Sundance 2024: A Brief Prequel

This Year, I'll Be Attending & Posting About Sundance. Here's Why.

The P&I Screening Tent at The Holiday Village is my home at Sundance… Bask in the overwhelming glamour!

I have been attending The Sundance Film Festival since 1998¹, first as an employee of The Independent Film Channel, screening films and producing online conversations, chats, and coverage of the festival for the channel’s web and broadband sites². After leaving IFC and missing the festival from 2001-2002³, I returned in 2003 to scout films as a film programmer for the Nantucket Film Festival and have attended every year since— so (*does quick math*), 24 Sundances, including 2021-22’s virtual editions. This year will mark my 25th⁴ festival.

In the early 2000’s, I was invited by Eugene Hernandez, then of IndieWire⁵, to join the emerging “blogging community” launching at IndieWire and, honored to be asked, I started my blog The Back Row Manifesto. As part of the fun of attending festivals, I would write film reviews, maybe throw in a couple of filmmaker interviews— nothing professional. After IndieWire decided (wisely⁶) to professionalize their industry blogs, the early “community” sites like mine were removed, so I ported over to my own domain and slowed down—I basically stopped writing about film festivals, then films, then writing much of anything at all.

Launching this Substack in 2023 was a personal decision driven by the desire to get back to what I enjoyed about writing, an effort to end my dynamic of self-editing, to create a new space for myself and (even though I write about music, books, and art here as well—I have lots of interests, forgive me) build a meaningful home for my film writing, one that is reflective of my thinking, my critical framework, and my experience in the film community.

For the past few years, I have been using social media tools to give quick reactions to films at Sundance and other festivals, but this year, I am looking to spend a little more time with my thoughts by writing reviews and recaps here. I have one enduring rule, and I want to just make sure I say it out loud— I will not be writing negative reviews. I am not a professional film critic and there are not enough hours in the day for me to sit with a film I do not like and articulate why I do not like it. More than that, the world is difficult enough for independent artists looking to find a place for their work and get it seen. My goal is not to make that process more difficult— instead, I want to use this space to amplify work I like or which engages me in a meaningful way.

The great thing about important festivals like Sundance is that, despite the structure of the festival staying pretty much the same⁷ for attendees— busses, venues, tents, ticketing, stand-by lines, etc— the programs are unique each and every year, and this annual renewal defines the festival experience. I have written before about the ways in which Sundance created the modern landscape of American film festivals and the perception among domestic audiences and filmmakers about the meaning and value of film festivals as key indicators of the marketplace for independent cinema, and that reality endures, even in a year of what is shaping up to be an industry-wide reset of streaming service investments, theatrical slates, and maybe, film acquisitions.

The optimist in me⁸ believes that, in a year when the release calendar is so spare, there is a huge opportunity for buyers to strike deals and find favorable windows for films acquired at Sundance. Maybe a well-programmed Sundance⁹, attuned to a shifting culture that still loves movies but requires new and innovative methods of audience connection, can once again lead us back toward a landscape where artists can have their work flourish across multiple distribution windows, re-building a sustainable independent sector. It is a lot to ask, but this is the festival upon which contemporary independent film culture was built— If any festival can offer hope of a re-energized industry, it is Sundance. I am excited to be there and to be a part of the festival again.

So, I am headed to the freezing cold of Park City, Utah again and hope to offer thoughts and updates on the films I enjoy, both here and, in an abbreviated form, on social media (you can find me on Instagram, Threads, Bluesky, etc and on Letterboxd, where I will be updating the list of films I screen) . Thank you again for subscribing and/or reading… and more soon!

1. I am bad at remembering “years”, so the further away it gets, the harder it is to remember when I started going, but I think this year’s festival marks 26 years since my first Sundance? I vividly remember seeing HIGH ART, PI, and SLAM on the big screen…

2. Back in the late 1990’s, when cable companies were rolling out high speed internet services, we created a high-speed, broadband exclusive, subscriber only web service that could— wait for it— stream video (Feature & Short films! Interviews! Web cams!) using Real Player and host live chats at the same time. Soon, several companies got into the business of online content streaming (hello, Atom Films), and my job was to produce coverage at festivals and work with acquisitions to platform films on streaming. I traveled all over the country (and to Cannes) to visit festivals— especially in markets where cable operators were launching high-speed internet services. I ended up learning how film festival programs were built and, after being offered an opportunity in 2002 to work at the Hamptons Film Festival, it was off to the races, which is how I ended up working at film festivals and, stupidly, not inventing YouTube instead.

3. A brief (and stupid) attempt at a career change. #YouLiveYouLearn

4. Ugh... I am OLD! 🫠

5. …and now the head of the Sundance Film Festival which, #FullCircle

6. I have to be honest— I had fun writing the old Back Row Manifesto, but I never saw it as a truly professional endeavor. Once IndieWire got more and more traction in the industry, I was surprised by how many professionals were reading my pieces. I learned quickly how eager people were for thoughtful coverage. That made me start worrying about what I said because, as a programmer, I didn’t want to upset colleagues or filmmakers by saying the wrong thing.

7. Well, but so— I am interested to see how this year’s festival goes. There are a couple of significant changes that will almost certainly modify the experience of the festival for industry attendees— the loss of the Yarrow, which was the largest screening venue for Press & Industry screenings, and the availability of some films on the festival’s online viewing platform likely means that seats for the films with in-person only screenings will be in much greater demand. I have carved out a lot of extra time in my schedule for lining up at The Holiday Village tent this year while trying to ensure I make time back home for online viewings. So, while I typically see about 28 or 29 films in-person from Thursday evening through Wednesday morning (roughly 4-5 films a day), this year, anticipating how I might need to spend more time in the tent, I am scaling that back— right now, I’m looking at 19 or so in-person screenings (a decrease in my in-person viewing of about 33%-ish) and then catching up by way of virtual screenings. But maybe that shifts?

8. aka the cinema operator and booker in me *ha*

9. Shout out to Kim Yutani and her team for all enduring with excellence through so many challenges these past few years… #YNWA, Kim!