In a sign of the times the Sundance Film Festival today announced it was moving online for 2022.
The original plan was to hold the esteemed indie festival founded by Robert Redford in 1981 in a hybrid fashion, with a combination of online events along with “in-person Utah elements.” With the Omicron variant that has all, unfortunately, changed. Here’s what the organizers had to say in the announcement:
“We have been looking forward to our first fully hybrid Sundance Film Festival and our teams have spent a year planning a festival like no other. But despite the most ambitious protocols, the Omicron variant with its unexpectedly high transmissibility rates is pushing the limits of health safety, travel and other infrastructures across the country. And so, today we’re announcing: the Festival’s in-person Utah elements will be moving online this year.”
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“While it is a deep loss to not have the in-person experience in Utah, we do not believe it is safe nor feasible to gather thousands of artists, audiences, employees, volunteers, and partners from around the world, for an eleven-day festival while overwhelmed communities are already struggling to provide essential services.”
The Sundance Film Festival — a program organized by the non-profit Sundance Institute — is still scheduled to begin Thursday, January, 2022 and run for eleven days.
Like so many arts organizations, here in the San Francisco Bay Area and across the country (and world for that matter), Covid has been a omnipresent and discouraging challenge for live programming.
Here’s hoping these non-profits can continue to navigate these tricky waters and soon enough achieve some semblance of normalcy that we’re all seeking.