The Sundance Dash, and Why It's Not Good for Films or Filmmakers

"Art should not be rushed."

Nearly twenty years ago, I wrote an article for Filmmaker Magazine called “Rush Jobs” about filmmakers racing to finish their films for the Sundance deadline. Director Michael Kang spoke to me about pushing himself to complete his debut feature “The Motel” (pictured) for the 2005 Sundance Film Festival, even though he knew it was “unrealistic.”

Two decades later, little has changed, with many films hustling at this very moment to deliver their films for Sundance, scrambling for finishing funds up until their premieres, and even showing uncompleted work at the festival.

I was reminded of that 2004 article over the last couple of weeks, while working on a recent Filmmaker Magazine story about XTR making offers (and then withdrawing) grants to Sundance filmmakers who were prepping their films for the festival, as well as my annual Hit & Misses column about Sundance 2023 films in the marketplace.

In the latter story, I was shocked to learn that two of the films I profiled (“Shortcomings” and “Birth/Rebirth”) were both in production in August-September 2022, mere weeks before the Sundance deadline. With the official “Late Deadline” the last week of September, the “Birth/Rebirth” team had just three weeks of post! They got in, and the filmmakers say the film was actually helped by the compressed deadline. But you have to wonder if this is a good thing for most independent films and the health of their creators?

While speaking to filmmakers recently, one producer told me that it’s no wonder everyone gets sick at Sundance. Yes, it’s cold, and now COVID and other respiratory illnesses are running amok at the time, but most of the attending filmmakers are also, in many cases, coming into Park City during one of the most stressful and sleep-deprived periods of their lives.

As another filmmaker told me about their dealings with XTR, it was bad enough that they thought they had a financial commitment that actually didn’t come through, but it was the November timing that made it particularly bad. “It’s a shitty thing to do anytime, but it’s a particularly intense and vulnerable time for anybody that gets into Sundance,” they said, “It feels like hitting people when they’re at their most vulnerable.”

It might be hard to be believe that getting your Sundance acceptance—the holy grail for filmmakers—is actually a time of fragility and anxiety, but of course it is. Labor of love projects are suddenly vaulted into one of the most competitive, high-stakes, and intensely capitalistic marketplaces there is for U.S. filmmakers.

I can’t help but think of last year’s “secret” last-minute world premiere of “Justice,” Doug Liman’s Brett Kavanaugh documentary. While it helped garner headlines for Sundance and the project itself, the film clearly wasn’t ready—Liman himself admitted they had more work to do—and what could have been an impactful movie landed with a thud. (A year later, and still no word on the doc.) You could blame Sundance for selecting a film that wasn’t ready to be seen or the filmmakers for letting it be shown, but the problem lies mainly with an entire ecosystem that now pressures every aspect of the indie film industry (from development to financing and production to distribution) to move faster than it should.

I understand filmmaking is a capital-intensive practice, and one must consequently balance art and commerce, but making films to conform to festival deadlines seems like it might get in the way of quality. As the former head of production at IFC Films Holly Becker told me way back in 2005, “Art should not be rushed. And that’s especially true for the filmmakers that Sundance loves to support. If you’re a first-time filmmaker, you’re best served by taking your time.”