Photo: Park City Film.

PARK CITY, Utah — When the Sundance Film Festival announced it was leaving Park City, Katharine Wang felt the loss personally. But she said the blow landed differently than it might have a few years earlier.

Wang, executive director of Park City Film, said the community’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic changed how she thought about what Park City could do without Sundance. That thinking led to the inaugural Park City Film Festival, set for Oct. 23-25.

“I feel like pre-COVID [losing Sundance Film Festival] would have been more upsetting than post-COVID,” Wang said. “The reason I say that is when everything went haywire in the world, global pandemic, everything shuts down. We never could have anticipated how our community rose up and just rallied around us.”

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Wang pointed to the drive-in screenings Park City Film held at Utah Olympic Park during the pandemic as proof of that appetite for film and community. What started as an improvised solution to shuttered theaters drew a crowd Wang said no one saw coming.

“We went from zero to 20,000 people at the drive-in,” Wang said. “It was so clear that our community loves film.”

The Park City Film and Sundance relationship dates back to 1995, when Sundance was looking for a new venue in Park City. The city was renovating the town’s original high school at the time, and organizers struck a deal: If the city restored the building’s auditorium, Sundance would use it as a festival venue and bring in the technology to run it. That theater is the Jim Santy Auditorium in Park City Library; Park City Film’s own theater.

Wang said that history is part of why the organization felt it had to act once Sundance’s departure was confirmed.

“Clearly we need to step up,” Wang said. “This is what we do. This is what we’ve always done. This is why we were started: to bring great films to our community.”

The first move was practical. Park City Film leases its space from Park City Municipal Corp., and that lease capped the organization at 130 screenings a year. Last summer, Wang said, the organization asked the city council to raise that cap to 200.

“Part of the questions the council had was, well, what are we going to do with those extra days?” Wang said. “And I said, you know, we don’t know yet, but giving us the possibility and giving us the room to imagine something different is what we need. And they said okay, and they were really supportive, which was amazing.”

Wang said the timing mattered. She described a narrowing window before Park City’s cultural calendar fills in around other events.

“There’s such a tsunami effect from the Sundance Film Festival every year. It’s films, it’s ideas, it’s people, it’s the boost to the economy,” Wang said. “So to do something in 2026, we felt, was going to be really important, so that we could carry on the legacy but still ride that wave before it fell to a dead calm.”

Unlike Sundance, the new festival will not take open submissions. Wang said the lineup, to be announced Aug. 17, is being hand-picked from films that have already had strong runs on the festival circuit this year but have not yet secured wide distribution.

“We all have that experience at film festivals where you see a movie, and you’re like, that was so amazing, and then it’s really hard to see it anywhere else,” Wang said. “It doesn’t get distribution, or the distribution that it gets is really… that’s not the reality of how film distribution works, and certainly not for independent films.”

Wang said one statistic reframed how she thought about who the festival is for. She said Sundance’s own data showed that close to 60 percent of its festival audience came from within Utah, roughly 55,000 people statewide.

Festival films will screen at the Jim Santy Auditorium. Panel discussions will be held separately, at Distrikt F in Prospector Square, a deliberate choice, Wang said, to send visitors into a part of town they might otherwise skip.

“As a tourist, as someone that’s not familiar with Park City, you would rarely go to Prospector Square, probably, and there are great restaurants over there,” Wang said. “It’s a fun way to engage people in a different way, where you encourage people to use electric bikes; it’s walkable.”

Tickets will be available both as single, à la carte purchases and as a festival pass, Wang said, a structure meant to accommodate casual attendees alongside dedicated festivalgoers.

“Not everyone wants to see five movies a day, 10 days in a row, like me,” Wang said. “We’re keeping in mind that there are some people that may just be here for the weekend, or they have a second home. It would be fun to just come, engage with a film festival in Park City, different than Sundance, obviously, but just to kind of try it out.”

The festival runs Oct. 23-25.

Wang credited the Distrikt F connection to two longtime Park City Film supporters, Vanessa Di Palma Wright and Jacki Zehner.

Wang said the festival’s smaller scale is intentional for its first year, and framed as a starting point rather than a fixed size.

“We wanted to do this in a way that was scalable, that made sense for our size, for the time of year, for the short time frame that we’re putting it all together,” Wang said. “The idea is that this will grow over time.”

Local sponsors backing the inaugural event include Park City Lodging, Summit County RAP and Restaurant Tax Grants, the Park City Chamber and the Utah Film Commission, according to Wang.

Wang said Park City Film has no interest in recreating what Sundance built over four decades and that she doesn’t think it would serve the community well.

“It would make no sense in so many ways to try and replicate Sundance,” Wang said. “Why would you? They’re there, they still exist. We can do something different that would be interesting in a completely different way.”

Asked for a final thought, Wang returned to the organization’s three-decade role in the community.

“We’re really excited to be able to hold the line for independent film in our community,” Wang said. “As sad as we are that Sundance is leaving, and again, we wish them the greatest success in Boulder, it’s exciting to have the opportunity to step it up and expand our programming in new and interesting ways.”

And for anyone wondering, Wang confirmed a couple of longstanding Park City Film traditions will carry over to the new festival.

“You can bring your own bowl at the festival, just because people will ask,” Wang said. “And we will have real butter.”