Sundance has always been a festival I had admired at a distance. How Robert Redford had gone about using his platform to launch the careers of countless filmmakers for over four decades had always left me in awe. So many of my favorite films had premiered at Redford’s festival nestled in the snow-capped mountains of Park City, Utah. Even my cousin Jeremy Scahill had his documentary, “Dirty Wars,” play to its first audiences there prior to receiving an Oscar nomination. Yet even as I traveled around the world attending festivals for RogerEbert.com, Sundance had never been a priority for me. Enough of our writers were covering it, and so I put my attention elsewhere.
Prior to founding Cinema Femme, my wife Rebecca first attended Sundance in 2016 and instantly fell in love with it. She always dreamed of one day taking me there, and when she learned that 2026 would be the festival’s final year in Park City, she insisted that I join her. I was more than a little reluctant, considering that nearly all the screenings had sold out before general admission tickets had gone on sale. Would it really be worth the trip? Little did I realize how four days of waitlisting would be so utterly life-altering…
DAY 1
The first good omen for me occurred as Rebecca and I waited to board our morning flight on Friday, January 23rd. A filmmaker whom I had interviewed for my blog Indie Outlook over a decade ago, Jenny Deller, suddenly materialized in the boarding line. Her film, “Future Weather,” starring Perla Haney Jardine (Uma Thurman’s daughter in “Kill Bill”), Lili Taylor and Amy Madigan, remains a favorite of mine, and it was a joy getting to finally meet her in person.
Upon arriving at the Salt Lake City airport, Rebecca and I met up with several of her Cinema Femme team members with whom we’d be sharing an Airbnb about six miles away from the festival’s central hub on Main Street. The breathtaking landscapes accompanying our Uber ride were already making me feel giddy, and once we dropped our stuff off at the three-story Airbnb, I was eager to begin exploring. After purchasing a Sundance beanie at the festival headquarters, I was encouraged by Rebecca to embark on my own journey. Her schedule for the next few days would be jam-packed, but we were confident our paths would eventually cross.
I found the city’s free shuttle service for festival goers, and made friends with the skiers and fellow Sundancers onboard. When I finally stepped onto Main Street, I was startled to find myself overcome with emotion. All the historic places I had read about in Roger’s festival coverage over the decades were suddenly within reach. Various celebrities—Riz Ahmed, Josephine Decker, Guillermo del Toro, Dave Franco, Domhnall Gleason, O’Shea Jackson Jr., Ken Jeong, Rob Lowe, Mimi Rogers and Martin Starr, to name a few—strolled up and down the somewhat steep incline of the street, as skiers rode down to earth on a nearby lift.
The first celebrity I had a memorable encounter with was Hoot the Great Horned Owl, a 26-year-old screen veteran featured in over 120 pictures, including the first two “Harry Potter” films. He’s apparently the owl perched on the Privet Drive sign in “Sorcerer’s Stone” and later played Ron Weasley’s klutzy owl in “Chamber of Secrets.” Hoot’s trainer Jeff Shelburg offered to take pictures of us in the alleyway containing Park City’s famous Banksy artwork, and getting to have an up close look at the owl’s fiery eyes was an awesome experience in itself.
I was about to get in line for my first Sundance screening, a U.K. coming-of-age comedy named “Extra Geography,” when I received the text I had been long awaiting. The Fortson family—whom I first met via Zoom in 2020 when interviewing them about their ingenious short, “Rated”—had a free window to meet me at the beloved Atticus Coffee shop on Main Street.
I booked it over to them, and was elated to meet in person the power couple John Fortson and Christie Lynn Smith, who are currently in post on their feature version of “Rated.” They were joined by their daughter Abby Ryder Fortson, who had the title role in my favorite film of 2023, “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.”, and their son Joshua, who also shares his family’s love of acting. Abby co-stars in one of this year’s Sundance selections, Rachel Lambert’s “Carousel,” and she told me about her great admiration for recent Oscar nominee Joachim Trier, whom I believe she is destined to work with one day.
With my evening freed up, I walked back up Main Street and ordered a front row ticket to see the band DeVotchKa perform their music from Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris’ 2006 Sundance smash, “Little Miss Sunshine,” at the Egyptian Theatre. Seeing the film on its opening weekend with a packed house at the Landmark in Chicago was, quite honestly, the greatest moviegoing experience of my life (people were literally dancing in the aisles at the end). The Egyptian had been Rebecca’s favorite place to screen films at Sundance, but was now being used solely as a live performance venue. This made seeing DeVotchKa’s astonishing artistry on that stage all the more poignant. The final numbers they performed—including “The Enemy Guns,” which inspired “First Push” on the “Sunshine” soundtrack—were so exhilarating that they had the audience on their feet cheering.
My adrenaline was on such a high afterward that I decided I wouldn’t head to bed yet and try to make a midnight screening. Adrian Chiarella’s horror film “Leviticus” was scheduled for 11:55pm at The Ray theater across town, and though my number on the waitlist was in the triple digits, I somehow snagged a seat. Anchoring this debut feature from Australia were the fine performances of its two leads, Joe Bird and Stacy Clausen, whose adolescent characters fall for one another, despite the church-fueled homophobia of their families. The film’s timely themes of controlling through fear and the power of resistance would be shared by the next two screenings I’d catch at the festival. What made this an especially meaningful first Sundance film for me was the fact that it co-starred the gifted Davida McKenzie, whose wonderful family I first befriended at the Karlovy Vary film festival in 2018—the same year that the career of Davida’s older sister Thomasin was launched at Sundance with her brilliant work in Debra Granik’s “Leave No Trace.”
DAY 2
My first full day at Sundance was focused not on films at all, but savoring the people around me. Rebecca and I got to spend the majority of our day together, which began with the “Little Miss Sunshine” popup celebrating the film’s twentieth anniversary. For the price of a social media post—we chose to pose as if we were chasing a replica of the film’s iconic yellow vehicle—we each received a free piece of “Sunshine” merchandise (Rebecca chose a T-shirt, I took a sweater), along with donuts and hot chocolate.
At The Filmmaker Lodge on Main Street, Rebecca and I attended an intimate panel on independent filmmaking. The panelists included Jay Duplass (whose marvelous film “The Puffy Chair” I screened for my “Beyond Mumblecore” class at Facets), Natalie Erika James (a cherished past interview subject of Rebecca’s, whose new film “Saccharine” will soon be distributed by Shudder) and Redford’s daughter Amy. Afterward, I approached Amy and told her of how her late brother James had taken me out to lunch when I interviewed him the day after the Cubs won the World Series. She thanked me for sharing this story with her, and I thanked her for keeping her family’s legacy alive and well.
Rebecca and I had numerous magical encounters along Main Street with various people she had previously interviewed, including filmmakers Raven Jackson and John Budion. Yet the most serendipitous moment of all for me occurred when Rebecca and I finally sat down to have a real meal at the No Name Saloon’s Atticus Burger restaurant. As Rebecca got up from her seat, I spotted directly behind her actor Daniel Zolghardi, who co-starred in my all-time favorite Sundance film, Bo Burnham’s “Eighth Grade.” I went up and told him how much that film meant to me, and how his tense scene in the backseat of a car with Elsie Fisher had begun a vital dialogue for young people regarding consent, leading to a memorable exchange between Burnham and an eighth grader at the Chicago Critics’ Film Festival (you can watch it at the 25:15 mark here).
Though I toyed with getting on waitlists that evening, I ended up accompanying Rebecca to a sobering and euphoric event hosted by Level Forward, “Bans Off Our Stories: The Solidarity in Narrative,” at The Park. Under a canopy of trees, various powerful speakers such as Dr. Kimberly Crenshaw and LaTosha Brown discussed the importance of storytelling in strengthening our connection with one another at a time of violent division. “The Vagina Monologues” playwright known formerly as Eve Ensler and now simply as V delivered a phenomenal speech about how empathy and love are a direct rebuke against the deadly forces of authoritarianism that recently claimed two lives in Minnesota. Concluding the evening was high-spirited dancing that lifted everyone’s spirits beyond the stratosphere.
DAY 3
Of all the experiences I had at Sundance—or any festival, for that matter—nothing quite compares with what happened to me on the morning of Sunday, January 25th. I was among the thousand or so people who registered to attend a 9am meditation event with the great filmmaker Chloé Zhao at The Shop Yoga Studio near the Library Center Theatre. Wearing the David Lynch shirt gifted to me by Rebecca, I arrived at 6:30am, and stood in the frigid cold for over two hours, immediately bonding with the like-minded souls who lined up behind me. Once I was allowed in, I claimed a yoga mat at the front of the room, which only held a maximum capacity of 100 participants. A mere few feet in front of me, a woman stretched with her head down on her workout mat. Only when she turned toward me and smiled did I realize she was Chloé Zhao.
For the next two hours, I embarked on a spiritual journey with Chloé and her meditation guide, actress and dream coach Kim Gillingham, that was unlike anything I had ever experienced. Kim was introduced to Chloé by actress Jessie Buckley, and her method of meditation was so transformative that the director had Buckley and the 300 extras at the Globe Theatre in her Oscar-nominated film “Hamnet” go through it together (Kim confirmed Rebecca’s claim that Chloé is visibly among the extras in this sequence). As Kim guided us in our breathing and movement, she had us visualize an encounter with a loved one who provides us with an item or message that may be important in ways that are not immediately apparent. For me, the message was, “Don’t hide,” which coincidentally reflected Chloé’s own fear—stated on her Instagram two days later—of “being seen.”
There were as many audible sobs during this visualization as there were at the preview screening I attended of “Hamnet” in Chicago. When we opened our eyes, we were encouraged to share stories about our experience, and any advice we’d have on how to make this form of meditation more accessible. A woman seated behind me revealed that she had a dream two months prior about this exact event, informing her of the very experience Chloé had just shared with us, in which she visualized her father during the meditation. Upon hearing this, Chloé’s eyes lit up, and she said that such mind-blowing occurrences have become more commonplace the more she has incorporated meditation into her life. Seated just a few rows behind me was another wonderful filmmaker, Wendy McColm, whose great 2023 feature, “Fuzzy Head,” is guided by the same intuitive artistry harnessed by Zhao and Lynch in their work. I would ordinarily say this was a coincidence, but in the case of this particular morning, it felt entirely meant to be. Cinema Femme alum and team member Veronica Miles had a profound experience at the event as well, and it was clear to us—as we snacked on s’mores at the Audible Lounge on Main Street—that we would forever be bonded by it.
As I was meditating with Chloé Zhao, Rebecca was at The Filmmaker Lodge listening to the legendary writer Salman Rushdie, whose life nearly ended a few years ago, when a 24-year-old assailant stabbed him multiple times at an onstage conversation in Chautauqua, New York. His bravery in still engaging with the public with his trademark humor left Rebecca in awe. We decided that we had to try getting on the waitlist for the premiere of Alex Gibney’s documentary based on Rushdie’s recent memoir. Luckily, we both made it into the premiere at The Ray of “Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie,” which is not only the best film I saw at Sundance, but the first picture of 2026 that has a guaranteed spot on my best of the year list. Shockingly frank in its portrayal of the brutality and injuries endured by Rushdie, the film masterfully illuminates how the threat of violence is silencing free speech in our country and around the world. Rushdie’s survival and resilience—not to mention the life-saving assistance he received from audience members who witnessed his near-assassination—stands as a soaring beacon of hope, and having him and his wife, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, in attendance at the Q&A made the experience all the more overwhelming. As we rose to give them a second standing ovation when they departed the theater, I repeatedly exclaimed, “Thank you!”, prompting Rachel to smile appreciatively at me.
DAY 4
My final day at Sundance may have been a weekday, but that didn’t stop the festival’s biggest screening venue—the Eccles—from filling all of its 1,269 seats. I was placed in the upper balcony for “Run Amok,” the feature-length version of NB Mager’s superb short about a high schooler who creates a theatrical production as a mode of catharsis, a decade following the school shooting that claimed the life of her mother. Though the film was a bit too tonally uneven for my taste, it serves as a hugely impressive showcase for its young lead, Alyssa Marvin, whose name I cheered as soon as it appeared during the end credits. It was fun to see the film’s starry ensemble—including Patrick Wilson, Molly Ringwald, Margaret Cho and Elizabeth Marvel (so quietly affecting as the shooter’s mother)—onstage for the post-screening Q&A, though as I left the theater, I realized that it was in fact a school auditorium, as students rushed past me to catch their bus home…an exceedingly eerie choice of venue, to say the least.
Knowing that my time in Park City was about to run out, I decided to bid Main Street adieu by walking up its enchanting hill one more time. As I walked back down, I saw a proposal between two filmmakers occur in front of the Egyptian, eliciting cheers of joy. The voices echoing on the street became angrier the further I walked, however, as a massive protest against the government-sanctioned terrorism of ICE grew in greater and greater numbers. I cheered on the protestors until Rebecca and I headed to the Eccles so that she’d be there in time for the evening’s red carpet event.
The legend scheduled to be in attendance that evening was trailblazing tennis champion Billie Jean King, whose battle against sexism had been immortalized in a narrative feature, stage production and now a documentary—“Give Me the Ball!”—co-helmed by Liz Garbus and Elizabeth Wolff. It was our final film at Sundance 2026, and couldn’t have ended our time there on a more thrilling and uplifting note. Not only is the film an excellent and rousing portrait of a world class human being, it exemplifies the sort of uncommon courage that is needed in order to overcome the struggles we are currently facing. As soon as Billie Jean made her wildly anticipated appearance onstage, she had the entire auditorium in the palm of her hand, flipping the Q&A on its head by asking the moderator questions. She brought the audience to its feet twice—first to give her a richly deserved ovation and again to catch the signed tennis balls she launched off the stage with her racket. When Rebecca and I arrived back at the Airbnb, we found that a snapshot from her conversation with Billie Jean on the red carpet had been added to the icon’s Instagram story.
I’ve written all of this on our Tuesday morning flight home in part to affirm for myself that any of it happened at all. My gratitude to Rebecca for encouraging me to have such a once-in-a-lifetime experience is truly beyond words. Thank you Park City, Sundance, Robert Redford and Cinema Femme for providing me with the fuel to survive all the obstacles awaiting me in 2026 and beyond. Long live democracy. Long live cinema.
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