Park City is about to host one more Sundance. The festival’s famous queues, celebrity sightings, and cold-weather hustle are all back. But the question hanging over Main Street is not which film will break out. It is whether Sundance can keep its identity intact after losing its founder and leaving the town that helped make it a global brand.
The Sundance Film Festival opens in Park City, Utah, with about 90 movies premiering across 10 days, according to reporting from The Associated Press carried by PBS NewsHour. The lineup is stacked with recognizable names, from Natalie Portman to pop star and cinephile Charli XCX. It is also a closing chapter. This is the final Park City edition before the festival relocates to Boulder, Colorado next year, and it is the first festival since founder Robert Redford died in September.
A farewell tour that still has to sell tickets
Sundance has always sold itself as a haven for the scrappy and unknown. Park City, for all its ski-town gloss, became the physical proof of that promise. You could walk from a tiny debut to a star-packed premiere, then overhear the post-screening verdict in a coffee line.
That mixture is still the pitch for this year’s “last one” in Park City. The festival expects the usual surge of pop-ups and sponsors on Main Street, plus the marathon lines for screenings and volunteer crews working in subfreezing temperatures, per the AP report.
But this edition carries a second job. It has to reassure filmmakers, donors, industry power brokers, and Park City loyalists that the move is a transition, not a surrender.
Redford is gone, and the festival is trying to keep him present
The Redford factor is not subtle this year. The festival is programming what the AP calls a “through-line” of legacy, including screenings of restored titles associated with Sundance history: ‘Little Miss Sunshine,’ ‘Mysterious Skin,’ ‘House Party,’ and ‘Humpday.’ There is also a screening of what the AP identifies as Redford’s first truly independent film, the 1969 sports drama ‘Downhill Racer.’
Tributes are also expected at the Sundance Institute’s fundraising event, with honorees including Chloe Zhao, Ed Harris, and Nia DaCosta, according to the same report. The message is clear. This is not just a festival saying goodbye to a location. It is an institution reminding everyone who built the house.
That institutional memory still matters to filmmakers who came up through Sundance’s ecosystem of labs and support. “Sundance has always been about showcasing and fostering independent movies in America. Without that, so many filmmakers wouldn’t have had the careers they have,” filmmaker Gregg Araki told The Associated Press.
The Park City paradox: indie grit meets sponsor gloss
The Sundance argument has always been a balancing act. The festival sells independence while operating at a scale that attracts corporate attention, prestige seekers, and the kind of celebrity traffic that turns a mountain town into a temporary backlot.
This year, that contrast is part of the story, not a footnote. The AP report notes sponsors in full force on Main Street, even as the festival doubles down on the language of discovery and artistic risk.
Jay Duplass, a veteran of multiple Sundance trips, described the old magic in practical terms. “It feels very special to be part of the last one in Park City,” he told the AP. “It’s just a super special place where, you know there are going to be movies there with giant stars and there’s also going to be some kids there who made movies for a few thousand dollars. And they’re all going to mix.”
That line is doing a lot of work. Mixing is the brand. Mixing is also what is hardest to preserve when a festival becomes a global pilgrimage, and when the venue changes force everyone to renegotiate where deals get done and who controls access.
Stars, titles, and the programmed promise of “something for everyone”
The 2026 slate is built to look like classic Sundance, with marquee names and left-field swings living side by side.
Among the starry projects highlighted in the AP report: Cathy Yan’s art world satire ‘The Gallerist,’ with Portman, Jenna Ortega, Sterling K. Brown, Zach Galifianakis, and Da’Vine Joy Randolph. Rachel Lambert’s romantic drama ‘Carousel’ pairs Chris Pine and Jenny Slate as high school exes who reconnect later in life.
Araki arrives with ‘I Want Your Sex,’ in which Olivia Wilde plays a provocative artist who draws in a younger muse portrayed by Cooper Hoffman. Araki described the project in a way that sounds like Sundance bait on purpose and with a wink: “It’s kind of a sex-positive love letter to Gen Z,” he told the AP. “It’s a comedy. It has elements of mystery, thriller, murder, a little bit of ‘Sunset Boulevard’ … it’s fun, it’s colorful, it’s sexy. It’s a ride.”
Wilde also directs ‘The Invite,’ co-starring Seth Rogen as a couple unraveling over the course of an evening. The lineup also includes ‘Wicker’ with Olivia Colman and Alexander Skarsgard, ‘Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass’ with Zoey Deutch and Jon Hamm, and ‘The Weight’ starring Ethan Hawke and Russell Crowe, per the AP.
Then there is Charli XCX, described by the AP as a noted cinephile, popping up in the self-referential mockumentary ‘The Moment’ and appearing in ‘The Gallerist’ and ‘I Want Your Sex’ as well.
In other words, Sundance is playing the hits. It is promising discovery, but it is also guaranteeing recognizable faces for cameras outside theaters.
Docs still carry Sundance’s credibility, and its arguments
If any part of the festival still reliably produces cultural and political aftershocks, it is the documentary program. The AP report points to the category’s track record of later Oscar nominations and wins.
This year’s doc slate includes films about high-profile figures, including Brittney Griner, Courtney Love, Salman Rushdie, Billie Jean King, Nelson Mandela, and comedian Maria Bamford, according to the AP.
It also includes projects aimed at headline-grade subjects. The AP notes ‘When A Witness Recants,’ in which Ta-Nehisi Coates revisits a 1983 murder connected to his Baltimore middle school. ‘American Doctor’ follows three professionals trying to help in Gaza. ‘Who Killed Alex Odeh’ examines the 1985 assassination of a Palestinian American activist in Southern California. ‘Everybody To Kenmure Street’ focuses on civil resistance to deportations in Glasgow in 2021. ‘Silenced’ tracks human rights lawyer Jennifer Robinson and what the AP describes as her fight against the weaponization of defamation laws against victims of gender violence.
Then Sundance does what it always does. It tosses a curveball. The AP highlights ‘The History of Concrete,’ in which filmmaker John Wilson applies lessons from a “how to sell a Hallmark movie” seminar to a documentary about concrete.
That combination, celebrity portraits, politically charged reporting, and genre-bending experiments, is the festival’s core sales pitch. It is also a test case for the Boulder era. Can Sundance keep that range without the Park City machinery that audiences and industry have been trained to navigate?
Boulder is next. The real question is what follows the move
The AP report frames the shift as more than logistics. It is “profound transition” after decades of relative stability. Park City is not just a venue. It is a shorthand for Sundance itself, complete with iconic locations like the Egyptian Theatre and Eccles that filmmakers talk about like rites of passage.
Araki, per the AP, agreed with a long-running truth inside festival culture: Sundance had outgrown Park City. He also made the counterpoint that the location is ultimately secondary to the institution. “The legacy and the tradition of Sundance will continue no matter where it is,” Araki told the AP.
That is the official theory. The on-the-ground reality is messier. Festivals are ecosystems. They depend on habit, proximity, and a thousand informal meetings that happen because everyone knows exactly where to stand.
Daniel Roher, returning with two films including ‘Tuner’ and ‘The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist,’ described the moment as an institutional rebirth. “We’re going through a weird moment in the world … There’s something that strikes me about an institution that has been evergreen, that seems so entrenched going through its own transition and rebirth,” he told The Associated Press.
Sundance’s farewell to Park City is being sold as a celebration. It is also a live stress test, staged in front of the very people the festival cannot afford to lose. Next year, the festival lands in Boulder. This year, it is still in the town that made its legend. And it is doing it without the founder who could walk into a room and remind everyone why this whole circus started.
