Robert Redford made a wrong turn. Somewhere along his thousand-plus mile commute from his college town of Boulder to his family home in Los Angeles, the interstate became a quiet two-lane road. He was 18 or 19 years old then, flunking out of the University of Colorado in the mid-1950s, adrift. He weaved his motorcycle up a narrow canyon lined with aspen and pine trees, in pursuit of a better view of the mountain he saw towering overhead. The path twisted and tightened. His breathing deepened. Then, he arrived at a clearing. The landscape opened up to reveal Mount Timpanogos in all its splendor.
In spite of how he’d gotten there — entirely by mistake — Redford felt like he’d arrived somewhere promising. Sunlight glittered off the permanent snowfield on the mountain’s north slope, ice crystals winking like coins. The area surrounding one of the tallest peaks in Utah was undeveloped at that point, apart from a locally owned ski resort by the name of Timp Haven. It had humble amenities: a homemade rope tow, a single chairlift and a T-bar. Rather than leave it up to fate to decide how long it would take for encroaching development to spoil that sight, Redford vowed to put a stake in the ground and return to Utah. A few years later, in 1961, he bought two acres of ski area land off a sheepherder for $500.
Over the years, Redford morphed from an unserious college dropout to a celebrated actor, breaking through with a Broadway production of “Barefoot in the Park” in 1963 before becoming one of Hollywood’s most beloved heartthrobs in 1969 with a lead role in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” He’d winter with his Provo-born wife at their retreat in Provo Canyon when he needed respite from the grind of the industry. Then his small hideout, and his vision for it, expanded. In 1969, Redford’s two acres grew to include a mountain resort and wilderness preserve spanning 5,000 acres in the Wasatch Range. He named it Sundance, after his titular role. And in 1981, at the base of the same snowy mountain that had lured him off course as a teen, he founded the Sundance Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing independent film.
More than four decades later, the institute hosts labs and workshops for aspiring screenwriters and directors, dishes out upward of $3 million in grants and matches more than 1,000 new filmmakers with seasoned mentors every year. It also hosts the Sundance Film Festival, which has brought Hollywood hopefuls, coastal elites, industry outcasts, A-list celebrities, film nerds and the cinema-curious from around the world to Park City each January. “It helped put Utah on a map in a way we hadn’t been before,” says Gary Herbert, who served as a Republican governor from 2009 to 2021 and proclaimed Nov. 9, 2013, “Robert Redford Day” in Utah to honor the actor’s impact on the state. “People wanted to come and enjoy the same culture, the same beauty that Redford had fallen in love with years ago.”
Last year alone, the event generated an economic boost of more than $196 million, brought in nearly 30,000 visitors from out of state and created about 3,000 jobs. Beyond the finances, the festival proved that creativity and art can thrive in so-called “flyover country” — that a landlocked state in the Intermountain West that’s been solidly Republican for more than half a century can double as a hub of independent film. “People do sell Utah short if they don’t know it,” says Virginia Pearce, director of the Utah Film Commission. “Redford staking a claim in Utah gave all of the filmmakers here a belief that Utah truly was a place where creative ideas belong.” So when the institute announced in March that the festival would leave its home for Boulder, Colorado, in 2027, it presented an identity crisis for both the festival and the state that had built it.
Movies that had not shown in the artsiest cultural hubs of the United States had come to Utah. It demonstrated that diversity of thought, lived experiences and expression can resonate with audiences in “flyover country.”
The 2026 Sundance Film Festival will mark Park City’s final year as the world’s premiere destination for independent filmmakers. The Sundance Institute — which hosts the year-round labs, workshops and learning opportunities that Redford was especially proud of — will remain in Utah for the foreseeable future. Yet the loss of the state’s marquee annual event will prove impossible for locals to ignore in the years to come. Not even a month after the institute announced it would relocate the festival to Boulder, a Deseret News/Hinckley Institute of Politics poll found that 56% of state residents felt disappointed by the news. So was Gov. Spencer Cox. “Ultimately, this decision is theirs to make,” he said in a statement, “but I believe it’s a mistake and that, one day, they’ll realize they left behind not just a place, but their heritage.”
By the time the institute arrived at its conclusion, Redford was 88 years old. He gave the decision his blessing. Then he died six months later in his home at Sundance Mountain Resort where he’d arrived by chance all those years ago, barely an adult, yet fated to transform a state and an industry. Now Utah is left to brace for a future without the festival, while the festival looks toward one without its original home or its founder.
The state’s relationship with film began way back, before Redford and before Sundance, with “The Covered Wagon,” a 1923 silent film Western shot across Utah’s Antelope Island and Beaver County. The director, James Cruze from Ogden, was tasked with creating a film that promoted Americanism to help reset Hollywood’s then-scandalous reputation. He opened the film with a title card that read: “The blood of America is the blood of pioneers — the blood of lion-hearted men and women who carved a splendid civilization out of an uncharted wilderness.” Then-President Warren G. Harding was such a fan of the film, he invited members of the Supreme Court, military and Congress to view it at a special White House screening. Another silent film, 1924’s “The Deadwood Coach,” highlighted the dramatic scenery of Kanab and the wide-open spaces that made the town a choice location for Westerns of the era, drawing in the genre’s biggest stars like John Wayne. By 1949, it had become the most popular filming location outside of California and earned the nickname “Little Hollywood.”
Even after Westerns fell out of mainstream favor in the 1970s, Utah made a concerted effort to continue attracting filmmakers. Gov. Calvin Rampton, a Democrat who served from 1965 to 1977, established the Utah Film Commission near the end of his tenure. The state agency opened in 1974 and became one of the first state-level film commissions in the country, with a mission of advertising Utah as a filming location. And advertise, it did.
The Utah/U.S. Film Festival launched in September 1978 and featured screenings in Salt Lake City’s Trolley Square, alongside panel discussions and local competitions that highlighted voices in independent cinema. That initial slate of showings included the Southern Gothic “A Streetcar Named Desire” and neo-noir crime drama “Mean Streets.” After the industry rejected the Hays Code in 1968 — which had imposed strict guidelines barring profanity, violence and even interracial relationships on screen — studios adopted a rating system that allowed filmmakers more creative freedom. This period of experimentation and boom in independent film became known as the New Hollywood era, and the Sundance Film Festival was the first event of its kind to respond to that cultural reset on a national stage.
Redford was drawn to the festival for that same reason. Though he wasn’t a founding member, he’d gotten involved early on and served as the first board chairman. After he attended the festival in 1979, he later told Architectural Digest, he understood “that experiments were going on — in provincial garages — and not getting seen.” Yet however noble of a pursuit Redford found the festival to be, it had accrued mounds of debt. He took a central role in saving it. The festival was rebranded as the U.S. Film and Video Festival in 1981 and relocated to Park City in January at the suggestion of revered film director Sydney Pollack. The hope was that by becoming the world’s only film festival to take place in a ski town during the winter, it would generate enough novelty and interest to boost ticket sales. That idea, coupled with the exposure and resources available after Redford’s Sundance Institute assumed control of the festival in 1985, worked as planned. It expanded to a 10-day event in 1985 and adopted its final name in 1991: the Sundance Film Festival.
By then, the festival had already earned the attention of industry giants and had enough status and acclaim to push the boundaries by premiering Norman René’s “Longtime Companion,” one of the first films to put a human face on the AIDS crisis. “Over the years, you would have angsty films, difficult films. They were never afraid of telling difficult stories,” says Randy Barton, manager of the Egyptian Theatre in Park City, which has helped host the festival throughout its four decades in town. “It was a place where stories were told, where people’s passions became real.”
We have a long history in film. We are a film-loving state. It’s not as if we just woke up one day a few years ago and decided to get into the film industry.
People like Steven Soderbergh, whose Sundance debut went on to receive the highest honor at the Cannes Film Festival. Or Quentin Tarantino, who premiered his first film, “Reservoir Dogs,” at the 1992 festival. The following year, master of twee, Wes Anderson, got his start at Sundance before going on to make such groundbreaking films as “The Royal Tenenbaums.” Since 1991, 20 documentary films supported by the institute have gone on to win Oscars, as well as at least 30 more Oscar-winning feature and short films. As early as 1996, the festival was known not just as the most famous festival for independent film, but the “preeminent American film festival, period,” according to then-Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan. This evolution brought independent or “indie” films — often low budget, quirky or unusual — from niche to one of the most lauded approaches to filmmaking.
Movies that had not shown in the artsiest cultural hubs of the United States had come to Utah. It demonstrated that diversity of thought, lived experiences and expression resonate with audiences in the interior West. Perhaps even more so than in places where that kind of exchange is widely accessible and taken for granted. It’s that paradox that makes Sundance’s origin story uniquely Utahn. “The reasons (Redford) fell in love with Utah were not just the beautiful landscapes, but a community that embraced creativity and the wild spaces that encouraged connection to nature and gave you space as an artist to create and be thoughtful,” Pearce says. “Independent filmmaking, creative thought, didn’t begin with Sundance (Film Festival). It certainly won’t end with it.” But it might change.
Jared Hess thought he was going to be sick. He could feel the anxiety bubble up in his stomach, to the point where he was dry-heaving in anticipation of the movie about to begin. The 24-year-old was two years out of film school at Brigham Young University when he arrived at the Park City Library on Jan. 17, 2004. He’d attended Sundance each year he was in college as an audience member and aspiring filmmaker. That Saturday night, he attended for the first time as a featured director.
As the house lights dimmed, Hess caught his breath. The audience hushed. The screen went black. Then, a lanky teenage boy with aviator eyeglasses and a permed mop of ginger hair appeared. He was waiting outside his home for the school bus, and when it arrived, he trudged to the last seat and sat down with a huff.
“What are you going to do today, Napoleon?” the student next to him asked.
“Whatever I FEEL like I wanna do. GOSH,” Napoleon replied. Then he opened his Trapper Keeper, fished out an action figure tied to a string, and tossed it out of the bus window. It bobbed behind the vehicle along a dirt road, surrounded by sunbleached mountains and crop fields.
Everything — from the outdated ’80s garb, to the characteristically defiant teenage attitude and deadpan delivery — instantly appealed to the audience. Within the first two minutes of the premiere, laughter echoed around the auditorium. When the screening of “Napoleon Dynamite” ended, the film received a standing ovation and set a bidding war in motion, ultimately going to production company Fox Searchlight for $4.75 million. “I can’t overstate the impact that it had on my life,” Hess says. “If you’ve played at Sundance and had a film that’s unique, you come away with the confidence of trying to stay true to yourself and your own voice and make things that are original. The world’s a better place with a multitude of voices like that.”
Despite a slim $400,000 budget, the film went on to become a cult classic, grossing more than $46 million in worldwide box office sales. It was set and filmed in Preston, Idaho, a farming town of fewer than 5,000 at the time and where Hess himself grew up as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — a self-identified nerd and a fellow awkward teenager. “‘Napoleon Dynamite’ works because of the people who made that movie,” says Brian Price, a lecturer in film studies at Yale University who taught screenwriting at UCLA for 15 years. “The reason why it has the cult status that it has is that it’s about misfits and that it appeals to misfits.”
The festival had inspired Hess to believe that stories about people from overlooked backgrounds can resonate with national audiences. “There was a special dynamic that happened between art and culture,” he says. “Utah has its own very unique culture. Bringing something here, a festival that sometimes is at odds with that general culture, is an amazing thing. It creates conversation, and it exposes a culture to art and stories that they wouldn’t have otherwise.”
That includes films from rural pockets of the Intermountain West and middle America ignored by the coasts, as well as those made by or featuring people of diverse racial, ethnic and religious backgrounds sometimes overlooked by mainstream media. The 2025 Hollywood Diversity Report by UCLA found that 80% of directors and co-directors are white, along with more than 90% of writers of Hollywood’s top films. Sundance has invested in grants and outreach efforts for artists who are Muslim, disabled, Native American, Latino, Asian American and Pacific Islander — perspectives that are sorely lacking in the industry at large. An event in the state that prioritized those principles on such a globally visible scale gave Utah a reputation of being multidimensional despite the state’s conservative political leanings. It didn’t just bring the world to Utah, it brought Utah to the rest of the world.
On a Saturday night in April 1976, a group of more than 500 Kanab locals gathered around a flame. Tensions had bubbled unusually high in the small town of some 2,000 people. Just two days before, on April 15, the Southern California Edison Company and San Diego Gas and Electric Company had withdrawn support for the impending $3.5 billion Kaiparowits coal-fired power plant. It would’ve been the largest power plant on Earth, capable of burning 30,000 tons of coal each day. It would’ve brought southern Utah stable jobs — if not for Redford and a band of environmentalists that had advocated against it and successfully thwarted the project. So the mob of 500 lamented its loss by burning the actor in effigy, complete with a blond wig.
Throughout his time in Utah, Redford never shied away from advocacy. He was a prominent activist who pushed for the creation of the Grand Staircase- Escalante National Monument, as well as against a six-lane highway. “There was this belief that Redford was an extreme environmentalist, therefore his politics didn’t fit in with Utah’s general attitude towards conservative thought and policy,” former Gov. Herbert, who considered Redford a friend, told me. “He was much more multifaceted and had a broader view than other people gave him credit for.”
Park City and our community started to view Sundance not as a cultural nonprofit event, but as a cash cow.
Other qualms dealt with finances and local values. The Utah-based Sutherland Institute raised an issue in 2013 when the state invested $300,000 to advertise Utah tourism through Sundance branded merchandise. Sutherland argued the state shouldn’t fund the festival with public money when it doesn’t represent the mores of all residents. “Some of the films they did were a little R-plus rated, and folks didn’t like that. That was a pushback,” said Herbert. Though the festival and its founder have generally been supported by Democrats and Republicans alike, considering the event’s economic impact. At least right up until the end of the festival’s time in Utah.
Within the last few years, several laws have been passed that have come at odds with the anti-racist, anti-sexist and anti-discriminatory vision set forth by the film festival. Among them are a law that bans the display of pride flags on government property, an anti-DEI law, and restrictions on bathrooms and college campus housing for transgender people. The Sundance Institute has stated that politics did not play a major role in the decision to move to Colorado. But lawmakers and locals can’t help but suggest a connection, especially since the institute listed “ethos and equity values” as one of the criteria for selecting its new home. Deadline reported in March that a “Sundance insider” called the flurry of legislation “a terrible look for the state.” Erin Mendenhall, Salt Lake City’s mayor, spoke publicly about her concern that the pride flag ban would harm the state’s bid to keep the festival. Meanwhile, Republican state Sen. Daniel McCay celebrated the festival’s timely departure by posting on X in March that “Sundance does not fit in Utah anymore.”
To some extent, that may be true. If not for political and cultural reasons, then at least in terms of size. When Sundance officials looked to new locations to host its future festivals, they — including Redford — suggested the event needed room to grow. The three top contenders fell to Ohio, Colorado and Utah, which offered $3.5 million in funding to keep it. Colorado, though, offered $34 million in tax incentives over a decade. Boulder is also roughly 10 times bigger than Park City, with the infrastructure to support the massive influx of people who arrive each year for the festival. When Jared Hess premiered “Napoleon Dynamite” in 2004, for example, fewer than 37,000 people attended the festival. In 2025, more than 85,000 people attended. “The culture that it brought to the state, I think there was a level of appreciation for it among the local community that was just off the charts,” Hess says. “Everyone’s going to feel its loss once it’s gone.”
What attracted Redford to Utah and what guided his plans for Sundance are factors totally devoid of finances.
The idea to leave Park City had been simmering for some time. The town is home to only about 8,300 full-time residents, yet attracts 600,000 tourists every year. Most of those visitors arrive in the winter to ski or snowboard at the Park City Mountain Resort, the largest skiing area in the country, and compete with Sundance attendees for services. Even outside high season, Park City is the most expensive locale in Utah with a cost of living more than 30% above the national average. “Park City and our community started to view Sundance not as a cultural nonprofit event, but as a cash cow,” Barton, Egyptian Theatre manager, says. “The room rates skyrocketed, restaurants raised prices and it’s tough to get around.”
Redford himself hinted at the possibility of relocating the festival in a 2016 interview with The Associated Press. “As it grew, so did the crowds, so did the development in Park City,” he said then. “Well, at some point, if both those things continue to grow, they’re going to begin to choke each other.” He didn’t have all the answers at that point. But he did have questions. Should the festival risk changing its home base, the forces that shaped it in the first place, the community that brought it such resounding success? Would that move be rejecting the roots the founder deemed the festival’s “heart and soul”? What would that mean moving forward?
Eugene Hernandez sat beside his window at the Sundance Mountain Resort in late October 2025. He gazed out at the same mountain range that captivated Redford decades before and reflected on his own first trip to Utah in 1993 — which was also the first time he set foot on a plane, the first time he saw snow. He was a student at UCLA then, curating the student-run film program, and he had no clear vision of who exactly he wanted to be. Hernandez fell so in love with the festival on that trip, he has attended it nearly every year since. Now, more than 30 years later, he oversees it as the festival director and head of public programming for the Sundance Institute.
In his third year in the role, Hernandez is navigating the biggest change the festival has made in its more than 40 years, while mourning the loss of the person who made it possible. He scanned the pines just beyond his window pane. “This is the place, literally,” he said, “that Mr. Redford and others founded the Sundance Institute at a similar moment to that we’re in now, of artists looking for ways to make and tell stories.”
While the festival is permanently relocating to Colorado, the Sundance Institute will remain in Utah. About a third of the 165 people employed through the institute live in the state. And Hernandez’s hope is that the directors lab, the screenwriters lab and the programs that bring aspiring artists to the mountain resort will continue as is. “The region around Salt Lake City and Park City are so essential to the history and the formation of this organization, its ethos, what it stands for, and what it supports.”
Gov. Cox has pitched the idea of creating a new festival with the $3.5 million the state had set aside to keep the festival. The likelihood that a few million dollars in funding alone can create a festival to rival the world’s premiere independent film festival that took decades to build is slim. Within the last 10 years alone, the film commission brought the state 36,000 production jobs and more than $736 million in total economic impact. Incentive programs offer filmmakers who choose to shoot in Utah a refundable tax credit of up to 25% of what they spent in-state on production costs. Other programs like the Rural Utah Film Incentive Program offer filmmakers funding if they produce at least 75% of a project in a rural county, which equalizes economic impact across the state. “We have a long history in film. We are a film-loving state. It’s not as if we just woke up one day a few years ago and decided to get into the film industry,” Pearce says. “This has been a part of our DNA from the beginning.”
Part of what attracted Redford to Utah and what guided his plans for Sundance are factors totally devoid of finances. The fact that individuals with different values, backgrounds and politics could come together and celebrate great filmmaking — independent from the industry, from preconceived notions — is what made the festival successful. It’s possible that a sense of unity and discovery won’t come as easily in a city or state where a majority of residents are already aligned ideologically. It’s possible it can’t be replicated anywhere anymore, that it didn’t just outgrow Utah but outgrew a world where that kind of exchange felt within reach.
In his final statement about the festival’s relocation, Redford reinforced that lofty goal. “I founded the Sundance Institute with a commitment to discovering and developing independent artists, with the Sundance Film Festival serving as the platform for stories to help expand audiences and broaden the landscape,” he said. “That mission remains even more critical today and will continue to be our core principle.” Everyone has a story, as Redford often said. They just need to be sought out and shared to make a difference. The belief that this can be achieved is what will bring audiences to Park City one final time in 2026, along with all the Utahns about to bid the festival farewell. Because when the movies end and the crowds leave, it will be up to the locals who stay behind to determine what story starts next.
This story appears in the January/February 2026 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.