(Re-)Branding Sundance: Entering the Indie TV Market

Abstract

The Sundance Film Festival is indelibly tied to the history of contemporary American independent cinema, from the burgeoning of indie features like sex, lies, and videotape (Soderbergh, 1989) to the Indiewood darling Pulp Fiction (Tarantino, 1994) to the crossover hit Little Miss Sunshine (Faris and Dayton, 2006). However, more recently, and especially following the popularity of O.J.: Made in America (ESPN, 2016), Top of the Lake: China Girl (SundanceTV, 2017), and the advent of its new Indie Episodic Section in 2018, the Sundance Film Festival now embraces a variety of alternative forms of indie programming as part of the Festival, including both documentary series and episodic series such as State of the Union (Sundance Now, 2019-present), Gentefied (Netflix, 2020-present), and Hillary (Hulu, 2020-present). This chapter focuses on the marketing and re-branding of the Sundance Film Festival and SundanceTV as the festival shifts toward the inclusion and popularity of indie episodic series and docuseries. Using media industry and production studies approaches, this chapter will address the ways in which the Sundance Film Festival is attempting to rebrand itself by enabling new possibilities for the intersections between indie film, television, and alternative forms of digital media.