The Sundance Film Festival is the national American independent film festival. It is held in Park City, Utah, USA, at the end of January every year.
The organizer of the film festival is the Sundance Institute which was founded in 1981 by actor Robert Redford and a group of his friends and like-minded people to create conditions for the formation of independent American cinema. The film festival is named the Sundance Film Festival after the character played by Robert Redford in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The Sundance Institute is a non-profit organization dedicated to discovering, developing and supporting independent film and theater artists from around the world, and presenting their new work to the public. In the spring of 1981, ten aspiring filmmakers were invited to the first Sundance Film Festival, where they met with leading screenwriters and directors in the Institute’s creative laboratories, who helped independent screenwriters and filmmakers write, shoot and compose their footage. In 1984, the decision was made to expand the Institute, and since then Sundance Institute programs have included theatrical development; Sundance now includes youth programs, interactive exhibitions, and music concerts. Robert Redford is currently president of the Sundance Institute. The Institute’s program includes the annual Sundance Festival, held in Park City, Utah, USA, in late January each year, which is an international film marketplace where distribution and distribution companies can purchase films to be shown in worldwide theaters. Some films can be viewed online on the film festival’s Web site. The Sundance Institute offers creative and practical workshops, such as film music and theater classes, and also supports independent artists financially with scholarships. The Institute also maintains an archive of the history of independent films, Sundance, which is located in Los Angeles for the purpose of preservation. The first international Sundance Film Festival was held in 1985 in Park City.
Since 1985, the festival has been held 26 times and continues to do so annually. What is remarkable, in the first times the number of pictures was only 80-100, when in 2009 21 countries participated in the festival, 118 feature films and 96 shorts were selected out of 3661 pictures presented for viewing. The festival program includes 87 world and 19 North American premieres. It is also noteworthy that the works of Russian directors receive awards at such a prestigious and world-renowned film festival.