Kicking off its 11-day run Thursday and showcasing 88 feature films painstakingly selected from a record-high 16,000 submissions this year, the Sundance Film Festival remains a sui generis staging ground for the kind of buzzy, splashy titles that tend to explode out of Park City and ripple across popular culture.
The mordant, Rose Byrne-starring dramedy If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, with its Conan O’Brien cameo? Director Bill Condon’s remake of the novel adaptation-turned-Broadway musical-turned-Oscar-winning 1985-drama Kiss of the Spider Woman, co-starring Jennifer Lopez? Director David France’s documentary Free Leonard Peltier which premieres just days after President Biden actually freed the well-known Indigenous activist (who was convicted of killing two FBI agents and spent the last five decades behind bars)? Any or all of them could become inescapable water-cooler conversation over the next twelve months if Sundance’s past remains its prologue.
But business as usual at Sundance is hardly guaranteed this year, with catastrophic L.A. wildfires still burning, an impending move from the festival’s longtime base in Utah’s Wasatch mountains, and a recent shitstorm of corporate layoffs, depressed media stock prices, and metastasizing unemployment in film projects. In the afterglow of CODA, which won Sundance’s Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award before going on to win Best Picture at the 2022 Academy Awards, Hollywood still looks to Park City as a blast-off pad for future Oscar bait. Toward that end, Jesse Eisenberg’s awards season contender A Real Pain (nominated for a Best Original Screenplay Oscar Thursday morning) and art-house dark horse A Different Man (Best Makeup and Hairstyling), in addition to the Best Feature Documentary nominees Sugarcane, Black Box Diaries, Porcelain War and Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat all got their start at Sundance ‘24.
But more generally, Sundance can be understood to provide a kind of bellwether for the health of independent film as both a cinematic genre and business model. “It just gives you this snapshot, almost like a crystal ball,” says Eugene Hernandez, the fest’s director and head of public programming. “You get this moment to peer into the future. These are the films that will be coming later in the year. It is a great moment to take stock of what the year in film has told us, and what do we see coming around the bend?”
Despite the industry being significantly diminished by twin Hollywood strikes and pandemic hangover, a cross-section of independent producers hoping to sell films at Sundance tell Vulture they are, nonetheless, bullish on indie filmdom. While the boom times — when platforms like Amazon showed up at the festival with a veritable Brinks truck full of cash to splash out on an entire slate of films — may be firmly in the past, industry machers say there is a wider variety of outlets acquiring independent movies for distribution, both streaming and theatrically, than at any time in recent memory. “If you make a good movie nowadays for a moderate price, I believe there are 10 places that can competitively buy that film,” says Josh Peters, a former director of acquisitions at Focus Features who is a producer on this year’s “coming-of-age drama where the person doesn’t get to come of age” Ricky. “Buyers are being more pragmatic. And I’m noticing a group of financiers who are willing, in the aggregate, to put in a couple hundred thousand here, a couple hundred thousand there. So there’s an ecosystem of buyers telling artists, Take risks. Challenge yourself. Do what’s important to you.”
At the Toronto International Film Festival in September, producers Duncan Montgomery and Alex Orlovsky premiered and sold distribution rights for The Last Showgirl to Roadside Attractions, then launched a quick-turnaround theatrical release and awards-qualifying run in December. Now in Park City with the Premieres section thriller Lurker (about a young man who becomes obsessed with an up-and-coming pop star played by Saltburn’s Archie Madekwe), Montgomery contrasts Sundance’s sunny sense of optimism with the kind of mad dash into awards season that a TIFF acquisition deal most often entails. “It feels like there’s a bit of a wind in the sails of indie films,” Montgomery says. “I’m not going to say I know what buyers think. But I’m hopeful that there’s a positive vibe going in. And there’s something about the new year: [Sundance’s] placement in the third week in January. There’s promise. There’s hope. As opposed to those fall festivals where there’s lots of stress.”
Several producers point out that disruptions surrounding the 2023 strikes — production shutdowns, release delays, overall starvation of filmic product at the cineplex — contributed to an uptick in the amount of indie fare reaching screens last year. That comes into clearest focus with the awards-y titles that have remained in the cultural conversation through today’s Oscars nominations announcement. Among them: Demi Moore’s body-horror comeback vehicle The Substance, director Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl, the controversial Trump biopic The Apprentice, A Different Man (for which star Sebastian Stan won a Golden Globe this month) and the prison-thespian bio-drama Sing Sing. All generated strong buzz at festivals including Toronto, Cannes and Sundance en route to their respective public offerings.
That’s part of the calculus behind producers David Siegel and Scott McGehee repeatedly taking their films to the festival since 1994 and aiming to land placement this year for their Gulf War-adjacent crisis-actor comedy Atropia, whose ensemble cast includes Alia Shawcat, Callum Turner, Chloe Sevigny and Channing Tatum. Over that time, the producers have observed Sundance’s imprimatur assuming increasing importance in both marketing and public recognition. “It seems like the audience has really evolved,” McGehee says. “And they are really paying attention to box office now, to film festivals, to reviews. The way audiences engage with the business of the film industry is very different. So these days it seems like audiences care about the lineage that a film has in getting to them. And distributors care about having those things to present to an audience.”
While the fest’s renown as North America’s preeminent showcase for indie cinema remains beyond dispute, its pedestal for documentary titles has been complicated by the non-fiction film genre’s declining bankability. Since the N95 era, theatrical turnout for doc features has plummeted in almost inverse proportion to their increasing streaming popularity. But this year, of course, four out of five nominees for the Best Documentary Feature Oscar came from Sundance. And to hear it from Topic Studios’ head of film and documentaries Ryan Heller — who heads to Sundance with the documentaries It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley and the Norwegian “high school movie set at the edge of the earth” Folktales — finding a sweet spot between distributor and material is still achievable. “We’re in a moment where the buyers continue to be very specific and savvy about what works for them,” Heller says. “We’re not in a moment where a buyer is coming in saying, I need five movies. It’s more, If we see something we love, we’ll buy it. But looking at last year’s Sundance, there’s a real case to be made that the right buyer for the right movie is still a perfect match.”
Longtime industry pass holder Kevin Iwashina hits Park City this week with the Glenn Kaino-directed short film he produced, Hoops, Hopes & Dreams — it unpacks an unconventional political strategy by Martin Luther King Jr. and an all-star team of ’60s civil rights activists who used pick-up basketball to rally young voters and build networks of empowerment for disenfranchised communities. When I question Iwashina about the health of indie film as a genre, he quickly corrects me: “Indie film is a financial model; it’s not a genre.”
From there, the producer takes a brickbat to distinctions between mainstream and independent movies he feels are increasingly irrelevant to Generation Z. “We’re now in a period where there is a range of cinema, a range of quality. Sometimes that quality is going to come in the form of something made outside the system like Anora. And sometimes it’s going to come from within, like The Wild Robot,” Iwashina continues. “A24, as far as any young person is concerned, isn’t indie movies. Those are movies. I think categorically, we just have to redefine and not ghettoize this concept of indie.”
“Let’s stop playing identity politics with movies,” he adds. “We know what happened when we did that in the election.”