I have fond memories of sitting in the back row of the little Holiday Cinema 3 on Sundance Film Festival with indie manager Bingham Ray, in acquisition mode, watching a new movie that only the programmers had ever seen.
Back in the 90s through the depths, the excitement of discovering the next “In the bedroom”, “sex, lies and video tape” or Jennifer Lawrence was palpable, when there were plenty of buyers for American stories and the indie market was booming. It wasn’t all about celebrity suites and swag giveaways back then. The burgeoning Main Street parties were always a must-avoid, except for one: Cinetic’s Monday night was always tough to get into, but you learned everything you needed to know in the upstairs room at Zoom.
That time, and Zoom — and its one-time owner and Sundance founder Robert Redford – is gone. But as Sundance prepares for its Park City finale in January 2026, the industry is wondering what the first Sundance Boulder edition in 2027 will look like. Many hope that the festival will decrease in scope.
My first visit on the 13th Middleburg Film Festival, set at billionaire founder Sheila Johnson’s posh Salamander resort in the rolling hills of Virginia outside Washington, DC, reminded me of the fun of a small film Festival. If only 45 new features are available, every participant enters the premises. If the press and talent guests are a select few, there is more access to the people who roam the halls.
I walked into a library circle the night Oscar winner Chloé Zhao (whose “Hamnet” shared the Audience Award with “Rental Family”) admitted she’d like to open a funeral home. I had lunch with Rose Byrne and Mary Bronstein (“If I Had Legs I’d Kick You”), Nina Hoss (“Hedda”) and Zoey Deutch (“Nouvelle Vague”). I had dinner with Middleburgh producer-advisors Ron Yerxa and Albert Berger (“Little Miss Sunshine”) and “Train Dreams” auteur Clint Bentley (“Sing Sing”) and his star Joel Edgerton. And at the annual barbecue, I hung out with songwriter Diane Warren, who is still hoping to win a real Oscar after 16 nominations, as opposed to settling for an honorary one. (For the 2023 Oscars show, she practiced her song “Applause” on a dummy piano, she admitted, which turned out to be live accompaniment for singer Sofia Carson on the broadcast. It’s grace under fire!)
Good stuff, right? Over the years I have gotten to know industry people on a small scale festivals around the country, from California’s Mill Valley, Santa Barbara, Palm Springs and Sonoma to Florida’s Sarasota, Miami and Fort Lauderdale, Washington’s Orcas Island, Oregon’s Ashland and New Yorkis the Hamptons. I made friends and expanded my ever-growing filmmaking community.
The question for any small festival is how to manage growth and expansion. Do you need to keep growing? Middleburg Director Susan Koch is considering these questions now, as demand for attendance grows. She doesn’t want her local audience to not get into her screenings, which happens with regular pass holders on Telluride ($780), who often wait in line for popular titles only to see most of the seats taken by priority pass holders ($4900).
Telluride director Julie Huntsinger, who is in her 20th festival, keeps the program at around 60 titles. She can’t control rising costs and price cuts in the rich mountain town of Colorado. “It’s a box canyon,” she said on the phone. “The prices are going to be whatever they’re going to be. But in terms of growing, we’re small, we’re going to stick to the same number of sessions.” At Telluride, customers actually pay for the cheaper passes, which haven’t risen in price in 16 years.
The risk of a festival becoming too great — Toronto plays more than 200 functions — is that it overwhelms its participants with too many choices. “People want that curation,” said one festival director, who criticizes festivals like Toronto for programming too many films that aren’t “a bold new voice taking a chance. I hope Sundance is a little more concise. Bigger is not better.”
Another festival director added: “New York and Toronto are selling titles in the independent acquisitions market. You never know what’s going to be the center of attention there.”
The Toronto International Film Festival has declined, indeed. Since 2015, feature films in the Official Selection have steadily declined from 287 to 210 in 2025. “We went on a diet in the mid-2010s,” said TIFF CEO Cameron Bailey. “People were just scrambling, trying to see everything, and buyers were trying to see all the sales titles. They felt there was too much on offer. It was hard to tell what to focus on the most. They wanted a narrower selection.”
Bailey also made efforts to make the festival more walkable, eliminating theaters that required transportation. Now every screening room is within 10 minutes walking distance.
Bailey sees festivals as “living things, and they have to evolve,” he said. “Typically, once festivals catch on with the industry and the public, they grow in size or at least in ambition. Sundance has an opportunity to be completely reset.”
On a much smaller scale than Toronto, though in a larger city, Film at Lincoln Center’s New York film festival has stayed roughly the same size for years, with additional sidebars here and there: This year’s slate was 29 films. The festival books two films per night in its main venue, Alice Tully Hall. “It’s the best experience for the audience,” said Film at Lincoln Center President Daniel Battsek.
As the indie market contracts, what should Sundance’s primary role be in 2027 and beyond? “Sundance has a long-standing and well-deserved reputation for nurturing and anointing new talent; this process and the festival play a critical role in the independent film ecosystem,” said Battsek, pointing to a film like Jordan Peele’s Sundance breakout Get Out in 2017. “The audience reaction created a bit of a success of all kinds of success.”
In the case of Sundance, as festival director Eugene Hernandez often points out, the first half of the festival has long been louder and more crowded, while the mood changes as the second half returns to the quieter film-focused Sundance of yesteryear. Sundance has also spawned a smaller sidebar festival each year, first in London, then, in recent years, Mexico City.
Separated from its fancy ski resort setting, will Sundance Boulder return the festival to its indie roots and resist the pressure to allow Main Street’s corporate suites and raucous parties? Hernandez remains focused on Sundance 2026, and his team has yet to make many key decisions about Sundance 2027, from screening venues and hotels to the festival center. They have arranged screenings with the local film community, which includes enthusiastic film students.
Sundance Boulder promises many changes from icy Park City, which had become daunting to navigate. It may be tempting for the festival to expand to a more spacious city. Sundance has already announced plans to center its activities in the walkable downtown area, including the pedestrianized Pearl Street, wrote IndieWire’s Kate Erbland, “with access to restaurants, coffee shops, vintage theaters, performance art spaces, a multiplex, university facilities and other auditoriums.”
As Sundance makes its transition to Boulder, we can hope that its leadership not only builds a more sustainable film festival, but resists the temptation to expand into Boulder’s playground.
