“I want youto close your eyes,” said Jess, a perfumer from Napa Valley. “I want you to imagine: You’re sitting in a place where the land seems to hold opposites at once. From the dry desert of the Great Basin and the Colorado plateaus, to the rocky slopes and foothills, to the alpine forests where the air is cooler, sharper. This is Utah. This is Park City. This is Sundance.” She paused. “You may open your eyes.”
There were twelve of us at the World of Hyatt brand activation event. We were seated in a basement, surrounded by black leather sofas, LED candles, and jars of freshly cut flowers. Elsewhere in the room, women in pastel-colored flat-brim fedoras lined up for aura readings. On the table in front of us were vials of essential oils made from local plants — subalpine fir, ponderosa pine, pinyon pine, great western sage. Soon, we’d mix and match them to design our own Sundance-themed room spray.
“Welcome to the Scents of Sundance,” Jess announced. “Let’s get started.”
There was hardly any snow in Park City when I arrived in January. A month earlier, a warm and dry high-pressure weather system had settled over much of the Western United States, worsening Utah’s snow drought. The Wasatch Mountains, usually white by the start of the Sundance Film Festival, were bare.
Sundance means big business for Park City. Last year, the festival’s 85,000 visitors brought almost $200 million into the town’s economy, and major sponsors like Chase, Acura, United Airlines, and Adobe took over entire restaurants and event spaces up and down Main Street. In March 2025, however, the Sundance Institute — the nonprofit that operates the festival — announced that Sundance would be moving to Boulder. Sundance officials had spoken for years about the possibility of moving the festival out of Park City. In 2022, the institute lost millions of dollars after being forced to shut down in-person screenings in response to that winter’s omicron outbreak. Now Colorado was offering more than $34 million in state tax credits to incentivize the move. The 2026 Sundance Film Festival would be the last to take place in its original home, as well as the first not overseen by Sundance’s talismanic founder, Robert Redford, who died at 89 in September 2025.
If the move to Boulder naturally felt like the end of an era, in the lead-up to this year’s festival the mood was dim for more existential reasons. Covid had an especially devastating effect on the fragile architecture that supports indie film. Independent and art house theaters had closed; windowing — the process of staggering a film’s release across different formats — had disintegrated; moviegoing numbers had collapsed; and streamers had doubled down on mass-produced crap. Worst of all, Netflix and Paramount had been jockeying for months to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery in a frenzy of cash throwing and deal hashing. No matter who won, for independents the result would be the same: a further erosion of autonomy, and subjugation to either a massive streamer or a mammoth new studio.
In indie film, the saying goes, the sky is always falling. But now it appeared that the worst had come to pass. Sundance would go elsewhere — would there be an indie film industry to go along with it?
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