Sundance Film Festival kicks off, looking at 40 years of movies and what the future holds

Park City • The 2024 Sundance Film Festival launched Thursday — and, as the independent film world’s major event marks its 40th year, waves of memories are likely to hit many of those attending.

Take Jason Blum, who in 1994 was a 24-year-old movie fan attending Sundance for the first time. He recalled that one of his highlights was director Ben Stiller’s Gen X comedy “Reality Bites,” with Winona Ryder and Ethan Hawke. Three years later, as Blum was starting his Hollywood career, he acquired the distribution rights to the comedy-drama “The House of Yes,” starring the 1997 festival’s icon, Parker Posey.

Today, Blum is one of Hollywood’s most successful producers, as founder and CEO of Blumhouse, responsible for such movies as “Get Out” (which debuted in a secret screening at Sundance in 2017), “M3gan” and the “Halloween” reboot. He’s also on the Sundance Institute’s board of trustees.

“Sundance is a vital, vital part of the entertainment ecosystem,” Blum said Thursday, kicking off the festival’s opening-day news conference, called Sundance Scoop, in Park City. “Without Sundance, the United States would not be where it is in entertainment.”

Blum moderated the news conference, which featured Joana Vicente, the institute’s CEO; Eugene Hernandez, the festival’s new director and the institute’s head of public programming; and Kim Yutani, the festival’s programming director.

Sundance Institute’s founder, actor-filmmaker Robert Redford, was present in spirit — and in a pre-recorded compilation reel of some of the movies that have played the festival since the institute started running it in 1985. The films in the clip reel included “Napoleon Dynamite,” “Call Me By Your Name,” “Get Out” and last year’s documentary “Kokomo City.”

Those films, Vicente said, are “part of our culture, and that’s what Sundance does. … There is the work we do, day in and day out, about supporting storytellers.” She called Sundance “the Super Bowl of storytelling.”

Hernandez, who has been attending Sundance for 30 years, noted that it “feels very different sitting in this chair [onstage] than one of these chairs,” pointing to the media rows. For years, Hernandez covered the festival for the industry site IndieWire, which he co-founded and served as editor in chief. This year, his first as director, is a full-circle moment for Hernandez.

AI in the movies

Hernandez and Yutani, with the programming team, have chosen some 90 feature-length films and dozens of short films — out of 17,345 submissions, the most ever in Sundance’s history, from 153 countries. The strikes by Hollywood’s writers and actors didn’t affect submissions, she said.

Around 5,000 of those submissions were feature films, Yutani said, and around 12,000 were short films. She added that 80% of this year’s program is for sale to distributors; 40% are by first-time filmmakers; and 95% are world premieres.

One emerging theme in this year’s selections, Hernandez said, is artificial intelligence. He mentioned “Eno,” director Gary Hustwit’s documentary about the music producer Brian Eno. Hernandez said Hustwit believes it to be the “first generative documentary”; the festival’s program guide says the film is “different each time it’s shown,” using an algorithm to reorder scenes and interviews with every screening.

Though AI is a topic of several films at Sundance — including the documentaries “Love Machine” and “Eternal You” — Yutani stressed that there are no films in the festival directed by AI.

Vicente said, “We’re all about protecting the art and that’s essential, but it’s also exciting to see [AI] used as a tool.”

Showing some classics

To mark its 40th year, the festival is screening eight movies from its past. She credited senior programmer John Nein, who works with Sundance’s restored products, for helping to arrange those screenings and the reunions of some cast and crew in Park City.

The goal with programming those eight films was to present something :you wound not be able to see anywhere else,” Yutani said. “We also wanted to highlight documentaries, fiction films, filmmakers who could come to the festival to present their work, because that’s such an essential part of what we do at Sundance, and to be able to have conversations with audience members.”

A highlight for Utah moviegoers, Yutani said, is the 20th anniversary showing of “Napoleon Dynamite,” because of its “great local connection to Utah.” Director Jared Hess and his co-writer/wife Jerusha Hess are graduates of Brigham Young University and full-time Salt Lake City-area residents.

Jerusha Hess and cast members Jon Heder, Efren Ramirez, Jon Gries, Shondella Avery and Tom Lefler are scheduled to appear at a screening Wednesday, 7 p.m., at The Ray in Park City. (Jared Hess is in New Zealand, directing the movie adaptation of the videogame “Minecraft,” but he recorded an introduction in Preston, Idaho, where the movie was filmed.)

Other classic movies screening during the festival are the documentaries “The Times of Harvey Milk” and “Dig,” the romances “Mississippi Masala” and “Go Fish,” the dramas “Pariah” and “Three Seasons,” and the horror movie “The Babadook.”

“Looking forward and looking back at the [festival’s] history” is a major theme of Sundance 2024, Hernandez said.

Hernandez recalled his first festival, in 1993, when he saw Robert Rodriguez’s micro-budgeted action movie “El Mariachi.” Hernandez said he even signed an autograph on Rodriguez’s behalf for a mistaken fan, joking that there weren’t many Latinos at the festival back then.

Yutani said her memory is the “collective experience” of Sundance. She mentioned the “incredible experience” of last year’s musical drama “Flora and Son,” starring Eve Hewson and Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

“That is what reminds me of what Sundance is — what we do so well, and and what we will always do,” she said. “It’s such a privilege to do this job, and to be able to help launch the careers of filmmakers.”

Vicente said one of her recurring memories is what happens “when the film ends. It’s dark, and it’s the first time you show it to an audience. Then you hear the applause and you can breathe, and you feel for the next half hour — while you go onstage and you have a conversation with the audience — nothing else matters. Then you want to feel like, ‘Who’s buying the film?’”

Looking ahead, Vicente said she’s “excited … with the chance to walk into a theater today at noon — and all day today and all this weekend — and to be introduced to someone new, something new.”

Sundance’s first day, Thursday, was scheduled to feature 19 premieres — with more premieres and screenings for the following 10 days, ending Jan. 28, in Park City and Salt Lake City. Individual tickets are available at festival.sundance.org.

Blum ended Thursday’s news conference by saying, “now let’s go see some movies.”