The Sundance Film Festival is one of the most renowned and important film festivals in the country — and this year, it’s being led by two queer people.
Eugene Hernandez is stepping into his first full year as festival director, where he joins Kim Yutani, who has been working at Sundance for over 15 years and serves as the director of programming, leading the team that makes film selections for the festival.
While he’s been in the role of festival director for just over a year, this will be the 30th time he’s attended the festival, and he’s intimately familiar with the impact it has had, and continues to have, on queer film.
“What drew me to Sundance personally when I started going in the '90s was, frankly, the queer films that played at the festival in '90, '91, '92, '93, and in that early period,” he tells Out. “Whether that's Jennie Livingston's Paris is Burning, or the early work of Todd Haynes, or certainly the films of Gregg Araki were in particular very influential for me.”
Now, he and Yutani get to bring queer movies to the more than 40,000 attendees of the festival who will get to be influenced by a new generation of film.
Images via Sundance Institute // Credit: Henny Garfunkel; Agnieszka Wojtun/Green Carrot
Though Yutani has been at Sundance for nearly two decades, she tells us that every year her idea of what makes queer cinema exciting changes.
“Whatever has preceded what I'm seeing in a certain year informs what we're seeing, and from my perspective, I always want to see how the envelope is being pushed and how representation is being furthered,” she says. “I'm always looking for what the new spin is on maybe some of the similar types of stories we've seen over the years.”
“So I think that that is something that is very inspiring as we tackle a new heap of films every programming season,” she continues. “I also think what is exciting to me is seeing the spectrum of stories being told right now. This year I think we have a wide array of trans stories that are in our program, and to me that full spectrum of stories, not full, but as full as we can be in a year, is an interesting thing to take a step back and look at.”
In the past, going to a film festival like Sundance might’ve been the only opportunity some people got to see queer films. Now, many of the biggest blockbusters in the world have bits of queerness thrown in, and with the rise of streaming, people can watch tons of queer content from the comfort of their couch.
For Hernandez, though, there will always be something special about watching queer films at a festival and experiencing “community coming together, being together, watching films together.”
“Having that opportunity to gather together to watch movies together, to talk about them in this place, in this moment, is really a valuable part of the experience,” he says. “And folks will have an opportunity in that intense first five or six days of the festival to watch everything together, and there'll be reactions and responses and conversations, and then those films will go on to lead a longer life that will take them to other festivals and to theaters and ultimately to people's homes through streaming. But I think starting in person together is such a great launching pad for all of these, especially these new filmmakers, these discoveries, these films that are being made by first, second-time directors. I can't think of a better way to start.”
The 2024 Sundance Film Festival is taking place in Park City, Utah from January 18-28.
