Zero enthusiasm for the the slate of the 2024 Sundance Film Festival (January 18–28). I feel nothing….nothing at all. Festival director Eugene Hernandez is doing his level best, I’m sure, but has simply arrived too late in the cycle. Sundance is a shell of its former self.
For roughly 20 to 22 years or so (mid’90s to mid teens) this fabled Park City gathering was heavenly, and certainly more than worth the time, expense and hassle of going there.
My press pass was zotzed by the Robespierres in ’18, but I attended Sundance ’19 anyway and saw films by the grace of publicist pals. For the last four years I haven’t even thought of it.
It was 43 and 1/2 years ago when Robert Redford announced the idea of a Sundance Institute of some sort. He did so during a private chat-and-discussion at Yale University’s Battell Chapel. It happened on Thursday, 5.2.80, and I was right there front and center. I taped the whole thing.
For at least four years I’ve been calling the Sundance Film Festival a wokester cul de sac…a dead end in itself, a dog in a box. Robert Redford‘s annual Park City gathering was alive and crackling between the early ’90s until 2016, pumping new blood and attitude into Hollywood and in some instances even reaching Average Joe multiplexes — 25 years of vitality.
Then the wokesters began to take over in ’17, and within a year Sundance had become a festival for woke purists. Or, as I wrote in ’18, “a socialist summer camp in the snow…largely about woke-ness and women’s agenda films — healings, buried pain, social ills, #MeToo awareness, identity politics, etc.”
I’ve said this four or five times, only to be met by a consensus view from the HE commentariat that boiled down to “aahh, pipe down… you’re just pissed off because they yanked your press pass.”
But now finally…finally!…a writer director has told The Ankler‘s Richard Rushfield that “the indie Sundance machine” has indeed woked itself into a corner, “creating films that no one wants to see…there’s a reason why you don’t have many indie breakouts because the stuff that has been deemed important is completely out of touch.”
Thank you!! Someone has finally joined me in saying how over the last four years the Robespierre contingent have all but poisoned the indie realm, which is annually celebrated in Park City. Indiewire would rather slit its collective throat that admit this, but now there are two of us…me and this writer-director guy!
