SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL
The
festival shows approximately 200 films during its 10-day run and offers prizes
in several categories of competition. Among these honours are the Grand Jury
Prize, which is awarded for documentaries and dramatic films originating in the
United States, and the World Cinema Jury Prize, given for documentaries and
dramatic films originating elsewhere. Audience Awards are also bestowed in the
same four categories. In addition to screening films, the Sundance Film
Festival hosts panel discussions, workshops, musical events, and parties for
the approximately 50,000 attendees, who include both industry insiders and the
filmgoing public. The Film Festival is one of the best times of the year
for a cinephile, but not planning accordingly can make it a challenge.
IndieWire has been covering the Park City event since our founding in 1996, so
by now we know a little thing or two about what it takes to pull off a
successful and enjoyable visit to the Sundance Film Festival. Next year’s
Sundance kicks off Thursday, January 24. Here are the survival tips you need to
keep in mind before you arrive.
Don’t Forget Your Boots
Boots are the most
essential footwear to bring to Park City, as there’s bound to be at least one
snowstorm that turns Main Street into a muddy, icy mess. Word to the wise:
Don’t bring a new pair of boots to Park City. Make sure all the footwear you
bring is well worn-in, as you’ll be doing a lot of walking to shuttles or
between venues, and walking up Main Street with its heavy incline can be a real
workout. The rest of your wardrobe should be standard winter wear: Sweaters,
sweatshirts, jeans, winter coats (don’t be the person who brings a windbreaker
and not a heavy duty winter coat, it can get frigid at night.
overcrowding, and a
schedule that seems to get more loosey-goosey as the ten-day event wears on.
Study the shuttle map before you go, targeting the stops that are most
important to your experience (venues where you’ll be seeing most of your films,
stops close to your homebase, your best bets for rest areas, etc.) and
memorizing the routes that serve you best. For most people, that will likely be
the Theater Loop, which moves between Main St. and the bigger venues, but if
you’re staying in say, Deer Valley, there’s a shuttle for that, and even one to
get you out to Redstone, where some screenings happen. Learn it, love it, but don’t rely on
it — you’re going to want to give yourself plenty of time to get places. Sure,
something might look like a hop, skip, and a jump on paper, but in actuality,
it could take half an hour. Scheduling is hard in a festival atmosphere, but
building in travel time is key. And, don’t be afraid to ask the friendly
volunteers manning each shuttle stop or the experienced drivers running them,
they are always happy to offer the best bus for you.
Sundance offers a robust shuttle service that can be
essential when it comes to navigating the fest — especially from film venue to
film venue — without a car. But while there are multiple routes (run through
Park City’s free bus service, many of them all converging at a downtown hub)
that serve the festival year in and year out, the shuttle service is also
beholden to weather, traffic.
Falling on your ass is
bad. Falling on your ass in front of all your favorite indie stars and
filmmakers is worse. And if you’re not careful, that’s probably what’s going to
happen to you. In fact, even if you are careful that’s probably what’s going to
happen to you — the streets of Sundance are just that slippery. While it goes
without saying to pack your sturdiest boots, and to wear them at all times, you
can never be too sure of where you’re stepping at this festival, especially
when night falls on Park City and dangerous patches of ice start to disguise
themselves as innocent bits of pavement. Main Street, despite its steepness,
tends to be pretty safe and well-salted, but the sidewalks outside of the
Library and Eccles theaters are huge danger zones, so be sure to practice your
shuffle step in advance, and don’t be afraid to ask for a helping hand over the
particularly treacherous bits.
Film fans hitting up
the festival just for fun have a number of options when it comes to buying tickets,
from passes and packages that go on sale weeks before the event kicks off, to
individual tickets that roll out in early January (want the best ticketing
window? Think about becoming a Sundance member to get early access). All
tickets and passes can be bought, and the festival provides a handy
walk-through of how to do just that.
Want to go a little
more free and easy? You can also attend Sundance without advance tickets, as
the festival will release any free tickets to each event up to two hours before
showtime. In recent years, the festival has started using an eWaitlist for
non-purchased tickets, allowing eager attendees to “wait” in line without
having to, well, wait in a cold line. Sound like a shot in the dark? It’s not:
the festival reports that nearly 15% of their audience attend via the waitlist.
If you’re willing to wait in the cold, Sundance often plays home to sign-toting
wannabe audience members who stand outside (brrrr) to ask kindly fellow
attendees for free tickets or to swap for hot events.
When it comes to exciting new indie films, Sundance is the
world’s greatest feast. When it comes to food, however, the festival is…
lacking. Main Street has a zillion restaurants to choose from, but that only
gets you so far, as all but one of the major screening venues are located
elsewhere, and the most prominent of them all — the Eccles — doesn’t permit you
to bring food inside. At Sundance, you should never pass up a chance to eat, as
you can never be sure when you might get another one. While all of the venues
have some kind of concessions stand outside (even the Eccles), the options are
rather limited, and there’s only so long you can live on Red Vines and Pizza.
Our advice is to stock up on energy bars, hide them deep in your bag, and tear
one open whenever you find yourself waiting in line between movies. A couple of
Clif Bars should be enough to keep you going between breakfast and dinner, and
they might be the difference between watching the next great independent film
and sleeping right through it.
It’s a natural impulse at a festival to want to dissect
everything you’ve seen. Whether on the bus, in the lobby, waiting in line,
answering “What have you seen that you liked?” is the easiest conversation
starter there is. Of course, there are going to be films you don’t like as
much, but take care when sharing criticisms. There are a lot of people at the
festival who put their life’s work into these movies, and they don’t go walking
around with a neon sign saying why they’re there or what they worked on. Festivals
are a celebration of the medium, so if you’re going to go out of your way to
rake someone’s first feature over the coals (which, OK, interesting life
choice), just know that the mountain air makes everyone’s hearing about 35%
better. Sometimes plans
change. You get a surprise Gala screening ticket or you got your theaters mixed
up. Just know that it’s probably going to take you at least 10 more minutes to
get where you want to go than any piece of technology might tell you. Planning
on an Uber or Lyft to help you get from Main Street to the MARC on short notice
is not a viable plan, especially on opening weekend, when private cars are
clogging up every conceivable side street. (And that’s if it’s not even snowing
at all. The first sign of precipitation grinds all vehicle traffic around the
busiest parts of town to a complete and inexplicable halt.) “Be Early” is a
good Sundance rule of thumb overall, and know that your phone simply may
not make that happen.
Most of the Sundance press and
industry screenings are held at the charmingly old-fashioned Metropolitan
Holiday Village 4 Cinemas. But some premieres – open on a first-come,
first-serve basis to the paying public but where actors and directors will be
in attendance – can be much further away. Some gala screening events take place
in downtown Salt Lake City itself, a 40-minute drive away, while others occur
at the Sundance Mountain Resort, which is at least 75 minutes south and close
to the city of Provo. Pay close attention to where any public screening is
going to be held, though: even venues that are closer to the heart of Park
City, such as The Marc, can require a long, traffic-jammed journey.
Sundance has moved away from its
history as a freewheeling bazaar where swarms of hanger-on celebrities come to
hot-tub hop and film distributors throw money around in all-night bidding wars.
But the festival remains the pre-eminent showcase for American independent
film. The past festival’s lineup included multiple films that helped define the
year in art-house cinema, including “Sorry to Bother You,” “Eighth Grade,”
“Leave No Trace” and the documentaries “RBG” and “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?”
Other established stars pepper the
selections. Davis and Allison Janney anchor “Troupe Zero,” an Amazon Studios comedy
about a misfit girl in rural 1977 Georgia who forms a makeshift Girl
Scout-style group. Jake Gyllenhaal reteams with his “Nightcrawler” director,
Dan Gilroy, for an art-world horror thriller called “Velvet Buzzsaw.” And
Chiwetel Ejiofor directed, wrote and stars in “The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind,”
the true story of a Malawian boy whose invention saved his village from famine.
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