Sundance’s Eugene Hernandez on “Unprecedented” Work in Move to Boulder

The countdown to Colorado is heating up.

Sundance’s big Boulder debut is now less than six months away, and to mark the moment, Eugene Hernandez, festival director and head of public programming, published a “What to Know About the 2027 Sundance Film Festival” letter today on Sundance Institute’s website. It lifts the veil with news on planning, logistics, scheduling and more.

“Yes, a lot is changing,” Hernandez writes before diving into the details for next year’s festival, scheduled for Jan. 21-31 (with online screenings set for the public from Jan. 28-31, and a day earlier for industry and press). And he’s right, with a new home base comes expected changes to venues and hotels and some unexpected ones with an expansion to the schedule and the resuscitation of the New Frontier program to spotlight tech-forward projects.

The headline in regard to venues, and something that feels like a point of pride for Hernandez and his Sundance team, is that the festival footprint will be contained within a two-mile radius, which creates a walkable, scooter-able or more easily accessible festival compared to the sprawling locations when it was based in Park City, Utah.

“On the University of Colorado Boulder campus, the iconic Macky Auditorium is adjacent to the historic Old Main, across the quad from the Roe Green Theatre and near Muenzinger Auditorium. A short walk from campus is Boulder High School, and just a few blocks away is the Pearl Street pedestrian mall filled with restaurants and shops,” Hernandez writes. “From the center of Pearl Street, the Hotel Boulderado, our festival headquarters, is steps away, and around the corner is the Boulder Theater, near e-Town Hall and the Canyon Theater. Walk a few more blocks north and find Casey [Casey Middle School]. The legendary Chautauqua Auditorium is about a mile away at the base of the Flatiron trails, and there is still more to experience a few minutes away from Pearl Street at Dairy Arts Center and the Cinemark Century [press and industry screening venue].”

Many of the venues are being updated to accommodate festival screenings, and Hernandez notes how it is no quick polish. “In partnership with the venues, our teams are hard at work to ensure that each screening space will be state-of-the-art, allowing our artists to best present their new works to the world and giving our audiences world-class cinematic experiences. This is so exciting for us because the transformative work being done to prepare our venues for the 2027 festival is unprecedented.”

The move to Boulder has allowed programmers to expand the roster of films selected, as Hernandez confirmed that all four of the fest’s central competition categories, U.S. dramatic, world cinema dramatic, U.S. documentary and world cinema documentary, will grow to 12 films each. Other sections like premieres, NEXT, midnight and family matinee “will also expand” with details on those forthcoming. Also blooming will be the Beyond Film slate of programming which is being rebranded to Offscreen and expanded to include live podcast recordings.

New Frontier, a category that has been described as the home for “cutting edge” films that land at the “intersection of art, cinematic storytelling and emerging technologies,” has been dormant in recent years. But it is being resuscitated for 2027 at a time when artificial intelligence and emerging technologies are the talk (horror?) of Hollywood. “Determined to stay with our community as we face the uncertainty of our times, New Frontier will return to the 2027 edition of the festival as New Frontier FLUX to activate inside the massive fluctuations of our biodigital realities,” Hernandez writes.

There are developments on the awards front, too. Sundance partnered with the International Federation of Film Critics (FIPRESCI) to establish its own jury that will select winners for best debut narrative in the world Cinema dramatic competition and best debut documentary within the world cinema documentary competition. FIPRESCI will present those new trophies at the fest-ending awards ceremony on Jan. 29, 2027.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has also blessed Sundance as an Academy Awards–qualifying festival for world cinema grand jury prize winners in both documentary and dramatic, meaning that those victors will automatically qualify for the subsequent Oscar race in the Academy’s international feature film category.

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Hernandez opened up more on all of the above including what to expect from the tech-forward New Frontier FLUX category and whether or not that will include AI-created works.

Six months out, how is the prep going compared to how you would have felt at this time ahead of a Park City festival?

This year is pretty special, pretty unique. A lot has changed, a lot is changing. We’re in motion and building this festival anew in Boulder, and that’s super exciting. Part of what we want to convey and share today [with the letter] is just where we are in that journey. We’ve been doing screenings and events every month every month in Boulder. We just did two huge events at Red Rocks, which is the outdoor amphitheater outside of Denver earlier. We’re seeing such great energy from the local community in connecting with Sundance, wanting to learn more, wanting to get to know us and the kinds of movies we show.

In talking about what’s unique about Boulder, we will have a two square mile proximity of the festival, a centralized footprint with state-of-the-art venues that we’re working on literally right now. If you’ve seen any of my recent social media videos, we’re wearing hard hats and going into construction zones as they’re installing 240 speakers into Macky Theater on the CU Boulder campus or winterizing the Chautauqua Auditorium so that it can for the very first time have a film festival there in the winter and show movies and have concerts year round. These are huge transformative things, not only for our festival, sure, but also for the Boulder community.

In the letter, you called the work “unprecedented.”

It feels unprecedented to us, and if anybody wants to correct us on it, we’re happy to hear it. It’s a level of investment and time into a single year to create a film festival with state-of-the-art venues in partnership with Dolby and the work they are doing on the sound or the screens that we’re installing. We’ve done some orientations with industry folks, artists and publicists who have come to Boulder, and we’ll be doing more over the summer with another coming up after Telluride. Folks are telling us how transformative it is in terms of what we’re offering for the Sundance audience. Also, Central Boulder is like a town with a grid system of streets, and a walking street in Pearl Street that’s not unlike Santa Monica Promenade but probably a little more vibrant than Santa Monica; it’s really teaming with restaurants and bars and cafes and coffee shops and bookstores and puzzle shops.

What has been the biggest surprise or biggest action item you’ve taken away from the orientations?

On the surprise side, it’s the way in which an industry is responding to change. The industry can sometimes be a little resistant to change — understandably, we all are — but people have really embraced the opportunity of building this new festival in Boulder, and that’s been really exciting to see. I keep getting messages from heads of talent agencies, distributors and studios with ideas. “Oh, our team saw this in Boulder,” or, “I just got back from dropping my kid off at college or spending a weekend there and I have an idea for you.” The level of engagement has been very personal. It’s not just institutional. Sure, Sundance Institute is working with the university and Visit Boulder, the city and different agencies but the way folks are engaging has led us to realize that the work we’re doing on an individual basis has an opportunity to really lay a foundation for what this festival can be for the next generation.

In terms of being specifically responsive, it’s the ways that we’ve worked with the community around housing and transportation, some of the more mundane aspects but still fundamental to a festival experience. We’ve engaged with the restaurant and business communities, to make their businesses available to the industry. We’re collecting lists of information to share with some of the marketers or distributors for their events teams to centralize information.

Last question: You’re bringing back the New Frontier FLUX, which spotlights emerging technologies. Does this mean you will accept AI-created or produced films?

New Frontier has been a more dormant section of the festival the last few years. Being in Boulder allows us to bring this program back and expand it in a meaningful way because of the experimentation and exploration that already exists in Boulder at places like the Brakhage Center for Media Arts or the ATLAS Institute at CU Boulder which explores immersive technology. What Shari Frilot and the team at New Frontier are looking to do, and why they call it FLUX this year, is because we’re laying a new foundation for what this program will be in the future. Some of what you’re asking is actually what we’re looking for answers to as well, candidly, in trying to understand how creators are engaging, not engaging, questioning, interrogating the use of technology in the creation of artistic exploration. And that’s something that the New Frontier program over 20 years has always been at the forefront of.

What’s happening right now is the curators in that area of our festival are actually out in the world at events, meeting with artists, and are literally answering that question in real time in a way that we will be able to talk about and share with you in a few months when we announce our program. It’s an area that is still forming, formative because it’s not defined, but it’s something we are grappling with and thinking about in both intellectual and creative ways right now.

Interview edited for length and clarity.