Robert Redford was disillusioned with the Hollywood mainstream. The Sundance Kid, who died Tuesday at age 89, knew that there were more stories out there, ones that weren’t getting made into films because of the rigidity of the business. So he made something different, founding Sundance Institute and the Sundance Film Festival as an alternative avenue for emerging filmmakers, where independence was a virtue, not a liability.
Over the past four decades, the institute and the festival have given an early platform to countless young filmmakers, including Steven Soderbergh, Paul Thomas Anderson, Quentin Tarantino, Ryan Coogler, Chloé Zhao, Nicole Holofcener, Nia DaCosta, Taika Waititi, Ava DuVernay, Rian Johnson, Gina Prince-Bythewood, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert and many more.
