The Sundance Film Festival is venturing to a new town.
After a year of deliberations, copious site visits and scores of plane rides, the board of the Sundance Institute has chosen Boulder, Colo., to host its film festival beginning January 2027.
“Boulder is a tech town, a college town, it’s a really creative town,” Eugene Hernandez, the festival’s director, said. “It’s just a really creative place. And that integration of the artsy community with the university side of it all is really dynamic.”
It’s also 10 times the size of Park City, Utah, where the festival has been held since the actor and director Robert Redford started it in 1981. As the festival kept growing, Park City began bursting at the seams.
Ebs Burnough, chair of the Sundance Institute, said the move to a town at the base of the mountains would help Sundance maintain its connection to the natural world. “It’s easy to get drawn into that amazing thing that Robert Redford really believed in, which was that commune between the artist and nature, and to actually be able to get away from the verticalness of cities.”
To frequent Sundance goers, the move to Boulder is likely to be less jarring than shifting the location to Cincinnati, one of two other finalist cities. Salt Lake City was also in the running, and the loss of the festival will be significant to the state of Utah. The festival generated $132 million in revenue for the state in 2024, according to a report released by the festival.
Sundance announced last April that it was exploring the possibility of a new home. Park City just didn’t have enough movie theaters, and lodging prices had become exorbitant. A good portion of the locals were ready for it to go, too. While Sundance added 1,730 jobs, according to the festival, it also kept skiers away during a prime month of winter snow.
“Words cannot express the sincere gratitude I have for Park City, the state of Utah and all those in the Utah community that have helped to build the organization,” Mr. Redford said in a statement.
Boulder, about 30 miles outside Denver, has around 100,000 residents, compared with Park City’s 8,200. The festival intends to center its activities in the city’s downtown and its nearby theaters and venues and the Pearl Street Mall, a pedestrian street with restaurants and cafes. The festival will also collaborate with the University of Colorado Boulder.
Initially, over 100 U.S. locations offered to host the festival. Sundance winnowed them down to the 67 that could meet a variety of requirements, including adequate screening and lodging locations and proximity to a sizable international airport. The Sundance selection committee then invited 13 of those cities to submit a proposal. Six of them — Atlanta; Boulder; Cincinnati; Louisville, Ky.; Salt Lake City; and Santa Fe, N.M. — were later selected for site visits.
Sundance will not be the only significant film festival held in Colorado. The Telluride Film Festival has been operating over Labor Day weekend in Telluride, a mountain town in the southwest part of the state, for over 50 years.
