Utah News Dispatch
Nostalgia in the spotlight as Sundance hosts its last festival in Utah
People gather outside the Egyptian Theatre in Park City on Wednesday, Jan. 21, 2026 before the start of the Sundance Film Festival. (Photo by Spenser Heaps for Utah News Dispatch)
Park City’s main street will flood lines of expecting Sundance Festival fans and movie aficionados for the last time. It’s the last Utah winter when a special kind of people watching happens 30 miles away from Salt Lake City, while in theaters, new stars are born and the legacy of the past Little Miss Sunshines and Whiplashes are still revered decades after their notable premieres at the festival.
More than four decades after its birth in the state, the Sundance Film Festival started its Utah swan song last week with a festival dedicated to its history in the Beehive State before officially moving to Boulder, Colorado next year.
John Nein, the festival’s senior programmer and director of strategy, still remembers the big snowstorm that fell over Park City in 1996, the first year he attended the festival.
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“I had come here for the first time because I had sensed that something was happening here, and it really was the case,” Nein said. “It was such a transformative moment for me.”
The one trip turned into an annual pilgrimage to Utah
This year, though without much snow, he still had “a lot of feelings” about this last Utah Sundance.
The 2026 festival was marked by an attack against Florida Democratic Rep. Maxwell Frost at a non-affiliated event in which a man is accused of making racially charged remarks, and punching the lawmaker in the face. Police are investigating the case as a possible hate crime.
However, nostalgia was as large a theme as the festival’s history in the state. A grown up Abigail Breslin alongside most of the cast of “Little Miss Sunshine” returned for a special screening of the movie celebrating its 20 years, and director Guillermo Del Toro serenaded guests with mariachi after a screening of a remastered “Cronos,” 32 years after its premiere.
“But we also thought a lot that there’s a community that comes here together, and they had that same experience that I had and they just want to be together and watch new films from new voices and be kind of transported to different places,” Nein said about this year’s planning.
Utah’s failed bid
A bid to keep the festival in Utah failed last year despite a proposal to extend events to Salt Lake City to solve some of the logistical issues of hosting the festival in a small ski resort city, and the inclusion of $3.5 million in the 2025 state budget to encourage the festival to stay.
Shortly before organizers announced their decision to move the festival to Colorado, the Utah Legislature approved a controversial law aimed at banning LGBTQ+ flags from schools and government buildings, a move that, according to a Deadline report, threatened Utah’s hopes of keeping Sundance.
Organizers said in the relocation announcement that Boulder’s “small-town charm with an engaged community, distinctive natural beauty, and a vibrant arts scene” made it the ideal location for the festival’s growth.
“Boulder’s welcoming environment aligns with the ethos the Sundance Film Festival developed in Park City — growing with a community rooted in independent thought, artistic exploration, and social impact,” the Sundance Institute said in a news release.
Asked for his thoughts on the festival’s final days, Gov. Spencer Cox’s office referred to his past comments during his monthly news conference broadcast by PBS Utah.
Before the move to Colorado was made public, the governor said the Sundance Board of Trustees had assured that political issues wouldn’t play into their decision and called the comments from Deadline’s unnamed source “disingenuous.”
“If that’s an issue you really care about, you think you’d want to stay and fight for that issue,” Cox said in March. “So look, Sundance is going to make their decision again, we were told, based on what is best for Sundance, what is best economically for Sundance.”
Later, at his April conference, Cox said his phone hadn’t stopped ringing with offers to do “something bigger and better than Sundance” that would incorporate not just film, but music and tech.
“There’s a lot of people that want to do something, we just don’t know what that something is yet,” Cox said. “And so that’s what’s going to be happening over the course of the next month or two, (is) bringing those people together and putting those ideas on paper, seeing what it looks like, and then potentially moving forward.”
However, there hasn’t been an announcement of a clear Sundance replacement yet.
Future expectations
When discussing the festival’s relocation, it was clear for organizers that continuing the Park City run wasn’t financially sustainable, Nein said. With the move, he hopes independent filmmakers are able to sustain themselves.
About his expectations for the festival’s future in Colorado, Nein said the festival will continue to have conversation-starting programs “about what’s important in the world.”
“That’s always been the conversation. We put together a program that is about a range of voices, a range of thoughts and feelings and personal stories, and some of them, political, social, science, technology, you name it,” he said. “There’s been such a broad range of work here. But I think it comes from the very strong value that we all started with, which is, we’re a place for artists to express their view of the world.”
And, in Nein’s view, looking at the legacy of the festival and its future is the same because the community that has driven independent film for the last 40 years is the same that will move it forward.
“When this independent movement started in the early ’80s, there were stories about having to just pull people into the theater, ‘please come watch a movie,’ and then it went through a really, really strong moment when you saw the industry mature,” Nein said. “There are challenges now, but to me, the thing that is the same is that you have independent storytellers who want to tell stories their way.”
But, without an immediate replacement, Sundance’s departure is leaving an economic hole in Utah.
Over 85,000 people attended the festival in person during its 2025 iteration, a 17% increase from 2024, according to a study the Sundance Institute commissioned. During the 11 festival days out-of-state visitors spent about $162.4 million in Utah and over $21.1 million were generated in state and local tax revenue.
However, the Utah Film Commission said that after 40 years of the festival the state’s “film industry has grown far beyond one event.”
“We’ve cultivated a thriving ecosystem of talent, infrastructure, and incentives that will continue to attract filmmakers and productions to our beautiful state,” Virginia Pearce, Utah Film Commission director said in a prepared statement. “We remain focused on investing in a strong film industry — one that drives our creative economy and inspires the next generation of artists and audiences. We believe that Utah is a place full of innovation and creativity. We want to see that thrive and grow organically.”
