"In January, 2027, the Sundance Film Festival will be held not in its longtime home of Park City, Utah, but in Boulder, Colorado. The experience promises to be bracingly new, chaotic, and exciting, but there was inevitably a melancholy tinge to this year's edition, which became, in effect-and affect-an eleven-day farewell. My Sundance unfurled as a series of absences; at times, it was as though the place's magic were seeping away before my eyes."
"The weather was part of it. Drought conditions were in effect, and, until the seventh day of the festival, there was hardly a flake of snow. For the first time that I can remember, I didn't slip on black ice on my way to a screening, or slosh through a pool that I'd mistaken for a puddle-a relief, yes, but also a disappointment."
"Another absence: there were no screenings at the Egyptian Theatre, whose old-fashioned marquee had long made it the festival's most recognizable venue. The theatre, situated on the city's Main Street, is to become a live-event space; the film projectors have already been removed. I find that reality strangely terrifying, if not quite as terrifying as some of the Sundance movies I've watched at the Egyptian."
The Sundance Film Festival will relocate to Boulder, Colorado, in January 2027, marking an end to its Park City era. The most recent edition functioned as an eleven-day farewell characterized by notable absences and a melancholy tinge. Drought and scant snowfall altered familiar winter rituals and underscored climate-change realities. Iconic venues, including the Egyptian Theatre, ceased film screenings and are being repurposed as live-event spaces, with projectors removed. The move combined excitement about new possibilities with nostalgia for longstanding traditions and physical traces of the festival's history in Utah.
Read at The New Yorker
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