The Sundance Film Festival 2022 will return for an in-person event at Park City, Utah, festival director Tabitha Jackson announced on Tuesday. All participants attending the festival, including artists, audiences, volunteers, and staff, will be required to be fully vaccinated.
The festival, that will also carry on with the virtual screenings introduced during the pandemic in 2021, will be held from January 20 to January 30, 2022.
Other details about precautionary measures, such as usage of masks, social distancing, and theatre capacity, will be shared later, Jackson added.
In 2021, the festival was restricted to virtual screenings in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. The Sundance Institute also collaborated with drive-in theatres and independent cinemas across the US to make screenings available to the public in various cities.
This Satellite Screen program will continue with the festival collaborating with 10 partners across the US to connect directly with local audiences and artists. Each Satellite Screen will show selections from the festival’s official program during the closing weekend, January 28-30, 2022.
Meanwhile, the in-person screenings will be held at the Sundance Mountain Resort in addition to Park City. “Online premieres will follow the in-person premieres, using our custom-built online platform that was home to last year’s festival. Awards will be announced on Friday, January 28, leading to a final weekend of award-winner screenings in person and online,” Jackson added.
The 37th edition of the festival is yet to announce its final lineup of films.
“The 2022 Festival program will be larger than last year’s, but we will maintain a tight focus (somewhere in the realm of 80 features),” said Jackson.
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Two Indian films, namely Ajitpal Singh’s Fire in the Mountains and Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh’s Writing with Fire, were screened at the 36th edition of the festival, and later entered for competition in the World Cinema Dramatic and World Cinema Documentary categories, respectively.
Writing with Fire won the Audience Award in the World Cinema Documentary category and the World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award (Impact for Change).