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The Sundance Film Festival is venturing to a new town.<\/p>\n
After a year of deliberations, copious site visits and scores of plane rides, the board of the Sundance Institute has chosen Boulder, Colo., to host its film festival beginning January 2027.<\/p>\n
\u201cBoulder is a tech town, a college town, it\u2019s a really creative town,\u201d Eugene Hernandez, the festival\u2019s director, said. \u201cIt\u2019s just a really creative place. And that integration of the artsy community with the university side of it all is really dynamic.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s also 10 times the size of Park City, Utah, where the festival has been held since the actor and director Robert Redford started it in 1981. As the festival kept growing, Park City began bursting at the seams.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Ebs Burnough, chair of the Sundance Institute, said the move to a town at the base of the mountains would help Sundance maintain its connection to the natural world. \u201cIt\u2019s easy to get drawn into that amazing thing that Robert Redford really believed in, which was that commune between the artist and nature, and to actually be able to get away from the verticalness of cities.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
To frequent Sundance goers, the move to Boulder is likely to be less jarring than shifting the location to Cincinnati, one of two other finalist cities. Salt Lake City was also in the running, and the loss of the festival will be significant to the state of Utah. The festival generated $132 million in revenue for the state in 2024, according to a report released by the festival.<\/p>\n