Before its permanent move to Boulder, the Sundance Film Festival has one more surprise stop!
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NEDERLAND -- For the first time in almost half a century, the Sundance Film Festival is moving to a new state. The festival has been hosted in Utah since its inception in 1978, but in 2023, discussions about moving the festival elsewhere started spreading.
In September of 2024, three cities were selected as finalists for the new host location – Cincinnati, Ohio, the original location of Park City, Utah (in a joint bid with Salt Lake City), and Boulder, Colorado.
On March 27, 2025, the Sundance Institute officially announced Boulder as the new host location for the festival. Sundance will start its run in Boulder in 2027 and is slated to run there through at least 2036.
However, a day later, on March 28, the Sundance Institute made a surprise announcement: to transition the festival from Utah to Colorado, another city will host the festival in 2026.
The festival will remain in Park City in 2025 as a final sendoff, but in 2026, Sundance plans to adjust the hundreds of thousands of attendees to Colorado by bringing the festival to the town of Nederland.
In an official statement, Sundance revealed that Nederland reached out as a potential host city early in the process, as their most prevalent local festival, Frozen Dead Guy Days, moved to Estes Park around the same time.
In their own statement, the town of Nederland revealed that they were pleasantly surprised when Sundance responded to their query. The town reached out to multiple local, state, and even national efforts, hoping to continue encouraging tourism through another festival.
Many of the discussions between Nederland and other festivals never went past the brainstorming stage, but both Nederland and Sundance felt that bringing such a large festival to such a small town was a chance nobody could pass up.
While Utah mourns its loss of the festival, which raked in $132 million in gross domestic product in 2024, Nederland celebrates its gain, knowing that even hosting it one year will allow the town to flourish, both artistically and economically, for many years to come.
