Last year in her first year as director of the Sundance Film Festival, Tabitha Jackson had to re-imagine the film festival for a virtual format in the midst of the pandemic. For 2022, she’s re-imagining it again.
Sundance will return to Park City, Utah, this year, but it will also remain online, meaning that the festival will be a hybrid opportunity for audiences both in person and watching from home. Every film will have an in-person premiere in Park City followed shortly after by an online premiere. And each premiere screening will be followed by its own separate live Q&A, with filmmakers and talent pulling double duty to be fully engaged for each audience.
Jackson told TheWrap she and festival programmer Kim Yutani were very intentional with that decision, making it clear to filmmakers that if they were going to be a part of Sundance 2022, they were signing up for their film to have an in-person and virtual presence. The goal will be to make sure there’s one unified conversation taking place around the buzziest films.
“That’s what we’re here to do. We’re here to generate energy and excitement around these new voices, and we now have the expanded possibility of doing that from the mountain and from the online dimensions,” Jackson told TheWrap of this year’s lineup, which was unveiled Thursday. “We didn’t want to go back on what we’d achieved last year. We wanted to add to it by bringing the in-person back.”
It makes sense that Sundance wouldn’t want to lose the crowd they gained last year; the festival estimated that 600,000 people “attended” its film screenings, events or talks online in 2021, which was three times more than the attendance for the pre-pandemic Park City event in 2020. And because the festival now has both avenues of screening films, organizers found more flexibility in the programming and opportunities to reach new audiences.
“We don’t have to think about what is going to play well on a small screen or big screen because we’ve got both. We don’t have to worry about what kind of audiences are not able to come to the mountain because we’ve got both,” Jackson said. “We now have an expanded community of people who already love independent filmmaking and the potential for a community that hasn’t experienced it yet. We can take it to them. The biggest challenge is doing right by the abundance of opportunity that’s presented to us.”
This year’s Sundance will open with an entry in the New Frontier section, an immersive documentary and “sensory film experience” called “32 Sounds” from artist Sam Green. The project will screen in-person at the Egyptian Theater on Main Street but also simultaneously in The Spaceship, a “metaverse” that was built specifically for online audiences to view New Frontier projects this year and that Jackson says will be an “experiment in convergence” in bringing audiences together.
“Those two audiences will converge in a moment to open the festival. We’re going to try it. We hope it works. But it’s symbolic of what we aim to do with this festival, which is to explore and experiment into what a festival can be,” Jackson said.
This year’s festival is bigger than in 2021, with 82 feature films on the initial lineup released Thursday compared to last year’s 70. Sundance even fielded its largest ever group of shorts submissions, and Jackson said her team has been impressed at the quality of the work considering the circumstances of shooting in the midst of a pandemic.
“We have no right to expect that anyone was going to be able to make a film during a pandemic, with the trauma and loss and economic instability, and all around impossibility of doing this work, they managed to do it,” she said. “It’s a humbling indication of how resilient artists are even in the most difficult of times, and we’re delighted to have such a robust program.”
Yutani also expressed admiration for the efforts of this year’s creators. “The way filmmakers are choosing to tell stories in this moment, films that are really questioning the system and fighting the system and taking a close look and examination on institutions and corporations and dealing with those stories in a really head-on way,” Yutani also told TheWrap about this year’s lineup. “And then we see a lot of films that are dealing very directly with grief and loss and very serious aspects of our times, but also we see the flip side of that, we see a lot of people using humor, and there’s a certain kind of levity we saw in our program.”
This year’s festival was also in line with last year in terms of diversity of female directors, people of color and LGBTQ+ filmmakers. Just over half of the 82 feature film lineup was directed or co-directed by a woman. But curiously, only 28% of the festival’s overall submissions were directed by women.
While Yutani emphasized that organizers “don’t program by quota,” she feels the most ambitious and innovative new work happens to be coming from traditionally underrepresented groups.
“Some of the most intriguing work is coming from women, people of color, looking to tell their stories in very specific ways that speak to their experience and have an approach to them and a point of view that is different from the mainstream,” she said. “It’s natural and organic that this work ends up with us. And we feel we’re the right place to launch these filmmakers and their projects.”
And Jackson agreed that it’s not surprising that the lineup shook out the way it did but believes the onus remains on the industry at large so that the number of submissions end up closer aligned to what the lineup will ultimately resemble.
“I feel very strongly our process isn’t one of bean counting, but we’re very mindful when we put the program together of what it is saying, and we are very mindful of our blind spots and what we may have missed. But basically, if as is our mission we focus on diversity of form, diversity of perspective, diversity of creative expression, then diversity of nature normally follows,” Jackson said. “The submissions, what’s actually happening in terms of financing and opportunity, they are not in a place that we would wish to see them. So hopefully we’ll see a year in which the figures are similar to what we’re programming than what the world is currently reflecting.”
The 2022 Sundance Film Festival runs January 20-30.
