Sundance • Even as the Sundance Film Festival will be leaving Utah after this year’s event, another Sundance Institute staple — the screenwriters’ and directors’ labs — will be staying at the Sundance Mountain Resort.
“This is Bob’s home,” said Michelle Satter, founding director of the institute’s artist program, referring to Robert Redford. The actor-director founded the institute there in 1981.
Satter said Redford, who died in September at age 89, “created this space as the home for the Sundance Institute, and … it is a space that brings community together.”
Sundance’s January screenwriters’ lab, an intensive three-day workshop where fledgling screenwriters get advice on their scripts from Hollywood professionals, has been held for decades at the Sundance Mountain Resort just before the festival’s launch in Park City.
This year’s screenwriters’ lab ran Sunday through Tuesday, with participants packing up Wednesday — one day before the film festival’s opening.
When the film festival moves to Boulder in 2027, Satter said the January lab would still be held at Sundance. (One of the perks of having a screenplay accepted into the January lab is getting tickets to festival screenings.)
The June labs — where new directors get to rehearse, shoot and edit scenes from their scripts — temporarily moved to Colorado in 2024, because of renovation work at the resort. Satter said this year’s June lab will be held again at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park (which inspired Stephen King when he wrote “The Shining”), but would return to Sundance in 2027.
Virginia Pearce, director of the Utah Film Commission, welcomed the Sundance labs’ return. to the resort.
“The state of Utah has been an engaged and supportive partner of Sundance Institute for more than 40 years,” Pearce said in a statement Tuesday. “A sense of place is an integral part of Robert Redford’s vision — to discover new voices and support artists as they develop new stories — and Utah is the place where this vision can thrive.”
The labs’ work is connected to the place, Satter said. “It allows you to go outside and breathe, and reach the river that runs through this space, and connect to something very powerful in nature.”
Ilyse McKimmie, deputy director of Sundance’s Feature Film Program, noted that the June directors’ lab kicks off its three-week run every year with a hike to Elk Meadows, to receive a blessing from a Ute tribal leader. “There’s a deep connection to the Indigenous community, on whose lands we hold these activities,” McKimmie said.
Doug Wright, a screenwriter and playwright who has been an adviser to the labs for years, said the resort’s natural setting has a big impact on new filmmakers.
“It is both inspiring, in a way that drives you to write, and it also dwarfs you in a way that is really healthy,” said Wright, who won a Tony and a Pultizer for his play “I Am My Own Wife.” “In the sheer topography here, you find incredible creative release, and also a cautionary word that you don’t get too big for your britches at the same time.”