The New Yorker:

The most important film festival in America bade farewell to its Utah roots.

By Justin Chang

In January, 2027, the Sundance Film Festival will be held not in its longtime home of Park City, Utah, but in Boulder, Colorado. The experience promises to be bracingly new, chaotic, and exciting, but there was inevitably a melancholy tinge to this year’s edition, which became, in effect—and affect—an eleven-day farewell. My Sundance unfurled as a series of absences; at times, it was as though the place’s magic were seeping away before my eyes. The weather was part of it. Drought conditions were in effect, and, until the seventh day of the festival, there was hardly a flake of snow. For the first time that I can remember, I didn’t slip on black ice on my way to a screening, or slosh through a pool that I’d mistaken for a puddle—a relief, yes, but also a disappointment. My fondest memories of this place have always been blanketed in white; I’ll never forget when I first came, in January, 2006, on a bitingly cold evening and dragged my suitcase through a fast-thickening layer of frost. As it happens, that was the year that the festival premièred Davis Guggenheim’s documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” about Al Gore’s efforts to raise awareness about climate change. Twenty years later, a mostly bone-dry Park City seemed to offer evidence, if any were still needed, that we are living in a world that the film warned about.

Another absence: there were no screenings at the Egyptian Theatre, whose old-fashioned marquee had long made it the festival’s most recognizable venue. The theatre, situated on the city’s Main Street, is to become a live-event space; the film projectors have already been removed. I find that reality strangely terrifying, if not quite as terrifying as some of the Sundance movies I’ve watched at the Egyptian. This is where I cowered in my seat at a midnight screening of “Hereditary” (2018), a blood-chilling calling card for a new talent named Ari Aster; it’s where I thrilled to the chainsaw-wielding climax of “Donkey Punch” (2008), a satisfyingly sleazy horror cheapie that has never drifted far from my thoughts, even though it scarcely found an audience; and in 1999, before my time, the Egyptian was where audiences first glimpsed “The Blair Witch Project.” That film is one of a few instant classics—including “sex, lies, and videotape” (1989) and “Reservoir Dogs” (1992)—that helped make the festival’s reputation as the country’s most important and exciting launchpad for new independent cinema.

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