Sundance Social Whirl Blankets Park City With Events and Activations

Like a bomb cyclone dropping flurries of must-do events and experiences, the whirl of brand activations and social/business/deal-making parties tied to this year’s Sundance Film Festival has finally ebbed in Park City, Utah.

It was the first in-person festival since about five weeks before the pandemic clamped down on the planet in early 2020. The hybrid return to Being There brought with it a phalanx of big brands hoping to cozy up to influencers and celebrities, connect with fans and followers, and perhaps grab a little media attention too. And the social scene extended from 10-minute conversations on buses and in movie waiting lines to late-night cocktails and EDM beats.

Friday morning, the festival will announce the winners of this year’s awards in a live event. And some filmmakers have already scored big, particularly the creators of Fair Play and Flora and Son, which each sold for about $20 million to NetflixNFLX
and Apple TV+ respectively during the week. Other, more modest deals were also announced, though the festival’s hybrid nature (and a suddenly cost-conscious streaming-video industry) may allow some buyers to take a more remote, relaxed approach to the traditional buying frenzy.

That said, thousands of people descended on Park City, some there even to ski, which keeps the place busy the rest of the winter. They clogged the handful of thoroughfares open to traffic, particularly Main Street, which resembled nothing so much as the world’s steepest parking lot. Perhaps that gave brands more time to imprint their logos on drivers’ cerebellums as they creeped past.

Regardless, all the activations gave those who dismounted and walked plenty to do, in case they didn’t want to, you know, watch movies at one of the world’s most prominent film festivals.

Major sponsors such as Acura, Adobe, Amazon’sAMZN
Prime Video and Audible, Canon, and Chase Sapphire reoccupied familiar spaces in downtown, showcasing their products, offering day-time “lounges” for a respite from the bitter cold and lengthy slogs.

Acura showed off a number of its sleek vehicles, and an all-electric concept car that it plans to bring to market by 2025. But the real electricity came from some of the gatherings that cycled in and out of the space.

Acura’s partly indoor, partly enclosed outdoor space hosted multiple panels for the LGBTQ+ audience as part of a renewed partnership with Outfest, and hosted the cast party for Theater Camp, Ben Platt’s loving mock documentary of a not-very-functional summer camp for drama nerds. Naturally, the party featured karaoke, highlighted by Platt and three young co-stars doing a quite-excellent rendition of a Hamilton song.

Panels, like the three Outfest gatherings at the Acura Village, were a common enticement to get people to visit at many venues, especially at the revived “houses” set up to spotlight the interests of specific groups of underrepresented filmmakers, including for Black, Asian/Pacific Islander and Latinx creators. Inclusion was a big theme at the festival, both in its own programming and panels, and in many of the conversations backed by various brands and activations.

Chase gave visitors something to chew on beyond panels, with top chefs offering up mid-afternoon bites of gourmet food at cardholder-only events, alongside cast parties for films such as Bad Behaviour, Magazine Dreams, and Sometimes I Think About Dying.

Hard seltzer maker White Claw’s Coast Club was a chilled-out three-level lounge, featuring personalized white or black versions of the festival’s most common (and useful) giveaway, watch caps (some call them beanies).

Recipients could get their name inscribed across their cap’s forehead, or pick from a handful of pertinent designs such as a mountain range or film reel. It’s worth noting that one veteran bartender I talked with said that Sundance is the only week his restaurant can actually sell a lot of White Claws, which have carved a big audience among all the snowboarders and weight-watching California imports in town.

Stanley, celebrating its 110th year, showcased a remarkable array of the vacuum-walled gear that made its name, including barware, cups, and other insulated drinking equipment like a 40-oz. “adventure quencher” cup that is roughly the size of a compact car, but somehow still fits your minivan’s cupholder. To further ratify its festival ubiquity, Stanley slipped a slim 20-oz. “transit bottle” with the Sundance logo into bags the festival handed out to some participants.

Cold-weather clothing maker Canada Goose one-upped the caps and cups, crafting special zip-up jackets for Sundance filmmakers as a way to commemorate their achievement. It too had a big footprint in its Main Street store.

And it wasn’t just brands lining Main Street. New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts was back in its usual perch, for a 30th year of panels and parties for its many industry alums and donors.

Throughout the town, many attendees still sported masks, at least in close quarters like bus shuttles between screening venues, in theaters and in waiting lines. But in other respects, the scene was much like pre-pandemic days: Stuff was going on pretty much everywhere, often with multiple events from different sponsors taking over a day part for a venue, but not the whole day.

At nightclub The Cabin, for instance, Stanley’s day-time lounge provided a comfy space for drinks and even latte-making classes. By evening on Friday, however, The Cabin became home to the first of three events around town hosted by the Creative Coalition, a Hollywood-backed non-profit pushing arts education, inclusive filmmaking, anti-censorship causes, and related issues.

The Friday night event with the Pepsico Foundation honored the political documentary Gumbo Coalition, directed by two-time Oscar winner Barbara Kopple. The doc’s main subjects – National Urban League President Marc Morial and UnidosUS head Janet Murguia – both spoke at length, alongside a clip from the movie.

“The notion of gumbo is you keep adding ingredients and it gets better and better,” said Morial, who built his gumbo political coalition while serving as New Orleans mayor. “And that’s my vision of America. We have to find a way to make it work.”

The film is one of 10 indie project getting support this year from the Creative Coalition, Creative Coalition executive director Robin Bronk said. And in a pointed nudge to potential film buyers, she also pointed out that both the Urban League and UnidosUS are prepared to share information about the film to their respective millions of members.

Meanwhile, in the Cabin’s below-ground lower level, another event from another sponsor went on, with both floors to be cleared out after 10 pm for late-night dancing.

Plenty of media companies staked out spaces along Main Street, creating a celebrity circuit for interviews, video clips and stills. For passersby, the various stops became places to spot the likes of Jason Momoa, Jennifer Connolly, Will Ferrell, Brooke Shields, and many other glitterati in town to support their latest passion project.

Parties and dancing were certainly on the minds of many, and not just for the many cast parties sprinkled around town.

Talent agency UTA, which took over a mansion in a gated community a couple of miles up the mountain from downtown Park City, held a string of events, including a women’s comedy panel with Elizabeth Banks on Saturday. That night, hundreds of people were Lyft-ed back up to the mansion for a gathering as much about connecting to the next business partner as it was about dancing and, even in Utah, drinking.

Earlier in the day, AdobeADBE
held a “Meet the Teams” event for its Premiere Pro video-editing and Frame.io video collaboration software that jammed the upstairs of Brick restaurant with filmmakers, media types, and others. A day later, Brick was the late-afternoon home of the UTA-backed cast party for The Persian Version.

And for those hearty partiers who just couldn’t stop, nightclub operator TAO took over a cavernous film production stage on the edge of town and converted it into something like the giant bacchanals it runs in Hollywood and Las Vegas, with room for perhaps a couple of thousand people, with dancers performing on a raised center stage. Big chunks of the floor space were reserved for people willing to pay for couches and setups. But around the rim of the club, Moet & Chandon was pouring free champagne and Belvedere vodka, while other bars were dispensing gratis margaritas and shots with Casamigos tequila.

And in yet another example of ways even brands were criss-crossing each other in various partnerships, on Friday night, TAO hosted a Chase Sapphire concert that featured hip hop star Anderson .Paak spinning discs in his DJ Pee .Wee persona.

Acura had its own Friday night concert at its downtown venue – Latin Grammy winner Adrian Quesada of Black Pumas, who has a new album out, spun discs before the R&B band Emotional Oranges – before partnering with TAO’s second night on the edge of town, a night that didn’t start until 11 pm and was supposed to run until 4 am.

More parties big and small continued through Monday night, with a gathering at the High West whiskey distillery just off Main Street hosted by Cinetic Media, the do-everything insider company founded by long-time indie finance dealmaker John Sloss.

By then, the flurries of socializing and panels had begun to die down, as festival goers jetted back to warmer climes and quieter times. But for Sundance, after two years in virtual perdition, it was all a reassuring reminder that 42 years on, the festival is still quite the place to be.