When the 2025 Sundance Film Festival ends in Park City next Groundhog Day, movie fans in Utah won’t know whether the country’s premiere independent film festival will be staying or going in 2027.
And, according to the festival’s director, neither will the people organizing it.
“We’re still a ways off from making that announcement,” Eugene Hernandez, the festival’s director, said in an interview Tuesday. “We’re sticking with late winter, early spring.”
Sundance staff members are still touring the three finalists in the running: Boulder, Colorado; Cincinnati; and a Salt Lake City/Park City bid. “We’re still visiting cities, we’re still having conversations,” Hernandez said.
And, Hernandez said, the staff members “are also running a festival that’s 43 days away. So we’re also just giving ourselves the space to do the work of the festival.”
One significant event building up to the 2025 festival happened Wednesday: Programmers announced the 87 feature-length films that will screen in Park City and Salt Lake City starting Jan. 23 through Feb. 2.
Hernandez reassured Utah festivalgoers that the timing of the location announcement is no indication of which bid Sundance is favoring. “We’re just taking the time we need,” Hernandez said, “while also planning [this year’s] festival. … We tell ourselves internally at Sundance, ‘trust the process.’”
The Sundance Institute, the arts nonprofit that runs the festival, announced in April that it was launching a bidding process to find a location for the event starting in 2027. Sundance’s current contract with Park City to host the festival has been in effect for more than a decade and expires after the 2026 festival.
At the time, the institute said it was looking for a location “that reflects the festival’s values of inclusion, racial equity, accessibility and belonging at every level for artists, audiences, staff and volunteers.”
Festival attendees have criticized Park City for accessibility issues — both for ADA compliance of some parts of the ski town (such as the sloping Old Main Street, where the Egyptian Theatre sits) and for increasingly expensive room rates that keep all but the most wealthy from attending.
(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) Park City Main Street, during the Sundance Film Festival, on Friday, Jan. 20, 2023.
Sundance invited several cities to submit bids to host the festival. In July, Sundance announced six bids had been named semi-finalists in the process, and in September, that list was narrowed to the three finalists.
The Utah Film Commission is presenting the Salt Lake City/Park City bid and has been quiet on details. It’s widely believed that if Utah succeeds in keeping Sundance, the bulk of the festival would be held in Salt Lake City, with some select screenings and events taking place in Park City. This would flip the current arrangement, which in the contract requires Sundance to hold 70% of festival events in Park City.
The festival’s history in Park City predates even Robert Redford’s creation of the Sundance Institute.
What was originally the Utah/US Film Festival began in September 1978 at Trolley Corners in Salt Lake City. After a couple of years there, organizers moved the festival to January in Park City — at the suggestion of movie director (and Redford’s friend) Sydney Pollack.
The festival had its first Park City edition in January 1981. Later that year, Redford launched the institute as an incubator for independent filmmakers.
In 1985, when Redford was seeking a showcase for the movies the Sundance labs’ filmmakers were producing, the institute took over operations of the US Film Festival. The event took the Sundance name officially in 1991, though visitors often called it Sundance before then.
Hernandez, who has been directing the festival for two years but attended as a journalist for three decades, said the bid process has shown him that “wherever we go in 2027,” Sundance will remain committed to discovering new films and storytellers.
“But we respect and honor the history and the legacy we have with Utah — and that’s why we’re just really so excited to continue with this process with our friends in Utah, and also to bring these next two festivals [in 2025 and 2026] to Park City,” he said. “… It’s going to be really special in person these next two years.”
