about a change to the festivals best of fest program. This year the best of fest will take place on Sunday February 2nd which will be the same night as the Super Bowl.
“With Monday we found that less people stayed,” Wallace continued. “We really wanted people to understand and enjoy the films that were being selected and jury awards so we wanted to push them up to Sunday and just see if we can get better attendance. It really is something we're prideful of and it really fell off on Monday. It could be for a variety of reasons you know we have Super Bowl last year and Monday everybody left for that, but we've moved it up to Sunday to see how we do this year.”
Wallace says competing with the Super Bowl usually results in about a 15% drop in tickets.
This year will also be the final for festival John Cooper in his role as Film Festival Director. Cooper will serve as director emeritus for the 40th anniversary of the festival in two years. Cooper will also be a key designer for the new building and programming to come to the arts & culture district.
“He's one of those guys that has such a creative side to him that it's like he's envisioned this for years,” Wallace said. “Finally, the dam has opened, and he said let me just tell you how we're going to do it and it's just lovely to see.”
The organization is actively looking for Cooper’s replacement.
