The Sundance Film Festival will launch its 40th edition later this month and will welcome alumni such as Steven Soderbergh, Dee Rees, Richard Linklater and Kristen Stewart as part of the event. It will be the first full edition for the new director of the festival, Eugene Hernández, in charge of directing the most important independent film showcase in the country towards an uncertain future for the industry in general.
Hernandez, 55, is only the fifth person to hold the position in the festival's history. When the Sundance Institute, founded by Robert Redford, took over the US Film Festival in 1985, the program included Wim Wenders' “Paris, Texas,” Jim Jarmusch's “Stranger Than Paradise” and the film's “Blood Simple.” Coen brothers.
In the years since, the festival has helped launch a wide range of important filmmakers, including Christopher Nolan, Quentin Tarantino, Ava DuVernay, Ryan Coogler, Chloé Zhao, Damien Chazelle, Paul Thomas Anderson and many others.
While film production is still recovering from the fallout of last year's strikes, exhibition continues to find its footing thanks to the double whammy of the pandemic and the rise of streaming. Many audiences that used to flock to arthouses for the kind of niche titles that reliably emerged at Sundance have not returned in full force to theaters, having grown accustomed to watching intimate, small-scale independent films at home.
All of which is to say that someone who arrives at a position specifically tasked with re-engaging the industry and the public alike may feel some pressure to perform in their first year on the job.
“The pressure I feel is my abiding respect for the legacy of the institution and the festival,” Hernandez said, “a desire to be respectful of everything Sundance has created, everything Mr. Redford has done at the institute over 40 years”. more years.
“I feel a strong sense of responsibility to remain focused and focused on what I have always seen the institute do in the many moments of uncertainty or change that it has endured,” Hernandez added. “And that is always coming back to focusing on the artist and coming back to focusing on the artist and the art form.”
Last year the festival had an especially strong lineup, including the premieres of future critical favorites like “Past Lives,” “Passages,” “Fair Play,” “A Thousand and One,” “Kokomo City,” and “All dirt roads taste like salt” and “Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie.” Additionally, the Australian horror film “Talk to Me,” which screened in the festival's Midnight section, grossed nearly $50 million at the U.S. box office.
Heading into this year, the festival saw a record number of performances.
“Despite all the uncertainty about the fate of independent films and series, we have this beautiful avalanche of submissions: more than 17,000 this year,” Hernández said. “So I think the mission is really to try to continue doing what Sundance has always done, which is to see them all and make a selection that can represent where the future of independent storytelling is going.”
Eugene Hernandez, photographed in Santa Monica in December.
(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)
Hernandez, who identifies as Latinx and queer, comes to Sundance after 11 years at Film at Lincoln Center, where he rose to the positions of senior vice president of FLC, editor of Film Comment, and executive director of the prestigious New York Film Festival, where it kept the flames burning during three difficult years of the pandemic.
Raised in Indio, California, Hernandez attended UCLA before eventually moving to New York City in 1994. He was co-founder and longtime editor-in-chief of the website IndieWire, a publication that has become a vital resource for news about the present. world of independent cinema.
Hernández's hiring at Sundance was announced in September 2022, replacing Tabitha Jackson after just two years in the role. After wrapping up that year's New York Film Festival in October and taking a few weeks off, Hernandez joined Sundance in November to observe the planning and inner workings of the festival's 2023 edition. She threw herself into an active role as soon as last year's festival concluded. Hernandez noted that since she took the job at Sundance, she has spent time at the organization's offices in Utah, New York and Los Angeles.
The position of festival director sits right at the intersection between the needs of the industry (including distributors, producers and financiers) and those of the creative artists themselves. Reconciling the needs and wants of those two parties can be a big part of the job.
John Cooper, who was festival director from 2009 to 2020, knows it can be a challenge to satisfy all the different stakeholders.
“There's the industry giving you feedback and then there's the artists giving you feedback and you're really building a way to connect those two,” Cooper said via Zoom. “But you're not really leading but listening, especially listening to the filmmakers. What do you really need now while making a film? What do you need for the 10 days of Sundance? What do you need for the world? And you have to stick to the idea of how those 10 days can give you the most possible.”
Hernández remembers his first time at Sundance in 1993. He was at the first screening of Robert Rodríguez's low-budget debut, “El Mariachi” (Hernández still has his ticket) and remembered what it meant to be exactly in that room and in that exact moment. time.
“Being in a place where literally no one had seen this movie yet,” Hernandez said, “you're the first audience to see it, and the director is there and he's about your age and he's on stage talking about making that movie.” and all the struggles they went through to bring it to the screen. “That was a big lightbulb moment for me.”
It was also during his first trip to Sundance, while riding a bus, that Hernandez met budding journalist Mark Rabinowitz. They, along with Cheri Barner, would co-found the website that would become IndieWire. (Hernández sold his stake in the site and left the organization long before its 2016 sale to Penske Media Corp.)
That kind of apparent serendipity, that you can meet someone on a festival shuttle and change the direction of your life, is part of the Sundance myth that Hernandez hopes to latch onto. It is still possible for anyone who comes to participate in the event.
“If you're a kid in your twenties now, or even younger, and you're inspired to know more about what a festival is or what Sundance is, I feel like part of my job is to create the space for that discovery. happen,” Hernandez said. His goal is to “create the space for those chance encounters to happen, whether it's on the mountain in Utah or watching something on our platform during the second week of the festival and seeing something you may have never seen before.” .
“We are part of an ecosystem,” he added. “We are not separate from that. We are part of it.”
Hernández's unique experience in journalism, publishing and the festival world makes him ideal for his new multifaceted role at Sundance as the festival faces the future.
“He is very insightful and someone who really understands and thinks a lot about where the industry is,” laments Joana Vicente, executive director of the Sundance Institute, recently appointed in 2021. “He is someone who really knows how to listen, he is always willing to listen. listen to what people think, always asking questions. And I think that has served him very well.”
According to Vicente, Sundance's complex function as an incubator and launching pad for new talent is a priority for Hernández. “He's very committed to thinking about the festival not as something that serves a single purpose, but to thinking about a deeper purpose and how we evolve to remain as relevant as ever,” she said. “And I think that's the big question that drives it. And then it's not about: 'Oh, now we have a new section of the festival' or 'We won't do this and that anymore.' The question is how can we be as relevant every year as possible and how can we give these filmmakers the best platform to go forward and have incredible careers?
With Sundance celebrating a milestone anniversary and welcoming its new festival director, this year will be a combination of looking back and looking forward.
“You really always get this snapshot of what the state of our storytelling is and, to put it even more broadly, the state of our culture,” Hernandez said.
Much of the conversation on the ground this year may revolve around the hot topic of artificial intelligence: numerous films, including Gary Hustwit's “Eno,” a documentary portrait of artist and musician Brian Eno that uses generative AI (it's different every time). is being screened), and the technology-themed fiction film “Love Me” by Sam and Andy Zuchero, touch on the topic. There are also a series of panels organized by the festival that will focus on the use of artificial intelligence and technology in creative storytelling.
“What Sundance has always done so well is start the conversation and add complexity,” Hernandez said. “So if we end up thinking 'Was this the year of AI?' so I hope we've had a chance to dig even deeper, to continue to grapple with what that means now and where it might take us, and what we might need to do to navigate it.
“But it's really when the films reach the public that the festival comes to life,” he added. “And those are the conversations I can't wait to have.”
