What’s Occurring: Sundance Movie Pageant transferring on-line for 2022
In the sign of the times, the Sundance Film Festival announced today that it will go live in 2022.
The original plan was to hold the prestigious indie festival founded by Robert Redford in 1981 in a hybrid form, with a combination of online events and “personal Utah elements”. Unfortunately, all that has changed with the Omicron variant. This is what the organizers say in the announcement:
“We were looking forward to our first full hybrid Sundance Film Festival and our teams spent a year planning a festival like no other. But despite the most ambitious protocols, the Omicron variant, with its unexpectedly high transmission rates across the country, is reaching the limits of health security, travel and other infrastructures. And so we announce today: The personal Utah elements of the festival will go online this year. “
…
“While it is a huge loss not to have a personal experience in Utah, we don’t believe it is safe or doable while overwhelming thousands of artists, audiences, staff, volunteers and partners from around the world for Eleven Day Festival Communities are already struggling to provide basic services. “
The Sundance Film Festival – a program organized by the nonprofit Sundance Institute – is scheduled to begin Thursday, January 2022, and last eleven days.
Like so many arts organizations here in the San Francisco Bay Area and around the country (and in the world), Covid has been an ubiquitous and daunting challenge to live programming.
We hope that these nonprofits can continue to navigate these troubled waters and soon enough achieve the semblance of normalcy we are all looking for.
