Sundance: Chris Pine, Jenny Slate and Judd Apatow Kick Off Bittersweet Opening Night of Final Park City Edition

“We are sad it’s the last Sundance in Park City, but we will see what Colorado is all about,” Judd Apatow said at Thursday’s opening night premiere of the documentary “Paralyzed by Hope: The Maria Bamford Story.”

The director vocalized the uneasy feeling that many festival-goers were experiencing as they headed up the mountain one last time before Sundance departs for Boulder in 2027. The festival has been under financial pressure since COVID forced its organizers to cancel two in-person editions — and as the indie film business it celebrates struggles to draw crowds. Colorado is offering tax breaks and financial incentives, but it’s hard to leave the place that filmmakers have called home for more than 40 years.

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Yet Sundance rolled out the red carpet for filmmakers like Apatow and stars including Chris Pine, Jenny Slate and Riz Ahmed. It was a packed first day of programming with Pine and Slate hitting the Eccles, the festival’s largest venue, for the afternoon premiere of “Carousel,” a lyrical drama about a divorced doctor who reconnects with his high school girlfriend after she returns to their hometown. Ahmed was on hand for his new Amazon series “Bait,” in which he plays an actor whose star rises when he auditions to play James Bond, while observational humorist John Wilson touched down in Sundance to debut his new documentary “The History of Concrete.”

Despite the challenges that have been roiling the industry, Pine insisted he’s optimistic about the future of arthouse films and feels strongly that independent cinema “is still alive and kicking.”

“People want to go see cinema. Whether or not it looks anything like 20 years ago or 30 years ago, it doesn’t really matter,” he told Variety on the red carpet prior to the “Carousel” premiere. “We may have some diminishment in terms of cinema being the center of the zeitgeist, but my god, people still want to see it.”

One of the opening night’s most warmly received offerings, comedic drama “Ha-chan, Shake Your Booty!,” entered the festival with a relatively low profile. However, the story of a widow (Rinko Kikuchi) whose love of dancing helps her break out of a deep depression struck a chord with the evening crowd at the Eccles, who leapt to their feet as the credits rolled. The film’s director and co-writer Josef Kubota Wladyka said “Ha-chan” was intended as a tribute to his 80-year-old mother, who was in the audience as he basked in the applause.

“My mom has been through a lot of tribulations in her life,” Wladyka said. “She had to raise three boys on her own, and the one thing that she always fell back on to help her get through the hard times was dancing. So we wanted to create this film that was an homage to her, to show that no matter how messy life gets, you’ve got to keep moving forward, and you’ve got to keep dancing.”

The festival’s opening day was unseasonably warm. Instead of dazzlingly white mountains and massive drifts, there were only patches of snow. It was also quiet on Main Street, with overpriced boutiques showcasing “Farewell” gear. The Marquis, an upscale club in the middle of scores of installations, advertised a series of DJ sets billed as “The Last Dance,” with A-listers like Anderson .Paak (as his alter ego, DJ Pee .Wee) and Diplo set to fête the host city’s final days. The Egyptian, an iconic hub for downtown premieres, isn’t showing new films tied to the festival. Instead, plastered posters out front advertised a musical tribute to “Little Miss Sunshine,” one of Sundance’s biggest breakouts, that’s set to run during the fest.

Days before Sundance started, Festival Director Eugene Hernandez admitted this edition was bittersweet, because it’s the last hurrah in Utah and it’s being held shortly after its founder Robert Redford died in September at the age of 89.

“Everything became much more poignant with the passing of Mr. Redford,” Hernandez said.

It also made Hernandez, who has been coming to Sundance since the early ’90s as a journalist for IndieWire and later as a festival programmer, think about the impact that the gathering has had on indie cinema. It’s one that helped launch the careers of everyone from Quentin Tarantino, who debuted “Reservoir Dogs” in Park City in 1992, to Ryan Coogler, who premiered “Fruitvale Station” to raves in 2013. Other alums include Steven Soderbergh, Kenneth Lonergan, Ava DuVernay, Damien Chazelle and Richard Linklater. Many also participated in the Sundance Institute, where they were mentored by other, more established filmmakers.

“Mr. Redford created a space to bring established and emerging artists together so that their stories could be workshopped and rehearsed, and their scripts could be rewritten and evolved. Then he held a festival where their work could be shown,” Hernandez said. “That legacy is so woven into my own personal understanding of what independent cinema can be.”

There was an elegiac vibe to what is traditionally a celebratory occasion, as countless conversations mentioned “the last Sundance,” with others quick to add “…in Park City” — as to not sound too bleak about the future in Boulder. At the Ray Theater, a melancholic Apatow reflected on saying goodbye to Utah.

“It’s heartbreaking. I have so many great memories here,” Apatow told Variety. “It’s a bummer, but life changes — and I need to accept that.”

Antonio Ferme and William Earl contributed to this report.