Straight out of college, Salt Lake County Mayor Jenny Wilson was one of the original employees at the Sundance Institute when it was created by Robert Redford in the 1980s.
Wilson, who is also a filmmaker, watched the institute’s film festival quickly grow over the ensuing decades with the release of cult classics like “Little Miss Sunshine,” “Memento” and Utah’s own “Napoleon Dynamite.”
“There was a sense that they needed to sort of pull back from what became quite crazy, especially in the town of Park City, as it related to celebrities and parties,” Wilson said. “I remember at the time, the organization taking a very focused, very deliberate decision to return the festival and its programming back to the core mission of Sundance, which was to foster independent storytelling and independent filmmaking.”
She said the COVID-19 pandemic had a massive impact on Sundance and the film industry as a whole…