Sundance is coming down from the mountain.
Every January for 36 years, the Sundance Film Festival has been organized in Park City, Utah, a wealthy ski town 7,000 feet high in the Wasatch Range. Attendees fill theaters to the brim, huddle in tents crowded with waiting lists, ride bus-ridden buses and hot tubs with drunken abandonment, at the height of the flu season.
But the coronavirus pandemic is forcing organizers to rethink Sundance. On Monday, Tabitha Jackson, the festival’s director, unveiled her preliminary plans for the 2021 edition, a meeting expected to take place under social distancing restrictions and with a Covid-19 vaccine not yet available. It will take place simultaneously in Park City and at least 20 other locations: Exploratory talks are underway with independent theaters in California, Colorado, Georgia, Kentucky, New York, Michigan, Minnesota, Tennessee, and Texas. Mexico City is also on the list.
Participating theaters will choose a “tailored” selection of Sundance 2021 offerings that make sense to their community, Jackson said, expanding those options with their own complementary programming.
She said Sundance’s “complete cure program” would also be available online.
“It will be the core of the festival,” he said of an online platform that Sundance is developing, “a unique access point designed to create a participatory experience that brings together all the elements and locations of the festival.”
Ms. Jackson’s plan is more than accommodating attendees who may not be comfortable flying to Utah or keeping corporate sponsorship healthy. The base of the festival in Park City has long been a strength and a weakness. Those who can make the pilgrimage feel like members of an exclusive club, watching movies before the rest of the world, and perhaps rubbing shoulders with a celebrity dressed in parka.
But the location is also limiting. The festival is known for defending minority and female filmmakers (a stark contrast to Hollywood), but racial and socioeconomic diversity among attendees may be lacking, something Sundance has been trying to fix, including offering travel stipends to minority journalists.
“We want to reach people we have not been able to reach before, where access to work is not based on being able to travel to an expensive place,” Jackson said by phone. “The world has generally come to Sundance. Now we are trying to bring Sundance to the world. “
However, he emphasized that “Utah will always be our home.”
Jackson indicated that the 2021 lineup would be smaller, though he said it was too early to talk about size, and not just because a pandemic-related shutdown in movie production could limit the amount of decent submissions programmers receive.
“I think the program may be stricter,” said Jackson.
She took over as festival director in February, succeeding John Cooper, who assumed an emeritus role after running the event for 11 years. Mr. Cooper expanded the festival’s offerings during his tenure, adding a television showcase, children’s movies, and a section called Next for “low and no budget” movies. The most recent edition screened around 120 feature films, chosen from 3,853 submissions.
The Sundance Institute, founded by Robert Redford in 1981, is considering a different start date for the festival, January 28 instead of January 21, to provide some distance from the presidential inauguration.
“Our model intentionally allows us to mark or reduce live meetings,” said Jackson. In other words, Sundance could limit attendance at Park City and cut the event short. Sundance generally lasts 10 days.
Even in middle age and with the rise of independent cinema in the 1990s, Sundance remains the preeminent showcase for American cinema made outside of the Hollywood system. The bidding wars are still raging over the online and theatrical distribution rights of festival selections. Which leads to a crucial question: if Sundance makes its line available online, how will filmmakers and their sponsors hope to secure an unexpected distribution of any kind, let alone line up a theatrical release?
Ms. Jackson said the festival was still “working to address all the nuances.” Content protection technologies, such as geo-blocking, view limitation, and digital activation, may be an answer.
“We must be extremely aware of what will sustain our artists,” said Jackson. “If something doesn’t work for our artists, it doesn’t work for us.”
The Tribeca Film Festival, overturned by the coronavirus, moved part of its online programming in the spring. So did the SXSW Film Festival, which partnered with Amazon Prime Video. Last week, the Toronto International Film Festival said it would try to make limited in-person screenings for its 45th installment in September, while also going semi-virtual for the first time. Toronto officials said their lineup would have 50 characteristics, up from 245 last year.
The Telluride Film Festival in Colorado has promised to host a physical event (Sept. 4-7), as well as the Venice Film Festival (Sept. 2-12).
Ms Jackson said the kind of outside cinema Sundance specializes in was more important than ever, “with the dominant narratives needing to be challenged and we all need to examine ourselves more deeply and learn in the midst of the international trial on racial justice “
She added: “Sundance is a well-oiled machine that means a lot to so many people. I thought to myself when I got the job, ‘I shouldn’t break this. I must not break this. But we should Break it to find the moment. We must open it.
