Why is the Sundance Film Festival so important to Hollywood?

Hollywood has had a very strange year in 2023, to put it mildly. With prolonged writer and cast strikes, underperforming tentpole films, mergers and acquisitions, and streaming wars causing billions of dollars in losses… where can we find a little hope? The future of the industry?

As it turns out, the small ski town outside Salt Lake City offers exactly that every January. We went to the Sundance Film Festival again this year, and in one of the most uncertain times in recent show business memory, we spoke to several of the festival’s filmmakers and top programmers about why film festivals remain an essential part of the ecosystem, and how they can be even more important. To move forward.

For the filmmakers, of course, there’s the joy of being there. As Kelly O’Sullivan, the writer and co-director of the absurdly charming drama Ghostlight, told us, “It’s like meeting a celebrity that you’ve only heard about or seen pictures of, and then you’re here and you’re like, ‘Oh my God, I know this theater.’

Moreover, there is every hope that your film will play well and get selected. After all, that’s the spirit of film festivals in general; To be seen by buyers in the larger film industry distribution system. But why Sundance is so important to the film industry, to me, boils down to a few specific points. In the beginning, it’s all about identifying trends.

Point 1 – Identify trends

For a film to succeed, not only do the audience need to care about seeing it, but the filmmakers obviously need to be invested in the story as well. According to John Nin, senior programmer and director of strategic initiatives at Sundance, an estimated 17,000 films have been submitted to the festival.

“If you count the shorts and features, it was huge, it was a record,” Nin told us.

Identifying the biggest trends in the industry based on 17,000 submissions to Sundance may seem like a chicken-or-the-egg scenario. Does the direction take into account the festival’s programming or does the festival lean towards the direction it likes in its programming? According to Nin, it’s probably neither of those options. During our interview, he told us, “Leaning on it wasn’t a conscious choice, and in fact, if you saw the wide pool that we were drawing from, you might not even feel like leaning on it. It’s just that that’s just the reality of what’s happening now.”

Thus, at a festival designed to showcase films to potential buyers, those buyers get a sample of the kind of films that are actually being made and, more importantly, how they are received by audiences.

Point 2 – Communication and Credibility

Obviously, what films really connect with audiences is important, but we caught up with Kelly O’Sullivan outside a pizzeria on Main Street in Park City to learn more about what it’s like to meet an audience at Sundance.

“What we felt when watching this film with an audience was that people would come up to us afterwards and tell us what the film meant to them,” she said. “People will share their personal experiences, and you won’t understand that when you’re watching a film at home on your laptop alone.” But laughing and crying with a group of people, that’s always been the dream of this movie. “Sundance attracts such an amazing audience that we were thrilled by the response and sense of connection we gained from sharing it.”

Alex Thompson, Kelly’s co-director at Ghostlight, sees this connection with the audience as not only validation of their art, but a degree of authenticity that only comes with a big screen.

“I think Sundance gives context to a film that could be considered small. It makes something so independent seem like it justifies the theater and the audience.” Tell us, in the snow outside a really good pizza place. “This is a message from (Sundance programmers) to buyers and distributors and audiences in the country and around the world that this film deserves a life beyond the link of your screen or your laptop. And that’s a really powerful thing for actual independent films to continue to exist. We need places that say, ‘Hey, Come check this out. This thing, this is big. It looks small, but it’s big. And we saw it first.” “That’s very powerful. This is a great gift.”

That’s how it’s always been at Sundance. That huge, powerful gift that Alex Thompson mentioned is one of the reasons Sundance is in its 40th edition, and is seen as one of those reasons, if not one. the, The most important festival in the world. A place for studios to find the next thing, based on trends that may not be obvious to the industry otherwise. This covers Sundance’s past and present, but what about the future?

Point 3 – Latest stuff available

Film festivals are generally about the latest stuff. Take this year’s Ponyboi, a film written, produced by, and starring River Gallo, a bisexual filmmaker who uses familiar gangster movie tropes, as they put it, to serve the audience some vegetables with dessert.

“I think people are hungry and hungry for the unexpected, for the weird, for things they’ve never seen before,” River told us outside this wonderful bookstore. “I feel like some of the most successful films this year have been ones that have been very subversive and controversial, and I feel very strongly that this film also walks that line of being unconventional and unusual, but also very familiar and heartwarming and just a really wild ride in New Jersey.”

The film’s director, Esteban Arango, agrees and sees a future for the film defined by boundary-pushing cinema, especially given the old-fashioned environment in Hollywood today.

“I think Sundance is instrumental in our industry,” Arango says. “I mean they’ve always been at the forefront of creating this taste, and I feel like people are tired of more of the same. We need a platform cleaner, and that always comes from these places, independent filmmaking, people taking risks for new kinds of stories so I think the passage The wave of weirdness we’re experiencing will explode and then we’ll find new voices and new opportunities to tell new stories with diverse perspectives and change the game. “It’s always evolving and always starting in places like this.”

But while we’re talking about the future, let’s talk about the whole future. The documentary Eternal You examines the emerging digital immortality industry and how it affects our ability to grieve the loss of loved ones. AI has, of course, played an enormous role in the industry in recent years, serving as a focal point in labor negotiations with both actors and writers on strike in 2023. Filmmakers Hans Bloch and Moritz Riswick pointed to the importance of Sundance going forward regarding the inevitable growth for artificial intelligence

“Sundance highlights the quality of human creativity that will never be automated in the same way that humans create,” Moritz told us, drinking coffee next to some beautiful pine trees outside Sundance headquarters. “When we talk about AI being creative, that’s a misleading way to put it, because what AI can’t imitate is this very unique form of expressing ourselves as humans.”

Where this becomes important to the industry, it actually speaks to some of the biggest issues in labor disputes over the past year: the role of artificial intelligence in Hollywood productions. According to Moritz, “A festival like Sundance will actually be more important because it will highlight this very individual and unique form of creativity whereas Hollywood will likely lose a lot of these qualities as it automates more parts of its productions.”

But if the industry has indeed lost some of its individuality and unique creativity in recent years, is this necessarily a bad thing for independent filmmakers?

Point 4 – No pressure

Scott Cummings, director of Satan’s World, a fascinating real-life slice of Satanism, sees Hollywood’s stagnation as a reason for liberation. Oddly enough, the thing that convinced him to do this was a video game.

“I played The Last of Us when it came out, and when I played that game, I was like, who needs to make a regular feature film after this?” Scott remembers standing outside some retail space across the street from the Egyptian Theater. “This is a great movie to watch And Being in it. Feature films can’t really compete with this. So I think this is the time to actually do whatever you want and push things and make things that can’t be games or TV… and people should see them in a theater.”

For what it’s worth, if there’s a movie I’ve ever seen where the director clearly does what he wants, it’s The Devil’s World. She says she found a home at Sundance alongside dramas about Chicago community theater, gender-bending crime thrillers, and documentaries about the role of artificial intelligence in modern human grief. Everything About Sundance.

The role of the festival has always been to present new and interesting stories from new and interesting filmmakers, and we hope that will never change. But film festivals, as a necessary part of the industry, are easy to overlook for part of Sundance.

Work is cyclical in itself, like anything else. Audiences tired of the Hays Code and catchy musicals? No problem, here come the new Hollywood authors. Tired of the muscle-bound action heroes of the 80s? Can we introduce you to Michael Keaton in a rubber suit? And now, it looks like the spectacle of massive CGI and shared universes is running out of steam in the same way. Whether or not any film at Sundance is an indicator of what’s next in the works, the festival seems to be taking its responsibility to the industry seriously. So, back to where I started, what about this hope for the future of the film industry that I’ve been searching for? We’ll let our friend, long-time festival programmer John Nen, take us home.

“I’ve been here long enough to see the ups and downs of the industry and to see other moments where we’ve faced difficult circumstances,” he told us in the luxurious interview suite at Sundance headquarters. “But perhaps the brightest beacon is that we have always known that there is a very clear connection between artist and audience at this festival, the way in which films are received, and the enthusiasm that there is for them. To me, this is an indication that there is an appetite on a fundamental level for these “Films. There is a deep desire among audiences to hear personal stories, independent stories, and the kinds of creativity, innovation and pushing the format that we bring together at the festival. That’s what we believe in.”