2014 Attendance 45,352 Film submissions 12,218

(4,057 features, 8,161 shorts) Films screened 186 Park City theatres 9 Festival staff 223

Thirty Years Of Different

On the 30th anniversary of the Festival, Sundance Institute president and founder Robert Redford spoke about how the Sundance Film Festival had evolved over the previous three decades. “Change is inevitable. You either resist it—we know who those people are—or you go with it,” he said. “We want to ride with that wave.” Celebrating 30 years of independent storytelling, the Festival explored an always feared, often denied, but most vital aspect of the creative process—failure—with FREE FAIL, a day of panels, workshops, and special events. New to 2014 was the Kids section, designed for independent film’s youngest fans. Standout films of the Festival included Obvious Child, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Skeleton Twins, God Help the Girl, Rich Hill, 20,000 Days on Earth, and Boyhood, while the unique history of baseball was showcased in both The Battered Bastards of Baseball and No No: A Dockumentary. The undead was a common theme 2014 with What We Do in the Shadows, Life After Beth, Jamie Marks Is Dead, Only Lovers Left Alive, and Dead Snow; Red vs. Dead.

Fun fact: Damien Chazelle‘s Whiplash won both the U.S. Dramatic Grand Jury Prize and U.S. Dramatic Audience Award and went on to win three Academy Awards, including best supporting actor for J.K. Simmons’s performance as Terence Fletcher, the brutally savage music instructor who will stop at nothing to realize a student’s potential.