EXCLUSIVE: Weeks after the indie film crowd left Park City, the box score on the Sundance Film Festival marketplace looks like this: a splashy auction and $15M WW deal by Neon on Together to start, followed by a handful of deals that moved sluggishly, with numbers that got smaller as leverage shifted from sellers to buyers. A chorus of naysayers followed, though it bears noting that after a slow Toronto Film Festival deal pace last fall, the just completed Berlinale marketplace was also a snore. No matter how splashily festival markets showcase acquisition titles, they can’t make buyers spend money on them in this moment of extreme uncertainty. Does Sundance have fundamental flaws, or did the festival merely reflect that low ebb and possibly a new risk-averse normal in the shifting sands of the indie business?
Sundance Festival head Eugene Hernandez has been pondering that with his staff, as the festival moves closer to landing a new venue either in Boulder, Colorado, Cincinnati, Ohio, or nearby Salt Lake City. The latter venue provides a more altitude and user-friendly venue opportunity than the logistically challenged Park City, and all of the finalists are dangling tax breaks and lofty plans. Maybe that will provide a new spark for a 40+ year old Sundance?
Hernandez has been steeped in Sundance and the indie film game his entire career. He co-founded IndieWire around a Sundance was launching big Hollywood film careers and huge deals. He headed the New York Film Festival before getting his dream job at Sundance. No one is more incentivized in keeping founder Robert Redford’s vision alive. Timed for the morning of the Spirit Awards that is the Super Bowl for indie films, Hernandez addresses with Deadline the concerns, and the future.
DEADLINE: The reviews on the just completed Sundance Festival were not great. Slow pace on film sales, a paucity of buzzy titles compared to years when films from CODA to The Big Sick and Manchester By The Sea, Birth of a Nation and Palm Springs sold for huge amounts. Was there anything you and your team could have done to create a different outcome?
EUGENE HERNANDEZ: That’s a fair question. We started at a rough moment. When the festival opened, there were still fires burning in LA. I spend a good part of the fall and winter in Los Angeles. I grew up there. I have an apartment in Santa Monica, and my place was in an evacuation zone for a bit. We started the festival at a time of great anxiety and stress. Colleagues and artists lost their homes and were displaced. Everyone we talked to going into the festival, they were clear. We have to continue. These films were ready to meet an audience. There was a lot of anxiety and distraction. I think it was a moment where people wanted to be together, where people wanted to engage with the next generation of filmmakers. I’m sensitive to the reactions, but at the same time, it felt very nourishing to be able to come back together. To walk out on stage to introduce films, and feel the energy from the crowd. We had such amazing reactions in the room.
DEADLINE: Highlights?
HERNANDEZ: We had the documentary Prime Minister, early in the festival. We had Dame Jacinda Ardern, former Prime Minister of New Zealand, there in the audience. When she came out on stage at the end of that film, everybody was crying. Everybody.
DEADLINE: She became prime minister, discovered she was pregnant, and oversaw accomplishments that included a countrywide ban on automatic weapons following the massacre of over 50 people at the Christchurch Mosque…
HERNANDEZ: It was a very emotional screening, I think, because of the subject matter, because of the way the film played. And because of the hope and optimism you feel from that film. Walking onstage to introduce Jacinda Ardern and do a Q&A, and in that emotional moment, I felt like I understood both the challenge and obstacles of this year’s festival, but also the potential. The audience, showing up with the warmth they showed to her and all of our artists this year…we had the most amazing reactions in the room. That’s what we set out to accomplish, and that premiere was the best starting point to reinforce our decision to carry on with the festival, knowing people were hurting and struggling. I could list a bunch of moments, visceral experiences.
DEADLINE: Protest and political expression have been an important part of the tapestry of Sundance. We saw Donald Trump get elected president, and the tech overlords who hold sway over movie business bow to and capitulate to him. Did you expect more of a rebel yell at your festival?
HERNANDEZ: I was thinking back to 2017, rereading some of the coverage from when Donald Trump was being inaugurated. Something Mr. Redford said at the start of the festival, I found very grounding. The idea is that presidents come and go, the pendulum swings back and forth and we don’t occupy ourselves with politics. We feel it’s far more important to support the storytellers and let them tell the stories. And if the politics come up in those stories, that’s fine. That’s how I felt. I felt like that was grounding, going into this year’s festival, and I think we saw it play out in some of the work itself. I take your point about what how people are reacting on the ground, but I but I felt a groundswell of reaction and response in the room.
Beyond Prime Minister, setting an achievable but high bar for leadership, optimism. There was Heightened Scrutiny, a film about ACLU attorney Chase Strangio preparing to argue a case for Trans rights before the Supreme Court; there was Kim Snyder’s The Librarians, about libraries and book banning. I am glad the festival can hold up these stories as an answer to what you are asking, and I think that work will continue to be done and explored. Big global topics were discussed in films. All of this is something Sundance has done so well for as long as I’ve been going, along with centering filmmakers. In his remarks when he introduced Kiss of the Spider Woman, Bill Condon addressed this question of gender identity and it was a very powerful moment. I appreciate your point about the more broad question of protests, but there were numerous moments at the festival where artists were inviting and engaging dialogue, and I’ll include here the documentary Free Leonard Peltier. When we invited the film in November, it had a different context. The election hadn’t happened yet. There was a question of whether you know Leonard Peltier would ever receive clemency or ever be freed, and in the last days of the Biden Presidency came the announcement of his clemency. He hasn’t been released yet, but will be soon, and that screening took on such incredible power.
DEADLINE: How many films do you and your team watch to cull the Sundance slate?
HERNANDEZ: It’s a year round process that begins in Berlin and meetings with international sales, companies and sales agents. We’ve seen the largest increase in and growth in our submissions coming internationally. We start tracking some of the films that are just being finished for submission to festivals later in the year. Last year we had 16,000 submissions, features short and episodic. The greatest increase of submissions is coming internationally and we lean in strongly on that, to make Sundance a festival of global discovery. We start watching all those films in the spring and go all the way through the fall.
DEADLINE: That sounds like a lot of time in dark rooms.
HERNANDEZ: It is, but it creates an important opportunity for us to continue to try to discover what’s going on, who’s out there, and what’s being made internationally. We have a pretty exhaustive process and we send programmers to different parts of the world to watch movies.
DEADLINE: To the feeling that the festival in January was a sleepy one in terms of sales and buzz: when you evaluate those thousands of movies you consider, how much weight do you put on choosing a film because you are confident it will sell for significant money, which injects headlines and a feeling of excitement?
HERNANDEZ: It’s a great question, and the fundamental one that Sundance has tackled for its 41 years of existence as a festival, and 44 years of existence as an institute. The mission of Sundance is fundamentally to connect artists with audiences. We walk into our programmatic process every season with that top of mind. Our role is sift through, watch and consider this pool of 16,000 movies and invite a small number of them. There are 10 films in each competition category, U.S., internation, docs. We take your question really seriously, because we think about all the different audiences that the festival reaches. This year maybe 80% of the films were looking for distribution, but 100% of them were looking for an audience. So every single film that we talk about and invite, we know that those films were made to connect with an audience. But it’s different now, given the nature of our current marketplace. Given the evolving way that audiences are finding films, exacerbated by the realities of the pandemic. The paths open to these films to find an audience are going to be different. Sometimes they’re going to be slower. Sometimes they’re going to be acquired. Sometimes these films are going to have distribution funded by some of the investors in the films themselves. We see an increasing amount of that. It’s not just self-distribution, but distribution that’s funded by investors, especially around documentaries looking to make an impact or affect a national conversation. So 100 of these movies are looking to find an audience and we know Sundance plays a part in helping to lay the foundation for that connection to an audience. But we can only do so much and if we’re successful, it’s that we gave each of these films the best possible launch moment. We premiere like 16 films a day over the course of the first six of the festival. You have the industry community. There you have the press. You have curators who travel to the festival from all around the world to consider films for their festivals.
DEADLINE: The difference is the negotiating pace leaves snail tracks now. This is about these films finding distributors who believe in them, but the heady days of all-night auctions are for now as dead as disco. Those festivals were a lot more exciting to cover. This is the way the business has evolved, and I don’t really know what a festival can do. You can display films, but you cannot make buyers buy in a moment when they are so wary. We saw that in Berlin. A lot of future films were pieced together with international rights deals, but the splashy deals haven’t happened yet.
HERNANDEZ: There was no shortage of activity happening at the festival. Buyers are responding as quickly as they ever have to films, but the transactions are just taking longer to play out. But we do consider how audiences including distribution companies are going to respond to the small amount of films we choose.
DEADLINE: Kiss of the Spider Woman was the splashiest Sundance title because of a lights out performance by Jennifer Lopez, a revelation in Tonatiuh, and a strong performance by Diego Luna. It seemed an unusually commercial choice with an unusually high budget for Sundance, and given its history as a successful film and stage play. It didn’t sell, and the effort to find distribution continued in Berlin. It feels like the backers won’t get the high price they asked for, but the notion of using Sundance as a sales launchpad that can continue through subsequent festivals and hopefully a wide Oscar season release, is an intriguing possible direction for the festival…
HERNANDEZ: That’s a great one to point to. But let me tell you how that film came to be at Sundance. I was at the festival as a journalist in 1998 when Bill Condon premiered Gods and Monsters. It was a career turning point for him, and the festival. The film got Oscar nominations, and a Screenplay win for him. It had a very long life after Sundance and so when we learned that that Bill was finishing this adaptation of Kiss of the Spider Woman, we were keen to see it and part of that was Bill Condon’s long history with the festival. He’s had much bigger successes in the studio world, but is very mindful of his indie roots. We watched the day after the election, a nearly finished cut. The musical numbers, the performances were all there and everything looked great on the screen. What really resonated with us watching it in those few hours after the election results, was how topical and timely this film felt.
Sure, it has these big, glossy MGM-style, musical numbers, but the story underneath was so of the moment. It was funded and financed independently, with a breakout performance by Tonatiuh and a defining performance by Jennifer Lopez. To us, this movie belonged at Sundance. We wanted the life of this movie to start with us, and we brought Bill back home. The idea this film was discovered internationally in the Berlin market is exciting to us and we see a long road ahead of it. Festivals are really locking arms now, and we stay close to each other and we have been talking more, and looking out for and supporting each other, especially since the pandemic. I am glad we could play a part in that film’s launch.
DEADLINE: What would you say to those who wrote critically about the festival that it has lost its compass, factoring in that next year will be the last in Park City before it moves to one of three venues?
HERNANDEZ: I was a journalist and I appreciate commentary and feedback. I feel if anything, the Festival and the Institute are are as grounded and focused and as directed towards the mission of Sundance as it’s ever been. I saw and felt that from the first Friday night premiere, and our gala, where Michelle Satter gave a speech when she was honored.
DEADLINE: After losing her terrific son Michael Latt in a senseless murder that shocked Hollywood, the founding senior director of the Sundance Institute lost her home in the fire…
HERNANDEZ: Between her and the other artists honored, there was a spirit there, about the importance of Sundance continuing to support its mission of discovering It’s personal for me, because I’ve always felt very grounded in that, and it was the mission of Indiewire when we created it out of Sundance in the ‘90s based on the unwavering mission of the Institute, and everything that Mr. Redford and Michelle Satter and others created. I know that right now there’s no loss of direction.
I understand when folks in the industry want more of this or that, and there is anxiety that started with the pandemic and continued with these tragic fires. I am deeply respectful of those challenges added to the contraction and consolidation happening in the marketplace as people try to get these worthy films out into the world. Sundance has proven our resilience over 40 years, but it’s also not stubborn and we are responsive to the evolution of the indie space. sundance is both resilient and responsive to the evolution that’s happening and has and has happened in our industry and in our community for 40 plus years. And that continues to be the case now.
DEADLINE: Attendance is another sign of a festival’s health. How did you do?
HERNANDEZ: We haven’t released the final numbers, because I know they’re still being tallied. But we exceeded our ticket sales goals, and great audiences at screenings. Given the challenges, including two of our movie theaters declaring bankruptcy in Park City this year with us finding ways to bring them back for the festival, that was pretty good.
DEADLINE: How far away are we from a decision as to where a Sundance is going to set up shop for the future?
HERNANDEZ: We’re still working through that process. The folks from the finalist cities were at the festival. We hope to have a decision in place by end of March of early April.
