The Sundance Film Festival will open its first Boulder edition on January 21, 2027, beginning an 11-day run that ends January 31. The move starts a new chapter after the festival's long association with Park City and Salt Lake City, with Boulder set to remain its home beyond the debut year.

Sundance has announced 11 screening venues across the city, from Boulder Theater and Chautauqua Auditorium to cinemas, school auditoriums, arts spaces, and University of Colorado Boulder facilities. Four additional locations are designated for talks and other festival programming.

The city becomes part of the program

A film festival is shaped by the distance between screenings as much as the films themselves. Sundance's Boulder plan spreads the event across downtown, community institutions, and the university campus, giving the new edition a public footprint rather than concentrating it in one purpose-built complex.

That layout creates opportunity and pressure. Walkability, winter transportation, queues, lodging, and the availability of informal gathering places will determine whether the festival preserves the productive collisions among filmmakers, audiences, critics, and distributors that became central to its identity in Utah.

The move will be measured not only by what premieres, but by whether Boulder can make discovery feel concentrated, walkable, and open to more than the film business.

The first program is taking shape

Submissions for the 2027 festival are open across feature, short-film, and episodic categories. The early feature deadline is July 27, followed by an official deadline on August 28 and a late deadline on September 21; other categories follow their own schedules and eligibility rules.

The festival has also added a FIPRESCI jury for its Boulder debut. Three international critics will evaluate debut films in the World Narrative and World Documentary competitions and present awards in both categories. The lineup has not yet been announced, but those decisions establish how the new edition will discover work and recognize emerging filmmakers.