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Sundance Film Festival officially opens

Sundance Institute

The 2022 Sundance Film Festival was kicked off with the annual press conference – but rather than being held in Park City’s Egyptian Theater, it was via a zoom webinar.

For the second year, the Sundance Film Festival is an online event. Last year, before there were vaccines for the COVID-19 pandemic, the festival was canceled months in advance. But this year, a huge surge of the new COVID variant happened just as the festival was scheduled to open, pushing all of the in-person Park City plans to digital screens around the world.

The press conference was opened by newly named Sundance Institute CEO Joana Vicente – just on the job for a few months after taking the reins from Kari Putnam. Vicente said she’s impressed with how the team has changed gears to an online festival and while a difficult decision, it was the right one for the safety of the community.

“Even though this year's festival venue has changed, so much remains the same,” Vicente said. “We are coming together to celebrate extraordinary work, elevate independent voices and honor the central power of storytelling. A festival is about more than watching films, although I can't think of a better way to spend 10 days in a theater or at home. The magic comes from the shared experience.”

Festival Director Tabitha Jackson is serving her 2nd year in that role. She noted that the mission of the Sundance Film Festival is the same as it was when Robert Redford opened the festival in 1981.

“Our mission, set down by Robert Redford, is still as true today as it was when he founded the Institute in 81,” she said. “It is to support artists as a transformative force in the culture. That hasn't changed. But the world around us has –in incredible ways - and so we have adapted. We've always been about values driven innovation, and we are being tested to adapt and thrive. And once we have a moment to catch our breath, we will realize what an opportunity this has presented us with.”

Director of Programming Kim Yutani urged film watchers to go deep and look for the hidden gems that people may overlook with the richness of this year’s program – because there are plenty of them.

“I think there's so much work to be discovered in in the program. And I hope that people will really dig in and take chances across our entire program,” Yutani said.

And while being online is not what anyone had hoped for, Senior Programmer John Nein says it doesn’t seem to have hurt the industry, noting record-breaking acquisitions last year.

“I think we were incredibly inspired and heartened by what we saw last year,” Nein said. “The work in the program that found success through the platform, and whether that's record breaking acquisitions, the success of some [films] that had general release or obviously during award season now... but we ask ourselves questions about what a festival can be and working in tandem with an industry that is also adapting and aware of the need to innovate. There have been lessons learned through these recent disruptions. I think we've been forced to reimagine a lot of things the festival, the nature of the community, the nature of the market.”

Jackson says given the success of the online platform, it’s something they will continue to offer, even after the threat of the pandemic is behind us...

“I think being able to diversify the audiences for this work together in community in a more expansive way, once we discovered how to do that and that we could do that, I personally, I don't want to go back on that,” Jackson said. “The question is always how we balance these things out what the what the balance of the festival is, and that's what we're experimenting with this year for the next couple of years, but yeah, this is this is a truly invaluable dimension of our festival.”

Tickets and more information are online at festival.sundance.org