Carey Williams is premiering his second feature, Emergency, on Thursday night. The film is based on his award-winning short of the same name that won a Special Jury Award at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival and went on to win Best Short at SXSW and the Seattle International Film Festival. Photo: Sundance Institute

PARK CITY, Utah — The Sundance Film Festival kicked off on Thursday virtually for the second year in a row, after organizers decided to pivot away from an in-person festival when the COVID-19 Omicron variant began to spread rapidly in Summit County at the beginning of the new year.

“Even though this year’s festival venue has changed, so much remains the same,” Sundance Institute CEO Joana Vicente said during a virtual press conference on Thursday morning.

“We are coming together to celebrate extraordinary work, elevate independent voices, and honor the essential power of storytelling,” Vicente said.

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Festival director Tabitha Jackson said the mission established by Robert Redford when he started the event in 1981 remains true today. “It is to support artists as a transformative force in the culture,” Jackson said. “That hasn’t changed. But the world around us has in incredible ways.”

Kim Yutani, the director of programming for the festival, said submissions have remained healthy despite the obstacles of the pandemic. “We were really pleasantly surprised to discover that artists found a way to sustain themselves, to make work, despite the challenges,” she said.

When discussing the program, Yutani said many films “looked at the current state of the environment. We have work that addresses climate politics. I would single out a film, the documentary To The End, which deals very directly with the Green New Deal.”

She also mentioned two Latin American films — Bolivian filmmaker Alejandro Loayza Grisi’s Utama and Chilean director Francisca Alegría’s The Cow Who Sang A Song Into The Future.

Jackson hinted that the digital portion of Sundance will likely remain, pointing to a future of hybrid festivals with in-portion elements in Park City alongside an accessible online platform. “I think being able to diversify the audiences for this work together in community in a more expansive way — once we discovered how to do that, I personally don’t want to go back on that,” she said.

“The question is how we balance these things out,” Jackson emphasized.

She ended by saying, “this notion that we are engaged in something that is bigger than ourselves, it’s about protecting things that we must not take for granted — freedom of creative expression, the ability to gather, speaking truth to power, resisting, but we are left with joy… Joy is also an operating principle this year and being together and experimenting. We’re doing a ton of experiments this year, all in service of finding out what a festival can be and what this festival can be.”

Opening night premieres include: