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by
Ben Travers
01.30.26
Life has a way of upending expectations, even the ones over a year in the making. The 2026 Sundance Film Festival marked the last in Park City, Utah, its home since 1981 (a decade before it was even renamed after its co-founder’s iconic cowboy). With any ending comes nostalgia, and the remembrances have poured in since the year began, from those attending their last screening at the Library to anyone who felt the magic of indie film manifested in a post-premiere snowstorm.
And yet so much of the film community’s focus has been wrenched out of the past into an urgent present and uncertain future. The horrific killing, attacks, and raids in Minneapolis rightfully overshadowed a weekend intended for buzzy discoveries and bidding wars. Instead, guests prioritized what was going on outside of Park City, wearing ICE Out pins and protesting on Main St. Within, festival-focused chatter couldn’t avoid speculating on the future: What would and wouldn’t change next year, when Sundance takes over Boulder, CO? What should and shouldn’t? What needs to be done to preserve the former and avoid the latter?
But the movies, while you’re with them, always live in the now, and Sundance’s annual slate of Episodic series — those lucky TV shows that get to be seen on the big screen — proved especially attuned to the present. It’s not that titles like “Worried,” “Freelance,” and “Soft Boil” deal directly with federally commissioned attack squads or the global rise in authoritarianism. It’s that they focus on people who are clearly going through it — in the big and small picture, as part of a group or acutely within their own heads. However they’re managing to get out of bed, put one foot in front of the other, and carry on not just surviving but living, well, that’s just fine. Great even. No judgement here.
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