Sundance Film Fest News - Meet the Programmers
By Owen Swallow
With Sundance Film Festival coming to Boulder, Colorado, the organization has begun holding events to introduce themselves to Colorado’s film community. On August 27, they held a “Meet the Programmers” event at the Boulder Theater, where Sundance’s heads of programming discussed their process and history with the festival.
“There’s something special about Boulder that drew us to it,” said Kim Yutani, Sundance’s Director of Programming. “When Robert Redford was first choosing a location for Sundance, he settled on Park City, Utah because he felt this connection to the Mountain West. We really wanted to keep that spirit.”
Eugene Hernandez, the Festival Director and Head of Public Programming, said that, at its core, Sundance was about connecting filmlovers with new artists.
“Sundance is a festival of international discovery and… [together with Kim Yutani] we’re leading the team to weed through all the submissions and make selections that are going to play at a festival,” Hernandez said. “Then you bring those films to an audience, that’s super profound because we get to connect the artist with you the audience. You get to meet your next favorite filmmaker year after year at the Sundance Film Festival. The audience piece of that has been really rejuvenating for me.”
Both Hernandez and Yutani said that they derive joy from watching audiences light up when they see the films they’ve selected.
“Being a programmer is such a solitary profession, until we talk to each other at the end of the year,” said Yutani. “That is such a strange thing because you start to feel almost possessive of these films. At this point, we’re the only ones who have seen it and you want to take care of it. We do a lot of work around taking care of the filmmakers and their teams. We’ve created this very intimate relationship with these film teams and we know how amazing their work is. Then we get to the festival and there is this profound moment where an artist is going to premiere their work for the first time in front of an audience, so suddenly it becomes an audience’s experience.”
Both Yutani and Hernandez have been with Sundance Film Festival for over two decades, they say that some of their favorite experiences have come from discovering new talent and sharing that with the world.
“You start to feel that buzz and energy from the audience as they are reacting to something they’ve never seen before,” Yutani continued. “There is something very special about knowing that an artist’s and their teams’ lives are going to change after that film plays.”
Hernandez said that Sundance is also a space that pushes artistic boundaries, elevating pioneering documentarians like Jenny Livingston and Gabriela Cowperthwaite.
Other members of the programming team at Sundance include: Basil Tsiokos, Heidi Zwicker, Adam Montgomery, Sudeep Sharma, Ania Souza, Ania Trzebiatowska, Shari Frilot, and John Nein.
Sundance Film Festival will transition to being held in Boulder in 2027.