On July 19, the startling announcement came that Cincinnati was one of the six finalists to be the new home of the Sundance Film Festival, the nation’s largest independent film fest and one of the world’s most important. It was startling locally because no one knew Cincinnati was even interested.
Well, Kristen Schlotman, executive director of Film Cincinnati, did. She sees luring Sundance here as consistent with her nonprofit organization’s goals of advocating and seeking growth for the city’s professional filmmakers while also attracting Hollywood and independent productions. Getting Sundance would be consistent with growing film’s impact in and on the city.
Shortly after the big announcement was made, she and city leaders—Mayor Aftab Pureval supports the effort—posted a dazzling component of their Sundance application so everyone could see it. It’s a 2:56-minute promotional video touting Cincinnati as a worthy successor to Park City, Utah, Sundance’s home since 1984. (The other finalists are Park City in tandem with nearby Salt Lake City; Atlanta; Boulder, Colorado; Louisville; and Santa Fe, New Mexico.)
Schlotman worked closely with a local team to create the video within days to meet a tight deadline. “I thought it was an opportunity that, if (Sundance officials) aren’t picturing it here or they don’t know what to picture, giving them something visual that really speaks to their ethos might be helpful,” she says. “We wanted it to really celebrate and imagine what a festival would feel like here.”
Giving the local audience a view of the video seems the right thing to do now. “We thought now that we’ve made it to the finals, it’s probably time to share that video with everyone else so they, too, can understand why Cincinnati is really positioned for this,” says Schlotman.
Seeing that video, produced by Lightborne Communications in Over-the-Rhine, is instructive because it wasn’t meant for a Cincinnati audience. It’s far different from watching the kind of promo often meant for a local audience. This one doesn’t tout the city as a nice quick-getaway destination for exurban families and people in nearby peer cities. It’s not a commercial.
Rather, it offers artfully framed images meant to show Cincinnati as a strong arts, culture, and all-around aesthetically-minded town. The video shows our burgeoning collection of public murals and both older and newer significant architecture such as the Contemporary Arts Center, Music Hall, Roebling Suspension Bridge, and more.
And in a real treat for film buffs, the video also has striking excerpts from some of the more artistically distinguished films to have at least partially been shot here in recent years as a result of Film Cincinnati’s efforts: the current motorcycle-gang drama Bikeriders; Carol, a 2015 period drama starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara as two New York women who fall in love; 2022’s Bones and All with Timothée Chalamet and Taylor Russell; and Robert Redford himself in a scene from the last movie he’s made to date, 2018’s The Old Man and the Gun. (He’s said he was retiring from movies.)
But despite all that dazzling Hollywood star power, perhaps the most memorable element of this video is the confident recitation of the city’s strengths by the spoken word artist/poet Laurent Che. He speaks with assured bravura and warm gravitas, his voice’s resonance creating viewer identification with him and his message. At one point, he even offers a savvy dance move when the dialogue calls for it. It seems a performance appropriate for the stage—and, in fact, he’s on one at the recently restored Memorial Hall.
Schlotman also credits local production crews and Cincinnati Experience, which seeks national coverage for positive local stories, for their contribution in getting the video done quickly.
You have to assume the video had something to do with Cincinnati making the list of finalist cities. But how did we get to the point where such an iconic brand as Sundance, so closely identified with Park City and the New West in general, is searching for another home?
Photograph by Kyle Smith
Sundance is committed to staying in Utah through 2026 but is searching for a home after that. It traditionally kicks off in January the year’s film festival schedule, presenting curated/invited films, with an emphasis on American indie productions. It’s highly competitive and keenly followed by just about everyone interested in film as art and/or a business. The festival actually began under a different name, U.S. Film Festival, in nearby Salt Lake City in 1978 but then moved to Park City in 1981, becoming Sundance three years later. It’s run by the Sundance Institute, a nonprofit founded by Redford.
Back on July 10, 2023, the Deadline website reported “Is the Sundance Film Festival on the Move?” Then, on April 17, it was announced that, as of that day and continuing through May 1, Sundance would welcome inquiries from cities to its request for information (RFI) about hosting the festival. A subsequent request for proposals (RFP) period would expire on June 21. A source at Sundance familiar with the process told Cincinnati Magazine on background, “We received a large number of applications in the RFI stage and then invited a select number to bid in the RFP stage.”
Deadline, in its April 17 story, said that once the RFP stage was completed a “task force will offer its recommendations to the Ebs Burnough-led Sundance Institute board for a final decision.” Burnough was quoted as saying, “We look forward to reviewing each proposal and working together with all of our potential collaborators to determine how we can collectively meet the needs of the independent film ecosystem and broader creative community.”
But is Sundance really eager to depart its longtime home or simply leaving its options open ahead of negotiations? In a July 22 letter to the “Sundance Community,” Eugene Hernandez, director of festival and public programs, offered kind words to Park City and Utah. “As you may know, we’re in the process of exploring viable locations to host the Festival starting in 2027, which includes Utah. … We remain deeply grateful to Park City and the state of Utah for their ongoing partnership and are proud of the legacy we’ve built together over these past four decades. We look forward to being with you in Utah again in January (2025).”
And is Park City and all of Utah really eager to lose such a cultural attention-grabber that attracts high-spending visitors and the kind of publicity you can’t buy or get enough of? Park City, it should be noted, is not wholly dependent on Sundance as a tourist generator. The city of 8,500 full-time residents is also a ski resort and summer vacation destination and will share hosting duties for the 2034 Winter Olympics with Salt Lake City.
Ken Katkin, a Cincinnati law professor involved in the city’s cultural scene, offered his own insight into why Park City/Salt Lake City/Utah might be favored to keep Sundance if the government entities offer the fest attractive incentives. “I tend to think that Utah would like to pony up money to keep it,” he says. “They have more to lose by losing it than others have by gaining it. We (Cincinnati) were in that situation with the Bengals. The Bengals were the ones saying, You better pay us whatever we ask or we’re going to leave. So nobody in local government wanted to be blamed for letting the Bengals get away—it would be a real blow to the city’s self-image. That put the team in a situation to extract more money out of Cincinnati than anywhere else.”
Another way to look at this process, Schlotman says, is that Sundance may be ready for change at the same time that Cincinnati is profoundly changing. “I believe that the festival is looking for the answer as to what is the new version of themselves and how do they evolve and how do they grow,” she says. “I feel like our city is on the precipice of that same dramatic element, and the timing alone—of both of us being on the precipice of becoming our future selves—is magical.”
Schlotman didn’t want to discuss specifics of the bidding process, but she did emphasize that she has support within the city. “Many here didn’t realize Sundance was looking for a new host city or that it would accept bids,” she says. “When I expressed that to them, to see if everyone else would be excited about it, I had tremendous support. The Mayor was aware I was going through that process. And as we got this announcement, I was thrilled to say, Share this excitement.”
Supportive posters, in fact, have gone up at such locations as Cincinnati Shakespeare Company, Music Hall, National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, Aronoff Center for the Arts, The Transept, and Memorial Hall.
One person who has first-hand insight into how Sundance works is tt stern-enzi, artistic director of the Over-the-Rhine Film Festival as well as a longtime film critic who’s written for Cincinnati Magazine, among other outlets. He is a past board member of a national film organization with Sundance connections, Art House Convergence, and currently serves on the board of Film Festival Alliance, an organization for festival film programmers that includes Sundance as a member.
He attended Sundance this year and notes that the festival had trouble finding enough Park City venues, so he believes Sundance will want finalist cities to have lots of screens. But he also thinks Sundance doesn’t necessarily need a metropolis as big as Atlanta.
“They’re looking for a community with a deep indie filmmaking environment that has arts spaces they can become part of,” says stern-enzi. “The festival is going to take place in the beginning of the year, because they’re always going to be the first major festival on the calendar. But I think they’re looking for a place where they can do year-round programming that will obviously attract people to whatever community they go to. They can find ways to support the films, filmmakers, and festivals in whichever city they happen to land in.”
Cincinnati might have one additional secret weapon. A young Pureval was featured in a dramatic film that premiered at Sundance in 2002. Well, maybe “featured” is a bit of an overstatement—he had a small role as a student. The movie was the Dayton-shot Blue Car, about a high school student (Agnes Bruckner) whose love of poetry brings her both support and unwanted attention from her high school English teacher (David Strathairn).
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