Twitter

After 36 years of annual festivities in Park City, Utah, the Sundance Film Festival is packing up and moving on. The festival is planning to expand its location for Sundance 2021 and move into multiple states and venues next year, including Park City, the New York Times reports.

Festival director Tabitha Jackson announced the tentative plans for next year’s Sundance Film Festival today, which will take place in January 2021, when social distancing requirements will likely still be in place and the coronavirus vaccine will not be readily available.

Jackson revealed the independent cinemas that Sundance has been in talks with about potentially hosting next year, all of which are located across the country. Along with Park City, Utah, the list also includes California, Colorado, Georgia, Kentucky, New York, Michigan, Minnesota, Tennessee and Texas. The list also includes one international location, Mexico City.

Each independent theatre will select its own custom lineup of Sundance programming that’s best fit for its audience, and the full Sundance program, which Jackson called “the nucleus of the festival,” will be made available online. Next year’s lineup is expected to be smaller than past years, although Jackson did not elaborate on size.

Jackson told the New York Times that Sundance’s online platform will be “a one-stop point of access, designed to create a participatory experience which brings all the elements and locations of the festival together.”

Sundance’s expansion in 2021 will not only make the festival better equipped to deal with coronavirus pandemic, it will also open up the event to audiences who never had a chance to engage with it in the past, Jackson explained.

“We want to reach people who we have not been able to reach before — where access to the work is not predicated on being able to afford to travel to an expensive place,” she said. “The world has typically come to Sundance. We are now trying to take Sundance to the world.”

The coronavirus pandemic has altered the way festivals showcase the work of independent artists. This past April, the Tribeca Film Festival teamed up with YouTube for the We Are One: A Global Film Festival, which was free for audiences to stream online. When SXSW was canceled in March, Amazon Prime Video paired up with the festival to showcase SXSW Film Festival Collection online. And last month, the Vail Film Festival went online for its 17th year, bringing more than 50 films to virtual audiences.