PARK CITY, Utah (AP) — With the 2025 Sundance Movie Pageant underway, Utah leaders, locals and longtime attendees are making a ultimate push — that would embody paying hundreds of thousands of {dollars} — to maintain the world-renowned movie pageant as its administrators think about uprooting.
Hundreds of festivalgoers affixed shiny yellow stickers to their winter coats that learn “Keep Sundance in Utah” in a last-ditch effort to persuade pageant management and state officers to maintain it in Park Metropolis, its dwelling of 41 years.
Gov. Spencer Cox mentioned beforehand that Utah wouldn’t throw as a lot cash on the pageant as different states hoping to lure it away. Now his workplace is urging the Legislature to carve out $3 million for Sundance within the state funds, weeks earlier than the impartial movie pageant is predicted to select a house for the following decade.
It may retain a small presence in picturesque Park Metropolis and middle itself in close by Salt Lake Metropolis, or transfer to a different finalist — Cincinnati, Ohio, or Boulder, Colorado — starting in 2027.
“Sundance is Utah, and Utah is Sundance. You can’t really separate those two,” Cox mentioned. “This is your home, and we desperately hope it will be your home forever.”
Pageant Director Eugene Hernandez instructed reporters final week that that they had not made a ultimate resolution. An announcement is predicted this 12 months by early spring.
Colorado is attempting additional to sweeten its provide. The state is contemplating laws giving as much as $34 million in tax incentives to movie festivals like Sundance by 2036 — on prime of the $1.5 million in funds already authorized to lure the Utah pageant to its neighboring state.
Cincinnati authorized a decision allocating $2.5 million to Sundance if pageant leaders relocate to southwest Ohio. But cash might not be the last word draw.
Sundance leaders say the pageant has outgrown the ski city it helped placed on the map many years in the past, they usually fear it has developed an air of exclusivity that takes the main focus away from the movies. A super dwelling would make Sundance extra centralized, inexpensive and accessible to all who respect impartial movie.
Some festivalgoers and trade leaders fear Sundance would lose its identification outdoors its idyllic mountain hometown.
Roger and Carin Ehrenberg, main donors to the pageant, mentioned they’d cease attending commonly if the pageant was outdoors Utah. Sundance is a “magical experience” for the New York Metropolis philanthropists, they mentioned, due largely to the environment in Park Metropolis.
“If it goes to Cincinnati, maybe once in a blue moon we would go, but it wouldn’t be a regular thing,” Carin Ehrenberg mentioned. “For us, it’ll lose its appeal.”
The couple mentioned they’d doubtless proceed to donate even when they didn’t attend.
Nineteen years of fond reminiscences at Sundance helped encourage Dr. Rhonda Taubin to relocate her household from Atlanta to Heber Metropolis — Park Metropolis’s neighboring city. She has no ties to the movie trade however has change into a fervent advocate for retaining the pageant in her new dwelling state.
This 12 months, she and her associates distributed hundreds of “Keep Sundance in Utah” stickers — and one other that learn “NOhio for Sundance” — to indicate the pageant how a lot it means to the local people.
“I really am not a movie buff, but my other girlfriends are, and being able to share all that we’ve been through as women, as mothers, as wives, as daughters, I don’t want it to end,” Taubin mentioned. “We watch provocative movies that make us talk and think about things that maybe we’ve never thought about before. Utah would be at a huge loss without those conversations.”
If Sundance stays in Utah, the pageant’s former director John Cooper mentioned main changes are wanted to enhance transportation between Salt Lake Metropolis and Park Metropolis and make lodging for filmmakers extra inexpensive.
Cooper, who led the pageant from 2009 to 2020, mentioned he can be unhappy to see Sundance shift away from actor and filmmaker Robert Redford’s unique imaginative and prescient. It’s very identify comes from Redford’s character within the 1969 movie “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”
“I felt like my role was to be a keeper of the flame for Robert Redford and his legacy,” Cooper instructed The Related Press. “The mountains of Utah, this was his vision. It’s weird to say ‘Sundance in Ohio.’ But I think it could go anywhere. What it does for a community is so strong.”
On the pink carpet this week, many have been break up on whether or not Sundance ought to keep or go.
Actor Elijah Wooden urged the pageant to stay in Park Metropolis, saying the situation is a part of its DNA.
Others have been open to it relocating. Actor Tessa Thompson, who serves on the Sundance Institute’s board of trustees, mentioned the pageant may preserve its identification in a brand new metropolis.
“I think that Sundance has more to do with the spirit and community, and I think that’s evergreen,” Thompson mentioned. “Regardless of where Sundance is, Sundance will always be.”
