PARK CITY, Utah — With the 2025 Sundance Movie Competition underway, Utah leaders, locals and longtime attendees are making a ultimate push — that might embody paying hundreds of thousands of {dollars} — to maintain the world-renowned movie competition as its administrators contemplate uprooting.
Hundreds of festivalgoers affixed vibrant yellow stickers to their winter coats that learn “Preserve Sundance in Utah” in a last-ditch effort to persuade competition management and state officers to maintain it in Park Metropolis, its house of 41 years.
Gov. Spencer Cox stated beforehand that Utah wouldn’t throw as a lot cash on the competition as different states hoping to lure it away. Now his workplace is urging the Legislature to carve out $3 million for Sundance within the state finances, weeks earlier than the unbiased movie competition is predicted to choose a house for the subsequent decade.
It might retain a small presence in picturesque Park Metropolis and heart itself in close by Salt Lake Metropolis, or transfer to a different finalist — Cincinnati, Ohio, or Boulder, Colorado — starting in 2027.
“Sundance is Utah, and Utah is Sundance. You possibly can’t actually separate these two,” Cox stated. “That is your private home, and we desperately hope it will likely be your private home perpetually.”
Competition Director Eugene Hernandez informed reporters final week that they’d not made a ultimate resolution. An announcement is predicted this 12 months by early spring.
Colorado is attempting to additional sweeten its supply. The state is contemplating laws giving as much as $34 million in tax incentives to movie festivals like Sundance by means of 2036 — on prime of the $1.5 million in funds already authorised to lure the Utah competition to its neighboring state.
Cincinnati authorised a decision allocating $2.5 million to Sundance if competition leaders relocate to southwest Ohio. But cash might not be the last word draw.
Sundance leaders say the competition has outgrown the ski city it helped placed on the map many years in the past, they usually fear it has developed an air of exclusivity that takes the main focus away from the movies. A perfect house would make Sundance extra centralized, reasonably priced and accessible to all who admire unbiased movie.
Some festivalgoers and business leaders fear Sundance would lose its id exterior its idyllic mountain hometown.
Roger and Carin Ehrenberg, main donors to the competition, stated they’d cease attending recurrently if the competition was exterior Utah. Sundance is a “magical expertise” for the New York Metropolis philanthropists, they stated, due largely to the ambiance in Park Metropolis.
“If it goes to Cincinnati, perhaps as soon as in a blue moon we might go, but it surely would not be an everyday factor,” Carin Ehrenberg stated. “For us, it’ll lose its enchantment.”
The couple stated they’d probably proceed to donate even when they didn’t attend.
Nineteen years of fond recollections at Sundance helped encourage Dr. Rhonda Taubin to relocate her household from Atlanta to Heber Metropolis — Park Metropolis’s neighboring city. She has no ties to the movie business however has change into a fervent advocate for protecting the competition in her new house state.
This 12 months, she and her buddies distributed 1000’s of “Preserve Sundance in Utah” stickers — and one other that learn “NOhio for Sundance” — to point out the competition how a lot it means to the area people.
“I actually am not a film buff, however my different girlfriends are, and with the ability to share all that we have been by means of as ladies, as moms, as wives, as daughters, I do not need it to finish,” Taubin stated. “We watch provocative films that make us discuss and take into consideration issues that perhaps we have by no means thought of earlier than. Utah could be at an enormous loss with out these conversations.”
If Sundance stays in Utah, the competition’s former director John Cooper stated main changes are wanted to enhance transportation between Salt Lake Metropolis and Park Metropolis and make lodging for filmmakers extra reasonably priced.
Cooper, who led the competition from 2009 to 2020, stated he could be unhappy to see Sundance shift away from actor and filmmaker Robert Redford’s unique imaginative and prescient. Its very identify comes from Redford’s character within the 1969 movie “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Child.”
“I felt like my position was to be a keeper of the flame for Robert Redford and his legacy,” Cooper informed The Related Press. “The mountains of Utah, this was his imaginative and prescient. It’s bizarre to say ‘Sundance in Ohio.’ However I feel it might go wherever. What it does for a group is so robust.”
On the pink carpet this week, many have been cut up on whether or not Sundance ought to keep or go.
Actor Elijah Wooden urged the competition to stay in Park Metropolis, saying the placement is a part of its DNA.
Others have been open to it relocating. Actor Tessa Thompson, who serves on the Sundance Institute’s board of trustees, stated the competition might keep its id in a brand new metropolis.
“I feel that Sundance has extra to do with the spirit and group, and I feel that is evergreen,” Thompson stated. “No matter the place Sundance is, Sundance will at all times be.”