THE Film Festival Sundance is linked to Boulder, leaving his house of four decades to Park City, Utah, for a new chapter of neighboring Colorado.
Organizers announced their decision Thursday after a one -year search in which many American cities argued to host the country’s first independent film festival. The other finalists were Cincinnati, Ohio, and a handset Salt Lake City and Park City Bid.
The festival leaders said that politics had not influenced their passage from the Conservative Utah to Liberal Colorado. However, they made “values of ethos and actions” one of their criteria and referred to Boulder in their ad as a “welcoming environment”.
Boulder stood out for organizers as an artistic city, accessible on foot and medium -sized nature. He has one of the strongest concentrations of professional artists in the United States and houses the University of Colorado, where the film program contributes to a dynamic artistic scene, the leaders of Sundance said. They noted that the large student population and the campus locations will create new opportunities to engage young people in the event.
Nature near Rocky Mountain Foothills offers visitors and artists to stretch their legs and draw inspiration from high -country landscapes. It is also a little more than half an hour in downtown Denver and not much further at the city’s international airport. There is currently no light train system connecting Denver to Boulder, but a bus takes place between the two cities.
When the leaders of Sundance started their search for a new house, they said that the festival had exceeded the charming Ski City of Park City and developed an air of exclusivity that removed the films. BOULDER, a city of 100,000 inhabitants, has a space for a more centralized festival. But this is not all the more affordable for the participants. The cost of living is estimated at 31% higher than the national average, compared to 33% of Park City, according to the Economic Research Institute. Visitors also say it can be difficult to find available hotel rooms and short -term rentals when the university organizes major events or home football matches.
Actor Jonah Hill, the creators of “South Park” Trey Parker and Matt Stone and – perhaps the most important – the founder of Sundance, Robert Redford, all attended the University of Colorado in Boulder. The school has a Festive culture in mind which sometimes pours into the surrounding streets. The city also houses a private Buddhist college.
Redford, 88 years old, gave the relocation of the festival its blessing.
Redford is recalled to boulder with a mural inside the sink, a restaurant and a bar where he worked as a concierge at the time of his colleges.
“It will be really fun to see what is going on and when people are presented to the beauty of Boulder and how incredible this place is. It will just raise the presence of Boulder on the world scene, I think,” said Chris Heinritz, co -owner of the sink.
Just outside the suburbs of Denver, Boulder has its own identity – and decades ago a very unique hippie atmosphere. Long before the voters of Colorado legalize recreational marijuana in 2012, thousands of students from the University of Colorado and others met on the campus to smoke the pot every April 20.
Today, Boulder retains its charm at the foot of the Flaitons of Sandstone, a Foothill range crisscrossed by hiking trails that begin in Chautao Colorado, a cultural center and show arts dating from the 1800s. The Pearl Street shopping center reserved for pedestrians with its nearby theaters could provide a central center similar to the main street of Park City.
It is no longer ideal for hippies. The university launched 4/20 Weed Fest outside the campus and booming housing costs – the median price of houses is now 1.1 million dollars – mostly inaccessible.
Films have been broadcast in Boulder since 1898, when the first kinetoscope, a device co-invented by Thomas Edison, showed images in motion to a person at the same time in the Chautauqua auditorium.
Besides Redford, the Hollywood names that attended the University of Colorado include Dalton Trumbo, a screenwriter of “Spartacus” and “Roman Holiday” which was part of the Hollywood Ten on blacklist for alleged communist sympathies in the late 1940s and 1950s.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Boulder’s places presented decorations by the film Woody Allen “Sleeper” and “The Shining” by Stanley Kubrick. And Boulder was the fictitious frame of the television program “Mork & Mindy”.
Today, it is home to more than a dozen small film festivals, including the Boulder International Film Festival and Chautaqua Silent Film Series.
“This is simply logical. We are a small small town, but we are filled with so many things. We have so much art so much, so much dynamism,” said Hannah Givens, a graduate of the University of Colorado who lives in the Boulder region.
Sundance called Park City at home for 41 years. The former festival leaders said that Redford had chosen Utah mountains as a space to promote independent cinema far from the bustle of Hollywood. The emblematic landscapes of Utah Red Rock served as a backdrop for many films, notably “Thelma and Louise”, “Forrest Gump” and “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”, for which the festival is appointed.
This year, thousands of festival -goers have affixed bright yellow stickers on their winter coats which read “Keep Sundance in Utah” in a last effort to convince its leaders to keep it local.
Sundance will have another festival in Park City in January 2026 before moving to Boulder in 2027.
For four decades, Sundance contributed to transforming his picturesque hometown into a renowned winter destination. The prices of the houses have skyrocketed, the luxury hotels have emerged and some local companies have closed while other prospered.
Visitors outside the state spent around $ 106.4 million in UTAH at the 2024 festival. Its total economic impact was estimated at $ 132 million, with $ 1,730 jobs for UTAH residents and $ 70 million for local workers. The governor of Utah Spencer Cox said he was sad to see Sundance leave, but the state’s economy could maintain the loss.
UTAH has offered Sundance $ 3.5 million in stay. Colorado legislators have offered $ 34 million in 10 -year tax credits to attract it.
The journalist of Associated Press, Thomas Peinert, contributed to this report by Boulder, Colorado.
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