Colorado
As Sundance said goodbye to Utah, its Colorado connections became clear
PARK CITY, UTAH — The evening before the Sundance Film Festival kicked off its final appearance in Utah, Amy Redford stood on a temporary stage in a temporary gathering space and addressed a roomful of people.
“My dad loved this place and its people,” she said of her father, Robert Redford, and the state where, for more than 40 years, the Sundance Institute — with its series of labs for emerging filmmakers — and the festival have shaped the film industry, and to some extent American culture.
Boulder City Council approves $17.3 million incentives package for Sundance
Robert Redford died last September at 89, and his absence, as well as his vision, permeated this installment of the first festival without the Sundance Kid turned Elder Statesman. It’s hard to decide if it was fitting or a poetic injustice that Redford will not be following the festival to Colorado, a state he knew well, where Sundance will move in January 2027.
Colorado, though, is a state he knew well. Redford had, at one time, wanted to start his film festival in Colorado before heading to Utah. “Even though Bob Redford enjoyed a successful acting and directing career, he was never just content to rest on those laurels. He believed that with space to create and experiment, independent artists were poised to have a tremendous impact,” Ebs Burnough, chair of the board of trustees, told a roomful of film writers and journalists.
“And of course, he was right. To this day, artists who get their start at the Sundance Institute and at the film festival go on to shape storytelling, independent cinema, and our collective culture. And that has never mattered more than it does in this moment, when we need the empathy and inspiration and new perspectives independent storytelling provides,” he added.
Place is a funny thing. The wilderness of Utah, coupled with the intimacy of the ski town, served and shaped the festival well for decades — and vice versa. Now it moves to a new location at the foot of the Flatirons and adjacent to the Rockies. Boulder is beautiful, but as a city, it has a wholly different aura. And it has a university and a tech corridor.
Fortunately, Sundance hired the Boulder-based producer Paula DuPré Pesmen (“The Cove,” “Chasing Ice,” “Porcelain War”) to help envision the transition.
In the meantime, here are four things (there’s plenty more) to know about the globally renowned festival that concludes Sunday and the one headed to Colorado in January 2027.
Colorado represented
Colorado was represented a couple of times this year. “See You When I See You,” a Jay Duplass-directed film, premiered at Sundance. It is based on beloved Denver stand-up Adam Cayton-Holland’s 2018 book, “Tragedy Plus Time: A Tragi-Comic Memoir,“ about grief and his sister’s suicide. It stars David Duchovny, Hope Davis and Cooper Raiff and Kaitlyn Dever as siblings.
Then there was writer-director Ramzi Bashour, who in 2023 was among the cohort of young filmmakers working on their first feature during the Sundance Directors Lab, held at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park. His debut feature, “Hot Water” — about a Lebanese mother and her son’s westward road trip — premiered in the U.S. Dramatic competition.
And the band DeVotchKa — with its roots in Colorado — returned to the place that launched them, as the festival celebrated the 20th anniversary of “Little Miss Sunshine.” “Yeah, everybody always says, ‘Man, I can’t believe it’s 20 years that flew by,’” frontman Nick Urata shared on a voice email. “But in this case, I have to say it doesn’t feel like that because that screening at Sundance 20 years ago was literally the first day of the rest of our lives. It was definitely the birth of our career as a band.”
They’d been touring and 21 years ago had self-released the album “How It Ends.” “Luckily, we got some airtime on listener-funded NPR stations, one of them being KCRW in L.A. And one morning they were playing us our song called “You’d Love Me,” he continued. “And Jonathan [Dayton] and Valerie [Faris], the directors, happened to hear it, and it sparked something. They got in touch with us about possibly using our music and doing some of the score for us. That is the coolest part of this whole story. The fact that those songs were released to little fanfare independently, and then it was repackaged along with this beautiful film, and the same exact songs were on the soundtrack album, and it got a Grammy nomination.”
Making young filmmakers household names
The Sundance labs are “a sneak peek at the artists you might see here … in the future,” Redford said in her speech. The next morning proved her prescient. When the Oscar nominations were announced, Sundance was well represented. Writer-director Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners” made history with 16 nominations. Nipping at its heels was Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another,” with 13. Chloe Zhao’s “Hamnet” garnered eight.
All three directors developed their first features in the Directors Lab: Coogler with “Fruitvale Station,” which starred his actor muse Michael B. Jordan; Anderson with the film that became “Hard Eight,” Zhao with “Songs My Brothers Taught Me,” set on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. And then there’s last year’s mournfully gorgeous meditation on a changing west, “Train Dreams,” which had four nominations, including Best Picture. The Oscar-nominated “Come See Me In the Good Light,” the tear-jerking, laugh-evoking documentary about the late Colorado Poet Laureate, Andrea Gibson, and her wife, the poet Megan Falley, as they faced Gibson’s cancer diagnosis, also won a nomination.
Colorado’s documentary filmmakers rule
Another world premiere was Daniel Roher and Charlie Tyrell’s “The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist.” As engaging as it is terrifying, the doc about the reasonable existential dread AI has engendered in some, including director Roher, was produced by Colorado-based filmmaker Shane Boris and multi-hyphenate Ted Tremper (“Borat Subsequent Moviefilm,” “The Daily Show.”)
“We did the film with the intention of making a work that would be engaging, that could bring people into this issue,” said Boris. “But, also with like clarifying very complicated topics in a very short amount of time and in a way that gave people a sense of agency in a moment where it feels like everything is just happening to us as opposed to us.”
In his young career, Boris has an Oscar for “Navalny” and two nominations for “Fire of Love” and “The Edge of Democracy.” The movie, which demanded a deft editor, had two: Daysha Broadway and Denver’s own Davis Coombe, a Primetime Emmy winner for Jeff Orlowski’s social-media indictment, “The Social Dilemma.”
In one fell swoop, Colorado became a global film hub
While Sundance will be Colorado’s — heck, the country’s — biggest film fest in 2027, it arrives in a place that already has a rich film festival tradition. Shoutout to XicanIndie Film, Fest Durango Film Festival, Mountain Film, the Dragon Boat Film Festival, Rocky Mountain Women’s Film, the Boulder International Film Festival, the Denver Film Festival, and more. In fact, the Denver Film Festival had one of its best-attended iterations last November and will soon celebrate its 50th anniversary.
Sundance also arrives in Colorado at a time when the state is undergoing changes. Earlier this month, Gov. Jared Polis and the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade announced the state’s new film commissioner: Lauren
Grimshaw Sloan, whose time at SeriesFest means she knows the ins and outs of festivals. The one-two punch of Sundance and the Telluride Film Festival (over Labor Day weekend) have seemingly made Colorado a global film destination.
At the end of her festival-eve comments, Redford encouraged the gathered. “Let’s make it a great festival celebration, remembrance and hope for all that is possible,” she said.
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UPDATE: SUNDAY 4/19/2026 7:12 p.m.
(COLORADO SPRINGS) — Northbound Powers Boulevards is back open at Palmer Park Boulevard, according to the Colorado Springs Police Department (CSPD). However, the center and right northbound lanes as well as the right turn lane remain closed south of Constitution Avenue. Law enforcement asked the community to avoid the area if possible, and drive carefully.
ORIGINAL STORY: CSPD: Major crash closes northbound Powers
The northbound lanes of Powers Boulevard are closed at Palmer Park Boulevard for a major crash at Powers and Constitution as of 5 p.m. on Sunday, April 19, according to the Colorado Springs Police Department (CSPD). Drivers are asked to avoid the area.
According to FOX21 News crew who spoke to an officer at the scene, the crash involved at least two cars and two motorcycles, and multiple people have been taken to the hospital.
Multiple agencies are responding, according to the FOX21 News crew, and the Major Crash Unit may be called in. Reports indicate that no one has died as of 5:30 p.m.
Former Colorado Buffaloes stars Sebastian Rancik and Bangot Dak announced their transfer portal decisions on Sunday with Rancik committing to Florida State and Dak committing to Vanderbilt, per On3’s Joe Tipton. They join former Buffs guard Isaiah Johnson (now at Texas) as the third former Colorado player to leave the Big 12 conference as Rancik opts for the ACC and Dak heads to the SEC.
The trio of Johnson, Rancik, and Dak make up three of Colorado’s four most productive players with rising senior guard Barrington Hargress, and the Buffs are now tasked with replacing such production with Hargress as the only returner.
Rancik’s season ended prematurely with an injury, but he averaged 12.3 points and 5.6 rebounds per game for the Buffs. Dak was Colorado’s leading rebounder with 6.5 boards per game, scoring 11.5 points per contest as well.
While each player has his respective reasons for transferring, the most expected ones are for seeking better NIL deals or more development on a better team in a better league. The Buffs finished 12th in the Big 12, and the allure of the SEC was too strong for the program to hold onto key talent like Johnson and Dak.
Still, Colorado coach Tad Boyle proved his ability to recruit and build up a solid core, one that saw its headliners of Johnson, Dak, and Rancik all depart in the portal. Can he do it again?
Colorado Buffaloes Roster Outlook
Boyle and the Buffaloes did retain Hargress as well as three freshmen guards: Jalin Holland, Ian Inman, and Josiah Sanders.
As a freshman, Holland averaged 4.9 points and 2.7 rebounds per game as one of Colorado’s key pieces coming off of the bench. Meanwhile, Sanders appeared in 33 games as a constant presence in the Buffs backcourt, averaging 4.4 points and 1.7 assists per game.
Inman played the fewest minutes of the returning trio, but he flashed with a couple of double-digit scoring performances as a true freshman.
“When I think of those three together, I think of toughness. I think of the improvement they made over the course of the season and the togetherness they have. They’re great friends and have formed a bond during their freshman year. Their toughness, energy and work ethic, when you have those attributes to go along with talent, which they all have, you get a chance to have three really good sophomores next year that will take the next step,” Boyle said in a release announcing the return of the three freshmen.
With eight outgoing transfers to replace, the Buffaloes will certainly have a new look to them for the 2026-27 season.
Colorado has landed one transfer portal prospect so far in former North Dakota State foward Noah Feddersen. On the recruiting trail, Boyle and company are bringing in four-star forward Rider Portela as well as two prospects from the NBL in Australia: forward Goc Malual and guard Alex Dickeson.
The transfer portal for men’s college basketball closes on Tuesday, April 21, meaning players have to enter their names by then. Transfer athletes do not have to commit before the portal closes, though, so Colorado is expected to continue hosting prospects on visits while building out the roster.
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