a personal Sundance oral history

Here’s what I can remember.

I’ve never truly felt how cold it probably really is at Sundance. There’s something about the festival, the energy, the walking or there’s just so much going on that the Park City cold doesn’t quite get to you.

In fact I’ve always loved the cold there. Breath in the air. Good cold. Really fresh and invigorating.

Standing in lines without knowing what the line was for or if it’s worth waiting for.

Posters plastered all over (that’s been gone btw for many years which has left less buzz about Main Street).

Flyers handed out by people who looked like they hadn’t slept and were more energized because of it.

I may not be the most reliable narrator and in writing this out I’ve already had to go back and correct some of the details. So to the best of my knowledge this all happened like I say it did.

1999

I had just moved to Los Angeles for film school at USC. A handful of us, maybe seven or eight out of a class of twenty-five, made a last-minute decision to go for the weekend. Friday to Sunday maybe. The details blur.

It was my first film festival. And also my first American mountain town.

We didn’t know how screening tickets worked. No one had been to Sundance before. We didn’t know anyone. We didn’t know the system. We just wanted to be close to whatever this was.

The only meal I remember clearly is eating a slice at the pizza place on Main. Not exactly memorable for the food but we needed to be fed, it was open late and there wasn’t a wait to get a table.

I managed to see one film, a World Cinema title, Brazilian or Chilean. I don’t remember the name but I remember the Egyptian Theatre. At the time, I didn’t know its significance, only that it felt like a place where something important happened. Sitting in that room, finally getting in after waiting in line, felt like crossing a threshold.

I remember thinking, I want to come back.

2002

I did come back. Things shifted.

This was the year Sundance began to tangibly influence my career.

That year I had a short film premiering, Blue Haven, a fiction short I’d made at USC. My first time attending not as an observer, but as a filmmaker. I remember checking in to get my filmmaker badge and surprised like a kid on Christmas Day by the swag that came with it.

Better Luck Tomorrow was in the U.S. Dramatic Competition. There was heat around that film, the kind you feel before you know how to name it. One of the actors from my short, Roger Fan, was also in Better Luck Tomorrow, and I remember being at a party when that whole crew walked in together. The confidence. The momentum. The sense that something had already tipped.

A friend of ours was in the film XX/XY that was in dramatic competition. This was another perk, I got into gifting suites, and saw my first premiere at the Eccles. The place was huge. I just remember thinking wow. I’d later get to come back and soak up the experience with films I produced.

That year, Sundance revealed itself to me as a place you could enter, not just admire from the sidewalk.

My film was programmed in the same block as Sarah Polley’s short film I Shout Love which was lovely and you knew she was more filmmaker than only actor right there. I was shy, didn’t really engage, I think she was too.

I didn’t yet know how to talk to people. Or what to ask. Or how to build anything lasting out of those moments. I said hi. I moved on. I didn’t yet understand that festivals are as much about community as they are about movies. But in 2002 I wasn’t ready yet to do that with her or any of the other filmmakers.

Don’t sleep. Get building from you first festival. These are your community. These are the people that you’ll come up the ladder with. Support each other

As I left Park City that year I remember thinking...
I’ve been here twice now.
Once without a film.
Once with one.
I don’t think I’ll come back unless I have work here.

Then there’s a long stretch where the record gets fuzzy.

Between 2002 and 2012, I submitted films, shorts, features, fiction, and documentaries. I collected rejections. I kept working.

Recently, I went digging through my old Yahoo email account to see if I could find any trace of casual Sundance trips during that decade, flight confirmations, housing threads, something. But everything before 2024 appears to be gone. Just...disappeared.

Which feels strangely on theme. That period lives more in feeling than documentation.

What I do know is that Sundance became something I associated with purpose. With work. Not with wandering. I know I did go back for at least one festival between ‘02 and ‘12, maybe two. What I remember is finding my friend Joe Beyer to get a festival badge! This is before I realized as an alumni I could get one pretty easily. But I didn’t have a film at the fest and thought that was the only way to get a badge. Anyway Joe’s a great champion for filmmakers and started working for Geoff Gilmore before carving out his lane as a programmer and starting up the Artist Services program. He got me hooked up.

2012

In January, I went to Sundance briefly, two or three days for financing meetings. I caught one film on the day I left town, The Invisible War. I remember being floored by the power of that film and how it shook the room.

This was another kind of Sundance. One about securing the next project. That trip mattered, I solidified needed financing for The Crash Reel during that festival. We’d be back. And this time I got my alumni badge ahead of time.

Later that summer, I returned to Utah to film in Salt Lake City, and I popped up to Park City again, this time out of season. The first time I’d ever been there when it wasn’t winter.

Warm. Quiet. Almost empty.

It was a completely different town. No crowds. No lines. No urgency. Just space.

That contrast stuck with me. How different the same place can feel depending on context, pressure, purpose.

2013

The Crash Reel premiered at Sundance.

This was the first time I truly understood what it meant to “work” the festival. We had some selling to do...

We rented a place just off Main, so we could walk everywhere. That turned out to be essential. Location matters more than people realize.

We hired paid intern drivers from Salt Lake City through the Utah Film Center. Parking is impossible. Shuttles eat time. Drivers change everything. Pro tip. Will it matter in Boulder?

We started with a volunteer screening at the Library, something I highly recommend. Volunteers are excited. They talk. They carry energy between places.

Seven screenings total. Park City and Salt Lake City. Days filled with press, logistics, making sure people got where they needed to be.

I didn’t see someone else’s film until late in the week. There was no time.

We came in with HBO already on board, which took some pressure off. We left with international sales and additional US rights deals. I remember going from meeting to meeting to listen to distributors pitch us. Fun.

It was a successful festival for sure.

Crucial thing I learned, the crew at Brit Doc (RIP Jess Search) aka Doc Society throw the best parties (sorry Cinetic). They do plenty of other great things for the filmmaker community too!

2014

I returned with a short documentary, The Lion’s Mouth Opens, and for the first (and only) time, I attended just the second half of the festival.

Less industry. More film lovers. More breathing room.

The film won the U.S. Documentary Short Jury Prize and was later shortlisted for the Academy Award.

That year reminded me Sundance doesn’t have to be frantic to be meaningful.

2016, is my first and only taste of the New Frontier’s section at the festival. A VR documentary I produced A History of Cuban Dance played. It’s the first time I shared a project not in a theater to an audience in seats! I couldn’t attend. I supported it from afar. That, too, became part of my Sundance education, learning how to let projects live without you physically present. A series I worked on screened the first two episodes and it’s one of the early years when episodic storytelling found a home on the mountain. So this was the first year with two projects at the dance.

In 2017, Buena Vista Social Club: Adios was selected, scheduled, and then pulled the night before its premiere. I get to put that on my resume, 8 projects at Sundance, 1 pulled. Many folks get to say they had projects at Sundance but few get to say they had one pulled! Ha.

Anyway, house booked. Travel booked. Badges waiting for us.

We went anyway.

I remember the strange feeling of being at Sundance with a film that wasn’t screening. People looking at my badge and saying oh you’re with that film! I don’t remember if I saw a film but I must have cause I’ve not left the festival without seeing a film yet.

It was surreal, and unknown to me then was that I would have an even more surreal experience a little further down the line.

We stayed a 20 min walk above Main Street towards Deer Valley, so it was walkable but it was a lot up hill! Not doing that again.

*ok I’ve been reminded by one of the editors on the pulled film, Pablo Proenza that I saw “Call me by your name” that year. It was an early morning screening at the Ray but I had to go, a Luca Guadagnino film after all. But mostly I went because it’s a film co-created and edited by Walter Fasano who is a hidden gem editor. Fun fact he edited the short film, Blue Haven, I screen at Sundance 2002.

2019

This year brought a different scale.

Clemency.

My first time in the fiction feature competition section. Big cast. Big press. Big stakes. Sale REALLY needed!

More herding. More schedules. More intensity.

We won the Grand Jury Prize — unexpected in the way these things often are.

Sales took time. The film wasn’t an easy sell. But it found its path a few weeks after the festival wrapped.

That year showed me how different the festival feels depending on form, fiction versus documentary, star-driven versus no stars. I also got dropped into the other world that exists at Sundance, the fiction side. New people, new parties, and new connections.

2020 was meetings and future-casting. I had one film we were editing that needed more financing and that was a big part of what drove every interaction I had. The overwhelming thing I remember though was I did a lot of hand sanitizing. We didn’t yet know what was to come but I’d followed the news in Asia enough to know I didn’t want what was circulating and clearly it must be in Park City at this point.

2021 was a virtual premiere, selling a film without ever sitting in a room with an audience.

You don’t realize how much you rely on the room until it’s gone.

This was the strangest Sundance. The film, Bring Your Own Brigade, premiered but I didn’t see the audience so did it premiere? The film team gathered right after the premiere on a group zoom and we all just felt weird. For some people this was their first film at the festival and while this experience was unique it did feel like they were robbed of what Sundance is about, the electric audience reaction, the buzz on Main Street and so much more.

This was also the Sundance I got the most heat for delivering the film so late. The calls. Yikes. But you gotta do what you gotta do to get the good film ready!

I know I wasn’t there in 2022 and 2023 but I couldn’t figure out if 2024 I stopped by or not.

2025

This was my first time I remember being back post pandemic. I came to support a work in progress screening of a short doc I produced to the local Salt Lake area Vietnamese diaspora. It was a really rewarding and impactful screening. We got to road test the film with a couple hundred people and picked up some good feedback to improve the film. We also used the opportunity to gather the main participants from the film and show them privately before hand. The film, On Healing Land, Birds Perch, went on to win a number of festival awards on it’s way to making the shortlist for this year’s 98th Academy Awards.

When I wandered along Main I caught myself thinking this could be my last time here. And then thought nah, that’s not gonna happen.

And then 2026.

The last Park City edition.

I didn’t expect it to land emotionally. But walking down Main that first night, it did.

This festival, in this town, has shaped my career more than any other. Not just through premieres or awards, but through proximity. Timing. Repetition. People met early. People met late. People met again. I ran into more people this year that I remembered from previous editions. I guess everyone came to say goodbye.

I ate at the same pizza place I ate at in 1999. Took the shuttle one last time. Was enthralled by one more screening at the Eccles (Liz Garbus’ Billie Jean King doc Give me the ball). Got in line (and danced) at the Cinetic party. Walked up Main one final time.

Sundance is film festival I’ve attended more than any other. By far. And it has meaning.

Not because Park City is irreplaceable.
Not because Sundance is perfect.

But because this version of the festival, in this place, mattered.

And it felt worth saying that out loud.

Onwards to Boulder.

my last Park City screening included tennis balls hit by Billie Jean King.

Blue skies of Main Street with zero snow!

a FilmStack gathering!