Despite the recent death of its world-famous founder, Robert Redford, the Sundance Film Festival is about to become much, much bigger. This year’s festival, which ends tomorrow, is its last hurrah in the small Utah ski resort it brought to prominence, Park City (population 9,000). Sundance needs more cinemas, more venues and better logistics. Next year and for the foreseeable future, it will be held in Boulder, Colorado (population 100,000).
For more than four decades, the Sundance Film Festival has been American cinema’s most visible argument in favour of independence: independence of voice, of form, of subject matter, and – crucially – of ambition. At its best, Sundance has insisted that films do not need to be large to be significant, nor expensive to be terrific.
From early on, it positioned itself as an international enabler, receptive to films that shared its independent ethos even if they did not share its nationality. Small British films such as Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) and An Education (2009) exemplify this. Neither was conceived as an international hit. Both relied on wit, performance and emotional precision rather than spectacle. Awards at Sundance demonstrated that independence was not a national category but a creative one: a way of making films that trusted audiences to engage with nuance, irony and moral complexity.
The mould-breaking charm of Four Weddings lay in its Englishness – its class-conscious humour, its melancholy undercurrents, its willingness (then daring) to allow joy and grief to occupy the same narrative space. Similarly, An Education offered a quietly devastating coming-of-age story that refused easy judgment. These movies’ success signalled Sundance’s role as a platform for films that assume intelligence and patience from their viewers. It also did wonders for the careers of Hugh Grant and Carey Mulligan.
Yet it is in American independent cinema that Sundance’s influence has been most profound. Low-budget films such as Little Miss Sunshine (2006), The Kids Are All Right (2010) and Whiplash (2014) illustrate how Sundance has functioned as both incubator and amplifier. Each began life as a small, precarious project. Each depended on tonal daring rather than scale. Each, in different ways, crossed over into the cultural mainstream without surrendering its identity.
Little Miss Sunshine could never have emerged from the Hollywood system. It was about a dysfunctional family road trip centred on a child beauty pageant, and celebrated failure rather than triumph. It won over big audiences because its humour was humane, its satire affectionate.
The Kids Are All Right demonstrated Sundance’s capacity to normalise stories that mainstream cinema had long marginalised or turned into preaching. Its portrayal of a lesbian couple was not framed as a social problem but as a lived reality, complete with intimacy, compromise and imperfections. The film’s success suggested that audiences were not merely ready for such stories but eager for them – provided they were told with honesty rather than didacticism.
Whiplash represented a different kind of success. Ferocious, claustrophobic and challenging to cinematic convention, it depicted mentorship as coercion, and the achievement of excellence as potentially destructive to the psyche. Hollywood would have tried to soften Whiplash for wider consumption. Sundance showed us a magnificent film that refused to bring feelgood comfort.
Just as momentously, Sundance played a decisive role in launching the careers of Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez and a wider generation of filmmakers who reshaped American cinema in the 1990s.
For Tarantino, Sundance was the moment when a video-store clerk achieved recognition as an innovative filmmaker. Reservoir Dogs (1992) premiered there. I caught up with it a few weeks later at the Montreal Film Festival, and encouraged my colleagues on the international jury to give him his first critical award.
Quentin’s then revolutionary use of time-shifting structure, heightened dialogue and shocking violence (usually committed off-screen) did not resemble mainstream American film at the time. I would still rate his initial indie efforts, Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction as two of the great cultural achievements of the 1990s.
The Sundance spirit is needed more than ever
An entertaining but lesser-known film, Robert Rodriguez’s El Mariachi (1992), was shot for an infamously minuscule budget, and embodied the festival’s democratic promise: that ingenuity could substitute for resources. Sundance did not merely showcase El Mariachi; it turned the film into a parable. Rodriguez became proof that filmmaking was not restricted to the well-connected or well-funded. The festival amplified the story of how the film was made as much as the film itself, inspiring a generation of filmmakers to believe that access, while difficult, was not impossible.
Beyond individual careers, Sundance has helped redefine the auteur in American cinema. It has encouraged critics, distributors and audiences to think in terms of voices and signatures. Filmmakers such as Steven Soderbergh (Sex, lies, and videotape), Kevin Smith (Clerks), and Paul Thomas Anderson (There Will Be Blood) all benefited from this shift. Sundance offered a space where personal style was not smoothed out by Hollywood, but sharpened.
Inevitably, there have been accusations that Sundance has ‘sold out’. The presence of major distributors, high-profile premieres, celebrity attendees and multimillion-dollar acquisition deals has led some critics to argue that the festival has become less a haven for outsiders than a marketplace for prestige content.
The risk is not that independent films no longer appear at Sundance – they do – but that the surrounding noise makes it harder for quieter, stranger works to be heard. The danger lies less in ‘selling out’ than in crowding out.
But Sundance never isolated independent filmmakers from the mainstream industry; it connected them to it on more favourable terms. By concentrating attention, creating press interest and fostering competition among buyers, the festival allowed producers and directors to retain more leverage than they would otherwise have had. Independence became a starting position rather than permanent exclusion.
Sundance-style independence of spirit is needed more than ever. Commercial cinema, like mainstream publishing, is in precipitous decline. Risk aversion has prioritised predictability. Big business relies on sequels, remakes and reboots because they think these minimise financial risk.
The result has been not just tedious repetition, but a narrowing of emotional and thematic range. Most big films these days feel like content engineered for franchising – films as delivery systems for spin-offs, merchandise and streaming extensions. They certainly seem aimed at people with the mental age of teenagers.
Until very recently, you could have gone to the cinema and enjoyed grown-up dramas, romantic comedies and genuinely surprising thrillers. These have almost completely vanished.
Data-driven, algorithm-dictated development favours what has already worked, encouraging formulaic structures, over-familiar didactic archetypes, and pre-tested emotional beats. This produces films (and, indeed, novels) that are efficient but hardly ever surprising, emotionally shallow, and culturally inert.
Sundance’s greatest gift to talented people has been not just fame and commercial success, but permission to be idiosyncratic, abrasive, personal and ambitious – and to believe that such qualities are the key to achieving great art.
Comments