Sundance Film Festival reveals details about Robert Redford tributes and
legacy screenings
[October 22, 2025]
By LINDSEY BAHR
Robert Redford’s legacy and mission was always going to be a key
component of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, which will be the last of
its kind in Park City, Utah. But in the wake of his death in Septemberat
age 89, those ideas took on a new significance.
This January, the institute that Redford founded over 40 years ago,
plans to honor his career and impact with and a screening of his first
truly independent film, the 1969 sports drama “Downhill Racer,” and a
series of legacy screenings of restored Sundance gems from “Little Miss
Sunshine” to “House Party,” festival organizers said Tuesday.
“As we were thinking about how best to honor Mr. Redford’s legacy, it’s
not only carrying forward this notion of ‘everyone has a story’ but it’s
also getting together in a movie theater and watching a film that really
embodies that independent spirit,” festival director Eugene Hernandez
told The Associated Press. “We’ve had some incredible artists reach out
to us, even in the past few weeks since Mr. Redford’s passing, who just
want to be part of this year’s festival.”
Archival screenings will include “Saw,” “Mysterious Skin,” “House
Party,” and “Humpday” as well as the 35th anniversary of Barbara
Kopple’s documentary “American Dream,” and 20th anniversaries of “Half
Nelson” and “Little Miss Sunshine,” with some of the filmmakers expected
to attend as well.
“Over the almost 30 years of Sundance Institute’s collaboration with our
partner, the UCLA Film & Television Archive, we’ve not only worked to
ensure that the Festival’s legacy endures through film preservation, but
we’ve seen that output feed an astonishing resurgence of repertory
cinema programming across the country,” said festival programmer John
Nein. “The films we’ve preserved and the newly restored films screening
at this year’s festival, including some big anniversaries, are an
important way to keep the independent stories from years past alive in
our culture today.”
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The marquee of the Egyptian Theatre appears during the Sundance Film
Festival in Park City, Utah on Jan. 28, 2020. (Photo by Arthur Mola/Invision/AP,
File)
 Tickets for the 2026 festival, which
runs from Jan. 22 through Feb. 1, go on sale Wednesday at noon
Eastern, with online and in person options. Some planning is also
already underway for the festival’s new home in Boulder, Colorado,
in 2027, but programmers are heads down figuring out the slate of
world premieres for January. Those will be revealed in December.
“There’s a lot more to come and a lot more to announce,” Hernandez
said. “This is just laying a foundation.”
Redford's death has added a poignancy to everything.
“Seeing and hearing the remembrances took me back to why I felt
compelled to go to the festival in the first place,” Hernandez said.
“It’s been very grounding and clarifying and for us as a team it’s
been very emotional and moving. But it’s also been an opportunity to
remind ourselves what Mr. Redford has given to us, to our lives, to
our industry, to Utah.”
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