Every public screening at the Sundance Film Festival is preceded by a land acknowledgment, recognizing the Shoshone, Paiute, Goshute and Ute tribes that have long stewarded the ground on which this annual event takes place. This tradition continues even now, as the COVID-19 pandemic has temporarily transformed America's most significant showcase for new independent cinema into an online-only event. Each movie that pops up in your Sundance screening app is prefaced by a video acknowledgment — a roughly two-minute montage that urges you to remember the land's traditional stewards and reflect on the human and environmental destruction wrought by their successors.
Indigenous representation and environmental advocacy have long been core principles for Sundance, now in its 38th year. But the emphasis on land — on a terrestrial, material reality that we overlook at our peril — carries a particular poignancy in these strange times.
This is the second January in a row that the movie-loving, buzz-generating crowds have stayed away from snowy Park City, Utah, and logged on from home instead to sample an abundance of new work. It's gratifying to be able to experience Sundance in any form. But for those of us who hunger for this festival in all its pre-pandemic glory, there are pleasures — and yes, headaches and frustrations — that no couch-potato festival experience will ever replicate.
