Even though it’s happening — again — in cyberspace rather than Park City, Tabitha Jackson is ready to get the 2022 Sundance Film Festival started.
Jackson, the festival’s director, told media assembled for a video news conference Thursday that the festival is about “convergence, coming together, our presence. It’s not how we are together, in person or online, but that we are together in a moment. And this is the moment. This is the moment when the work is revealed. This is the moment where we can discuss the work, in dialogue with each other and the other works in the festival.”
The festival — presented by Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute — starts its 11-day run Thursday evening, with premieres of 10 of the event’s 83 feature-length films that will unspool over Sundance’s online portal.
It’s the second year in a row that Sundance has gone online only, save for some in-person screenings at a few venues around the country — none of them in Utah. The reason is the COVID-19 pandemic, with this year’s case surge due to the omicron variant the deciding factor to cancel in-person Utah events just 15 days before the festival’s launch.
“We spent a year planning a beautiful hybrid festival, and then needed to pivot away for safety to this fully online iteration,” Jackson said, adding that the word “pivot” is “a trigger word for all our staff now.”
The decision to cancel in-person events “was very hard because of our disappointment of not being able to be back in Park City, expressing the festival fully and being together in person,” Jackson said. “Once we had the data about the public health implications of a festival taking place in Park City, with the levels of transmission of omicron and the impacts on the local infrastructure, it was very easy … to know that it would be irresponsible to continue in person. Also, very easy because we designed the festival to be hybrid, so the online component already existed.”
Festival programmers said this year’s online festival is building on what the 2021 festival accomplished in the same space.
Senior programmer Shari Frilot, who also curates the festival’s New Frontier program of virtual reality and augmented reality artworks, cited the success of The Spaceship, a mixed-reality gathering space that allowed festival attendees from around the world to mingle as if attending the same big party.
“The Spaceship worked beyond our wildest dreams last year,” Frilot said, adding that she stayed up until 2 a.m. most nights during the 2021 festival, talking to people there. “We built it in such a way that it keeps us human. It allows us to interact in the way that we’re practicing humanity now, which is through video chat.”
The festival kicks off Thursday at 4 p.m. MT with a live VR performance by composer Sam Green, called “32 Sounds.” Frilot said Green started to experiment with online performance, resulting in a work that “is using technology to present something to a lot of people, but one person at a time.”
Jackson said “32 Sounds” will be a perfect opening for the online festival. “There’s an intimacy to it. There’s a beauty to it.”
Information about the films and other programs at the festival, and how to buy tickets, is available at festival.sundance.org.
from The Salt Lake Tribune https://ift.tt/33NHqFX
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