A chill in the air at Sundance

An exclusive dispatch for the Post from the famed indie film festival.

By LAURI DONAHUE FEBRUARY 1, 2025 04:51

PRO-ISRAEL demonstrators on Main Street in Park City. (photo credit: LAURI DONAHUE)

There was a chill in the air at the Sundance Film Festival this year and not just because temperatures in Park City, Utah dropped to -14°C at night.

Founded in 1978 and chaired by actor and director Robert Redford for most of its history, the independent film festival has been held in the resort town for 40 years. But last April, the non-profit organization that runs Sundance announced that in 2027 it would be moving to one of three new locations: Salt Lake City, Utah – where the festival originated and where many screenings are still held – Boulder, Colorado, or Cincinnati, Ohio.

Sundance has long since outgrown Park City, bringing more than 20,000 festival-goers over 11 days to the town of 8,200 residents. Prices have surged as a result. A $500 per night guest house is considered a bargain. Downtown parking costs $50 for the evening. A cup of soup in a Main Street café goes for $14.75. 

Roads are crowded with movie fans, skiers, and black Cadillac SUVs delivering VIPs to their red carpets. Thus, the 3.2-km. shuttle bus ride from Main Street to Eccles Theater, the main venue, can take well over an hour, frustrating guests who are late for screenings. 

Sundance is about doing business as much as it is a celebration of film. About 60 films in competition are seeking theatrical and streaming distribution deals from companies such as Apple, Amazon, and Netflix that will allow their makers to earn back their costs and maybe make a profit.

THE EGYPTIAN Theater. (credit: LAURI DONAHUE)

This year, however, as Variety reported, not a single film sold over the first five days of the festival. That’s an unprecedented dry spell, according to Variety, even though many of these movies boasted A-list talent.

Attendees at this year’s festival included stars such as Sarah Jessica Parker (Sex and the City), Cynthia Erivo (Wicked), Josh O’Connor (Challengers), Ayo Edebiri (The Bear), Lily Gladstone (Killers of the Flower Moon), Olivia Colman (The Favourite), and Benedict Cumberbatch (Sherlock). However, some have questioned whether Hollywood bigshots will make the trek to a less glamorous and scenic location. The final decision about the move is expected to be announced in March or April.

Lounge life

Companies take advantage of the captive audience in Park City to market their wares. Main Street is lined with “lounges” sponsored by brands, such as Acura, Audible, Dropbox, Hyatt, Chase Saphire Reserve, Adobe, Canon, and Disney. 

They entice guests with delicacies like caviar-topped hash browns, melted camembert on brioche, artisanal chocolate, and “Power Nap” expresso martinis. 

Other lounges offer negative ion rain treatment chairs and oxygen cannulas to help with the thin mountain air. Park City is at 2,133 meters above sea level, leaving visitors huffing and puffing as they make their way up Main Street.

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In the lounges, guests can collect swag (mostly ski hats), turn themselves into GIFs, have free tote bags embroidered with their initials, make their own Scent of Sundance perfume with locally sourced essential oils, and play with camera equipment and editing software. 

Jewish visitors can relax in the Shabbat Lounge, which provides kosher meals, prayer services, l’chaims, and networking opportunities. It’s sponsored by Consulate General of Israel and the United Jewish Federation of Utah, among others. The Lounge is hosted by Rabbi Yonah Bookstein of the Pico Shul in Los Angeles, who wears his signature cowboy hat during the festival, and by Rebbetzin Rachel Bookstein. 

Hard times

The devastating fires in Los Angeles cast a pall over this year’s Festival, with more than 16,000 structures – many belonging to people in the movie industry – damaged or destroyed.

Hollywood also still hasn’t recovered from the actors’ and writers’ strikes of 2023, nor from the pandemic, and now faces the advent of generative artificial intelligence (AI) that some fear (or hope) will make writers, actors, and other creative professionals obsolete.

In short, it’s a tough time to make movies.

But, somehow, movies still get made, and hits and careers are often launched at Sundance.

Last year’s festival, as The Jerusalem Post reported, saw the debuts of two features with Jewish themes: A Real Pain and Between the Temples. 

A Real Pain, a road-trip dramedy about mismatched cousins on a Holocaust tour of their late grandmother’s homeland, was nominated for 2025 Oscars for Supporting Actor for Kieran Culkin (Succession) and for Original Screenplay by director and co-star Jesse Eisenberg (The Social Network).

This year’s Sundance also features several films on Jewish and/or Israeli subjects.

Coexistence, My A**! is a feature documentary that follows Israeli comedian Noam Shuster Eliassi over four years as she uses comedy to advocate for equal rights for Jewish Israelis and Palestinians.

Eliassi, with an Iranian-Jewish mother and a Jerusalem-born Israeli-Romanian father, was raised in Neve Shalom, an Israeli community with both Arab and Jewish families. She started developing her one-woman show during a fellowship at Harvard Divinity School. 

She returned home to Israel during the COVID-19 pandemic and went viral with her satirical Arabic song “Dubai, Dubai,” mocking the Abraham Accords.

All That’s Left of You is an epic family drama set in Israel and the West Bank, between 1948 and 2022, that stars several members of the Israeli Arab/Palestinian Bakri acting dynasty: Mohammed Bakri (Jenin, Jenin; Homeland) and his sons Saleh (The Band’s Visit) and Adam Bakri (Omar).

The film also stars Maria Zreik, whose maternal grandmother was a Holocaust survivor from Germany and whose maternal grandfather was Palestinian. 

The film was written and directed by Palestinian-American Cherien Dabis, who co-stars. Her films Make a Wish, Amreeka and May in the Summer also premiered at Sundance. She was nominated for an Emmy in 2022 for directing the comedy series Only Murders in the Building. 

Unholy is a short film written and directed by Daisy Freedman, about a young woman who attends her family’s Passover Seder for the first time since being put on a feeding tube for a gastrointestinal disorder. She’s confronted with “pushy family members, malfunctioning medical devices, and a room of food she can’t eat.”

Social issues

Sundance offers dozens of panel discussions, which are usually the best places to spot actual movie stars. Panel topics range from the practical (The State of Producing Independent Films) to the philosophical (The Role of the Artist in the Age of Censorship) to the aspirational (Mapping Gender Allyship in 2025 and Beyond).

NASA hosted a talk about an upcoming documentary titled “You Bet Your Asteroid NASA Has a Story to Tell.”

As last year, several dozen anti-Israel protesters carrying Palestinian flags demonstrated on Main Street. However, this year there was also a small counter-protest with demonstrators carrying American and Israeli flags, watched over by a sizeable police contingent, including some on horseback.