Sundance Film Festival

[4] It was founded by Sterling Van Wagenen,[5] head of Robert Redford's company Wildwood Enterprises, Inc, John Earle and Cirina Hampton-Catania [6] of the Utah Film Commission.[7] The 1978 festival featured films such as Deliverance, A Streetcar Named Desire, Midnight Cowboy, Mean Streets, and Sweet Smell of Success.[citation needed] In 1979, Sterling Van Wagenen left to head up the first-year pilot program of what became the Sundance Institute, and James W. Ure took over briefly as executive director, followed by Cirina Hampton Catania, who was asked by Governor Matheson to help bring the festival into profitability as the governing board was preparing to disband it due to debts incurred in 1978.[...] It is our mutual goal to bring to the UK, the very best in current American independent cinema, to introduce the artists responsible for it, and in essence, help build a picture of our country that is broadly reflective of the diversity of voices not always seen in our cultural exports.[18] Films shown at the 2019 event included Emma Thompson and Mindy Kaling’s Late Night, the controversial dark tale The Nightingale, US comedy Corporate Animals, Lulu Wang's The Farewell (which won the Audience Award[19]) and Sophie Hyde's film based on Emma Jane Unsworth's novel about female friendship, Animals.[24] Many notable independent filmmakers received their big break at Sundance, including Kevin Smith, Robert Rodriguez, Quentin Tarantino, Todd Field, David O. Russell, Steve James, Paul Thomas Anderson, Steven Soderbergh, Darren Aronofsky, James Wan, Edward Burns, Damien Chazelle, Lee Isaac Chung, Jane Schoenbrun, Molly Gordon, Nick Lieberman, A. V. Rockwell and Jim Jarmusch.The festival is also responsible for bringing wider attention to such films as Common Bonds, Saw, Garden State, American Psycho, Super Troopers, The Blair Witch Project, Spanking the Monkey, Reservoir Dogs, Primer, In the Bedroom, Better Luck Tomorrow, Little Miss Sunshine, Donnie Darko, El Mariachi, Moon, Clerks, Thank You for Smoking, Sex, Lies, and Videotape, The Brothers McMullen, 500 Days of Summer, Napoleon Dynamite,[25] Whiplash (which topped the festival's Top 10 Films of All Time in 2024, as the result of a survey conducted with over 500 filmmakers and critics in honor of the festival's 40th anniversary[26][27]), CODA, Boyhood, We're All Going to the World's Fair, Theater Camp and A Thousand and One.[citation needed] The 2009 film Official Rejection documented the experience of small filmmakers trying to get into various festivals in the late 2000s, including Sundance.[32] Included in the Sundance changes made in 2010, a new programming category titled "NEXT" (often denoted simply by the characters "<=>", which mean "less is more") was introduced to showcase innovative films that are able to transcend the confines of an independent budget.