Inside Sundance Institute

The Sundance Film Festival is held each January in Park City, Salt Lake City, and Ogden, Utah. The festival began in 1978 as a means to attracting more filmmakers to the state but has grown into the world’s largest international independent film festival, showcasing new films from American and international filmmakers. It is also the flagship event for the Sundance Institute - a year-round institution, founded by Robert Redford in 1981, dedicated to fostering independent films, theatre productions and music.

The festival consists of competitions for American and international dramatic and documentary films, both feature-length and short films, plus a handful of non-competitive showcase sections. Since the early-90s the profile of Sundance has been raised substantially by the success of certain independent film creators, such as Quentin Tarantino and Steven Soderbergh, to the point where it has become a focal point for the world’s media and the great and the good of the film world. Yet for all the Hollywood celebrities and the legions of reporters, it has never lost sight of its guiding ambition – to provide a world platform for the best of independent film. Among the high-profile cinematic successes to have come out of Sundance are “Reservoir Dogs”, “Clerks”, “Sex, Lies and Videotape”, “Garden State”, “Sideways”, “Little Miss Sunshine” and “Napoleon Dynamite”.