This month’s swansong Park City and Salt Lake City edition of Sundance Film Festival (January 22-February 1) will be an emotional affair, as staff and attendees bid farewell to Utah after more than four decades, and remember festival founder Robert Redford and former communications head Tammie Rosen.
On the business side, the volume of US deal-making will come under scrutiny as it always does, although festival top brass argue that while “domestic” sales are important, that focus misses the point of a deeply strategic selection.
“Sometimes the commentary after the festival can be pretty swift in terms of saying there were or were not a lot of deals,” Eugene Hernandez, director of Sundance Film Festival and head of public programming, says. “Through different metrics, we track deals and we track reviews and we track ticket sales and all the different ways that we want to find success for our artists.”
The 2025 edition was notorious for a low count of deal-making that closed on-site or even shortly after the festival ended – with honourable exceptions like Neon snapping up the body horror Together, and Netflix and A24 acquiring awards contenders Train Dreams and Sorry, Baby, respectively.
Yet in fairness to Sundance, its 2025 and other recent editions have produced a steady flow of sales that trickled in throughout the year, in keeping with the protracted timeframe that has come to define post-Covid deal-making. A case in point is Hailey Gates’ satire Atropia, which was touted as a must-see one year ago and despite having Luca Guadagnino on board as producer and winning the US Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic, only sold to Vertical for North America in mid-October.
Hernandez asserts that in the end, the 2025 deal flow was as significant as any other in recent years, with “probably 65%-plus of the programme finding distribution”.
The media will be tracking available English-language titles in particular from this year’s crop of 90 new features, not counting the Park City Legacy programme. Of the entire 16,201 submissions of features, TV episodes and shorts for the upcoming edition, 2,579 were features from outside the US. That is roughly on par with the prior year and continues a gradual upwards trend.
“We’ve worked with sales companies for years”
John Nein, senior programmer and director of strategic initiatives, picks up the theme. “What’s not quite as well covered is that, especially with the international films, [sales agents are] doing territory-to-territory sales over a fair amount of time going into Berlinale and the EFM.”
Nein continues: “The reason that we continue to get strong international features, and the reason that the number of submissions comes up is because we’ve worked with these sales companies for years to understand how the films can be positioned successfully, not just to sell at Sundance: to sell in the weeks afterwards, in the markets afterwards.”
Last year Neon International launched sales at Berlin’s EFM on Michael Shanks’ Together, AGC International brought Bill Condon’s Kiss Of The Spider Woman, A24 negotiated with international buyers on Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, Visit Films commenced talks on Flora Lau’s Luz, and Magnify brought Obex and Endless Cookie, to name a few. In 2024, Neon reported solid EFM sales on its acquisition of Steven Soderbergh’s Sundance 2024 entry Presence.
Director of programming Kim Yutani and her team (the entire Sundance programming team comprises roughly 12 people working across features and 10 for shorts) undertake or feed into a year-round search for potential selections. The process begins immediately after the end of Sundance and segues into Berlin. Besides obligatory stops in Cannes and Toronto, there are trips to smaller but no less meaningful destinations, particularly in search of selections for the two 10-strong World Cinema sections.
“A few of our team members have gone to Malaga recently, and that’s been fruitful,” Yutani says. “I go to Polish Days in Wroclaw regularly, and that selection is strong.”
Relationships are forged and productions tracked, so that when a talented creator of shorts or a first-time filmmaker delivers their first or second features or their debut film in English, the team will be ready to take things to the next step.
“We work in a very hands-on way, with our international filmmakers in particular, to find out what their goals are,” Yutani adds. “It can be very overwhelming to play an American festival like Sundance, so we talk to our filmmakers about how we can connect them with the American industry.”
A case in point is Premieres entry Frank & Louis, the English-language debut of Petra Volpe, whose film Late Shift is the Swiss Oscar submission. “I’ve known Petra for many years,” Yutani says. “This is a special moment in her career, so we’re also looking at success in that way.” TrustNordisk handles sales.
London-based Nigerian filmmaker Olive Nwosu brings her solo feature directorial debut Lady in World Cinema Dramatic Competition, sold by HanWay Films. Nein and the programmers met Nwosu in a breakout room during a Zoom call with nearly 200 African filmmakers during the pandemic, and the festival presented her short Masquerade in 2022.
In US Dramatic Competition, Nein highlights Josef Kubota Wladyka’s Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty! set against the Tokyo ballroom dancing scene and starring Rinko Kikuchi from TV show Tokyo Vice and 2014 Sundance and Berlin selection Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter. Another to look out for is Beth de Araújo’s Josephine, which stars Channing Tatum and Gemma Chan and centres on a family dealing with a traumatic experience. “We all feel it’s one of the most outstanding films in the programme.”
Remembering Robert Redford and Tammie Rosen
The final edition in Utah will be tinged with sadness as thoughts turn to Redford, who died in September, and Rosen, the festival and non-profit communications expert who previously served in the same capacity at Tribeca and passed away in December.
“We have the opportunity to honour that legacy and mission that Mr Redford established, and we will do so at the festival, and that’ll be really impactful,” Hernandez says. “It starts from a reverential place, but then it moves to a celebratory one, and we will honour and celebrate our founder and honour and celebrate the place that he created.”
In the last year or two, Rosen travelled with the core leadership team when the Sundance Institute was reviewing potential new locations before it settled on Colorado.
“Tammie, Kim and John and I and others had many conversations over long road trips about what was going to be right for this festival and the future,” Hernandez notes. “Tammie was a part of that, and we will honour and recognise her at the festival, because her impact on Sundance has been monumental as well. As hard as it is and emotional as it’s been for all of us, we will do that.”
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