It’s official: Boulder and Colorado will host the world-renowned Sundance Film Festival.
The festival will have one more year in its current location before starting up in Colorado 2027. Colorado’s bid beat out Cincinnati and Sundance’s home of more than four decades, Park City, Utah.
The festival’s board voted Thursday morning to move the marquee event to Colorado. Gov. Jared Polis and other elected leaders and officials are expected at a news conference at the Boulder Theatre in the afternoon.
“Boulder is an art town, tech town, mountain town, and college town. It is a place where the Festival can build and flourish,” said Amanda Kelso, Sundance Institute Acting CEO in a release announcing the decision. “We can’t imagine a better fit than Boulder.”
The release cited Boulder’s “small-town charm” and “engaged community,” as well as its values as “a community rooted in independent thought, artistic exploration, and social impact.”
Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, who lives in Boulder, swiftly celebrated the festival’s decision, saying in a statement, “Here in Colorado we also celebrate the arts and film industry as a key economic driver, job creator, and important contributor to our thriving culture. Now, with the addition of the iconic Sundance Film Festival, we can expect even more jobs, a huge benefit for our small businesses including stores and restaurants, and to help the festival achieve even greater success.”
The festival will be centered around the Pearl Street Mall and CU campus in Boulder, but will involve an array of venues in the region, potentially including the Stanley Film Center in Estes Park.
John Taylor, president and CEO of Boulder Chamber, called the decision a “milestone for our state and local economy.” But beyond the potential economic impact from the event, he was also excited about the artistic implications of hosting Sundance.
“It represents as a cultural beacon to the rest of the world in terms of Boulder’s and Colorado's leadership as a place of innovation for cultural creativity and for cinematic expression … What an immense responsibility this is for us to carry on the tradition that Sundance represents in terms of the storytelling that they are facilitating and the magic of it for the folks involved in the film industry,” he said.
Taylor also expressed confidence in Boulder’s “capacity to handle the film festival and to accommodate it comfortably” in light of the festival’s record of pulling in a large number of visitors every year.
Sundance Institute, the nonprofit that organizes the annual star-stuffed event, announced last April that it was weighing whether to move to a new host city. Its current contract with Park City is slated to end in 2026, and the nonprofit said it was accepting proposals from other cities interested in welcoming some 140,000-plus eager cinephiles every year.
To sweeten its bid, Colorado is preparing to give the festival up to $34 million in refundable tax credits over the course of a decade. The bipartisan bill is in the final steps at the state legislature, but has met with some opposition from Republicans who consider it a poor use of state funding. The legislation also makes $500,000 in tax credits available for smaller, homegrown festivals.
While the festival’s announcement contained no mention of politics, Rep. Brianna Titone, D-Arvada, one of the bill’s main sponsors, said she thinks the Sundance move sends a larger message about what’s happening across the country. Titone is Colorado’s only transgender state lawmaker.
“There's been a lot of changes going on in the federal government and in state governments around discrimination and picking on groups of people, especially the LGBT community and the film industry really is not about that. They are really about inclusivity and promoting the ideas about people being different,” she said in an interview with CPR News.
Utah has moved to ban the gay pride flag from state buildings and schools, while Colorado has ramped up protections for LGBTQ residents
Titone said Boulder is the perfect place for the festival.
“I think that Colorado getting the film festival is kind of karma,” she said. “Because this film industry and this film festival, which celebrates all of the vibrant diversity in people, has to have a home where it's welcome and celebrated.”
Boulder Democrat Steve Fenberg, who led the state Senate when Colorado launched its bid, said so many people from the state, the city, and the community worked very hard to illustrate to Sundance why Colorado is the perfect home for them.
“I’m thrilled that my two girls will grow up being able to have a first row seat at experiencing Sundance’s rich, life-changing storytelling.”
Republican Sen. Mark Baisley of Woodland Park was another main sponsor of state incentives to help entice Sundance to Boulder. He said the festival will bring tremendous economic benefits for all of Colorado, with both tangible and intangible blessings.
“Communities across the Front Range will benefit from the annual trek that will delightfully overwhelm Boulder’s hotel and restaurant capacities. Film industry visitors will boldly go where they had not gone before: to our ski slopes, our mountain towns, our unique Western slope communities, he said.
The financial impact could be significant. Sundance reportedly delivered a $132 million total economic impact to Utah in 2024.
However, some lawmakers object to the state offering so much tax money to land a single film event.
Most of the objections have come from Republicans, but Democratic Rep. Bob Marshall of Highlands Ranch, the only Democratic no vote in the House, said it shouldn’t be a priority given the state’s $1.2 billion budget shortfall.
“They want this elite group to show up and they want the rest of the Colorado taxpayers to subsidize it rather than subsidizing and trying to put a bulwark on Medicaid while we're cutting that to the bone this year,” he told CPR News.
To read more stories from Colorado Public Radio, visit www.cpr.org.
