EDITOR’S NOTE: Part I is an overview of the Utah film industry in the current moment. Part II (tomorrow) will offer a summary preview of the Sundance 2025 films, which The Utah Review will cover.
This year, as Utah has fully begun its second century in the film industry, Sundance Film Festival, now fully into its fifth decade, is set to open tomorrow (Jan. 24) and continue through Feb. 2, with in-person premieres in Park City, Utah and Salt Lake City, along with plenty of online options during the second half of the festival.
The slate includes 88 feature-length films representing 33 countries and 37 of 88 (42%) feature film directors are first-time feature filmmakers. Nine of the feature films and projects were supported by Sundance Institute in development through direct granting or residency labs. This year, the film slate includes 84, or 96%, world premieres.Beginning January 30, more than half the feature program will be available online for audiences nationwide to watch from home at festival.sundance.org. The curated online program will include all competition titles (U.S. Dramatic, U.S. Documentary, World Cinema Dramatic, World Cinema Documentary, and NEXT presented by Adobe), as well as additional selections from the feature, episodic, and Short Film Program presented by Vimeo.
The 57 short films selected this year were curated from 11,153 submissions. Of these submissions, 4,909 were from the U.S. and 6,244 were international. Work from 28 countries and territories is represented in this year’s slate of short films.
There is a solid representation of films with Utah connections, including seven documentaries either with a Utah Film Center fiscal sponsorship, or executive producer credits with Geralyn Dreyfous, cofounder of the center and Impact Partner films, or both. Dreyfous also is executive producer of a feature-length drama, set as a saga of three generations of a Palestinian family.
In addition, among the Sundance feature-length films with a significant Utah connection is Omaha, a drama filmed in Utah about a father who takes his two children on a cross-country trip, after a family tragedy. Marking Cole Webley’s feature-length debut as director, the film was written by Robert Machoian, who wrote and directed The Killing of Two Lovers, which premiered at Sundance in 2020. Incidentally, not a project filmed in Utah, Machoian also has one of 57 short films selected for Sundance this year: The Long Valley, chronicling the Hispanic migrant community and landscapes of the Salinas Valley, one of the most productive agricultural regions in California.
In narrative genres as well as documentaries and video art pieces and installations, Utah’s film ecosystem is flourishing and in several instances, local independent filmmakers have become agile in dealing with an intense competitive market for distribution and sales, even forging paths in festivals for visibility outside of the Sundance orbit.
UTAH FILM INCUBATORS
As part of the ecosystem, the Utah incubators for producing expertise and talent in the film industry are notable. The film degree programs at major universities including the University of Utah, Brigham Young University (BYU) and Utah Valley University are flourishing, along with Salt Lake Community College. BYUtv has expanded its productions of original series and documentaries.
Having marked its 25th anniversary, Spy Hop just celebrated its 21 edition of PitchNic, its signature film student program. Many of Spy Hop’s film student alumni also have advanced into the Phase 2 production arm of the nationally recognized nonprofit organization. Nearly 95 percent of the PitchNic films have thrived in film festivals and have garnered numerous awards over the years. Recently, Kasandra VerBrugghen announced that she would step down as executive director, a post she held since 2008. VerBrugghen has led Spy Hop to its greatest expansion into a thriving, nationally recognized nonprofit that includes statewide programming, helping more 10,000 Utah youth (ages 9-19) to find their voice through media arts. During her tenure, Spy Hop expanded their offerings from two programs to 18, extending their reach to more than 80 schools across Utah annually. She was instrumental in building the Kahlert Youth Media Arts Center, located in Salt Lake City’s Central Ninth neighborhood, to give Spy Hop a permanent home where students can develop the media and communication skills to build their professional careers. Under her leadership, Spy Hop established a legacy fund to ensure that their high-quality, free arts education will continue for years to come.
The Davey Foundation (created in memory of actor, director, producer, musician and community activist David Fetzer) also has become a major player in local independent filmmaking, not only providing financial support but also organizing the annual Davey Fest to screen films.
Utah’s film industry incentive programs have produced significant results in the last decade. With $630 million spent in 258 projects and with 39,800 jobs created in the last 10 years, the wealth has been spread across the state, most notably in 19 rural counties. Total rural production spending has been $268 million. In 2024, as production gradually recovered from the prolonged interruptions of the industry strikes, total production spending in Utah came in at $49.9 million, with $10.4 million going to rural counties in the state. More than 3,100 jobs were created statewide in the 22 incentive projects.
Incentives include the Motion Picture Incentive Program (MPIP), which offers a 20%-25% post performance incentive that offers a cash rebate or fully refundable, non-transferable tax credit on qualified dollars left in the state of Utah. This incentive is ideal for narrative, documentary, and episodic series that intend to be distributed commercially. The second principal option is the Community Film Incentive Program (CFIP). This offers a 20% post-performance cash rebate specifically for projects that originate in Utah with budgets between $100,000 – $500,000. The CFIP targets new and up-and-coming local filmmakers and productions.
A significant development in Utah’s film industry in recent years was expanding the film tax credit to Utah rural communities, which the state legislature approved. Thus, these areas are now formally acknowledged as ideal locations for productions, emphasizing that producers and directors have options beyond the usual options of Salt Lake City and Park City for location shooting. Several years ago, the Utah Film Commission designated 19 Film Ready Utah communities for supporting productions in their area with access to locations, professional crews and vendors.
Just ten days into the recent new year, the film commission announced four projects which will generate an estimated economic impact of $17.5 million and more than 420 new jobs. Leading the list is a new series from local filmmakers, Jason Faller and Kynan Griffin (The Outpost, Mythica: Stormbound), The Wayfinders, which was approved for a Rural Utah Film Incentive.
Other projects include the thriller The Edge of Normal based on a Carla Norton novel (which received a Motion Picture Incentive Program (MPIP)) and the second season of the Finding Mr. Christmas series for the Hallmark channel. starring Jonathan Bennett as host. Hallmark productions have gained a steadfast presence in Utah and this latest venture was approved for a Rural Utah Film Incentive. The fourth project, approved for a Utah Community Film Incentive, is The Genesis Project, a new feature from local filmmaker Dustin Ward (Princess for a Day). The story follows five psychology students who are studying serial killers and attempt to capture the killer stalking their town.
In an interview with The Utah Review, Faller, a Canadian transplant, presented a convincing case for why he opted to focus on Utah instead of the usual West coast hotbeds of Hollywood and Vancouver for film production. The Utah appeal became even stronger when he pivoted from rom-com features such as Moving McCallister (which starred Mila Kunis and Jon Heder) and Pride and Prejudice to fantasy features. Faller, a Brigham Young University film school graduate, had returned to the school to teach a class and challenged his students to make an experimental fantasy film, Dragon Hunter. The project was a “funny story,” he recalled. “I was an adjunct teaching this independent producing class at BYU and the challenge was to find the funding and direct and produce this crazy fantasy film. Only one person was interested.” The person who took on the project for the 2009 film was Stephen Shimek, who is now a film and television director, writer, producer and co-founder of the independent film production company Escapology.
Faller and Kynan Griffin, originally from South Africa, formed a local company Arrowstorm Entertainment, which specializes in the genres of fantasy, science fiction and adventure. “Utah has so many different fantastical and other-worldly landscapes — forests, mountains, lakes, snow and surfaces that look like they are on planets in outer space — that are ideal for the stories we like to tell,” Faller said. Likewise, the availability of qualified production crew members in Utah sweetened the deal that much more, with Faller adding that whenever “we brought crew members from Los Angeles, they didn’t match up consistently to the level of work we were getting from Utah-based crews.”
The various state incentives along with the success of signature television series such as Touched by an Angel, Everwood and the various Disney Channel projects, along with Yellowstone certainly have helped to sustain qualified production professionals in the state, according to Faller.
Faller said being tenacious is essential, even if one has enjoyed commercial success. Plainly, resting on one’s laurels does not punch the next ticket, regardless of whether or not the previous project is a commercially successful television series that has run for multiple seasons or a commercial for a globally known brand name such as Nike. “You’re always back standing on square one,” he said, “and you get lucky,” adding that there are thousands of people who also have checked those same boxes and are fighting to stay on that level.
For Faller, Wayfinders fulfills his creative wish for the ultimate fantasy feature, striving to be even more exciting than film franchises such as The Chronicles of Narnia and Harry Potter. The premise is simple enough: teen protagonists in the contemporary age of social media immersion are whisked off to a real, scary medieval world of fantasy. Transported to that medieval world, the protagonists are like fish out of water — relying on quotes from contemporary pop culture memes and movie tropes, speaking in the slang and phrases of their 21st century existence, thinking about making a hamburger or teaching how to play football.
While the medieval fantasy scenes will be shot in Ireland, replete with castles that set the relevant imagistic tones, Faller said Utah is perfect for showing the characters one would connect as familiar in small-town America. The rural tax incentive for Wayfinders fits perfectly as landscape and school locations in Heber and Nephi will serve for the appropriate narrative scenery, along with potential sites such as Escalante, Goblin Valley, Arches National Park and remote desert spots, where the production team will coordinate with the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management. Faller and Griffin are finalizing the schedule, targeting pre-production to complete by late spring and shooting to take place during the summer as well as in spring of 2026. The project currently is set for 12 episodes including the pilot.
While it is not easy to calculate the full economic beneficial impacts that film-related tax incentives bring to communities, Faller said there are interesting anecdotes that suggest there is a multiplier effect occurring as crews working on a production are spending money in that community which stays there and it generates ripple effects. He shared a story from Dean Devlin, a screenwriter, producer, director and actor, who was working on a production in Oregon years ago and decided to give everyone $2 bills to use for purchases in the location. The point was to raise awareness of how much the presence of this production in the community was doing to support consumer spending there. The ripple effects can extend to those who have such positive experiences with incentives and location-specific projects that they decide to invest in the community, including real estate to set up a home or for large consumer purchases such as boats and recreation equipment.
The film commission’s impact is leading to stories of creative fortune, respect and newfound reputations for Utah filmmakers. After their submission of Alien Country was rejected by Sundance, director Boston McConnaughey and writer Renny Grames decided to take a different path. “Sundance is a dream that I hoped for some time could be fulfilled but instead of just a formal rejection letter, we received some personal feedback about the film,” Grames said, in an interview with The Utah Review.
With the feedback taken earnestly, Grames and McConnaughey found a different but thoroughly gratifying path to connect their family-friendly science-fiction comedy to audiences. Last year, its debut came at Flickers, the Rhode Island International Film Festival, an event part of the Academy Award qualifying process, and the film took the grand jury prize for Best Comedy Feature. Grames and McConnaughey were surprised that their old-school comedy adventure akin to the likes of films such as Tremors and tips of the hat to Independence Day and Mars Attacks. After the film screened at FrightFest, critic Neil Baker wrote that the film is “is a love letter to those fun films and the classic spit-and-sawdust American West tale of a community coming together to fight for freedom.”
Capitalizing upon the momentum at Flickers, McConnaughey and Grames targeted international genre-specific film festivals, where audiences were just as receptive to Alien Country. The film’s European premiere came with last fall’s Trieste Science+Fiction Festival in Italy, followed shortly by its U.K. premiere at Fright Fest, held at the ODEON Luxe West End on Leicester Square in London. “We were thrilled with the robust audiences and the massive FrightFest theater and its perfect sound, which filmmaker James Cameron had customized for Avatar screenings,” Grames said. Back in the U.S., they arranged for a local premiere at a 500-seat South Jordan, Utah movie theater that was completely packed.
Since then, the mini festival run has given way to distribution and sales efforts and building word-of-mouth (they have approximately 100 reviews on Amazon and hope to reach 500). The pièce de résistance to boost their efforts came in a New York Times’ roundup of the top five science fiction films to stream, last November.
The Hawaii-based S&R Films has picked up the North American distribution rights and Vertical is handling the international rights. The film will eventually reach audiences in the Commonwealth of Independent States countries as well as those in South America, along with Australia.
Produced within a modified low-budget range, the filmmakers received one of Utah’s tax incentives, which was helpful in their post-production efforts. “When we got the letter about the tax incentive, we collapsed on the floor, relieved and joyful,” Grames explained. “It made a huge difference. Otherwise, we could not have finished the film.”
McConnaughey said, “We keep telling ourselves how glad we were to write and make this movie, especially when there might be a million reasons not to have done so.” He added that they already knew well about the problem of not having a famous or bankable name to act in the film and the less than 1-in-a-1000 chances of landing someone like that for casting. He recalled a FilmQuest panel discussion in Provo in which a distributor explained the difficulties of doing so because it might be difficult to trust whether or not a filmmaker can make a quality product. Connaughey added that in making a film that falls under the umbrella of the ‘WASH’ (westerns, action/adventure, science fiction and horror) acronym, one does not necessarily need a prized bankable name. These genres have avid fan bases that are willing to give fresh narratives their moment in the spotlight, regardless of whether or not there is a name star in the cast.
The doors are already opening for their next science fiction project with the working title Dark Habitat. It involves scientists simulating what life in a colony on Mars might be like, except now they face the challenge of how far do they carry this experiment when some of the crew members go missing. McConnaughey described the project as a “spiritual successor in one way or another” to Alien Country. As for whether or not the film might include shooting in Utah, both are leaving that door open as well. In fact, there is a Mars Desert Research Station in the state, near Hanksville.
UTAH FILM CENTER
After more than two decades of being in rented spaces in downtown Salt Lake City for its various programs and events, the Utah Film Center finally secured a permanent and sufficiently large enough building in the city’s Marmalade District that will accommodate all of its programs under one roof. The center will be named in honor of Geralyn Dreyfous, one of the cofounders.
With a target date of completing renovations this year, the staff has been working with Greg Walker, co-founder of WOW Atelier who is a film center board member, on the design. The center, located near the corner of 400 North and 400 West, will include a black box theater for screenings, education and event spaces, space for filmmaker offices and meetings, a commons area, spacious lobby, offices for administrative staff. Some 40% of the center’s freshly renovated space will be dedicated to team spaces, production offices, editing suites, educational spaces, and flex spaces for artist development.
Construction is being overseen by Cowdin Construction and Development. Mariah Mellus, the center’s executive director, added that the center’s newly designed spaces also will accommodate Sundance-related events in future years, especially if the festival remains in Utah.
Considering that Sundance’s feature-length juried slate represents an acceptance rate of barely more than two percent of the total feature-length submissions, the fact that five documentaries which received Utah Film Center’s fiscal sponsorship were accepted is impressive. Mellus sees the resonance in the results because the center vets films as potential recipients of fiscal sponsorship for how well the projects exemplify the artistic and creative mission of documentary storytelling. Over the last decade, anywhere between three and eight films each year that received fiscal sponsorship by the Utah Film Center have premiered at Sundance.
The year of 2024 was good for the success of the center’s fiscally sponsored films and not just in representation at Sundance. Make Peace or Die, received the Veteran’s Voice Award at the GI Film Festival In San Diego as well as Best Documentary Feature at Circle Cinema Film Festival. Porcelain War, which won the Grand Jury Prize for Documentary Filmmaking at Sundance last year, is screening currently in theaters around the country and has been shortlisted as one of 15 documentaries being considered for an Academy Award nomination. Porcelain War has gone on to win best documentary awards at the Seattle International Film Festival, Nantucket Film Festival, Telluride Mountainfilm Festival, Boulder International Film Festival, and the Bali International Film Festival, and additional prizes at the Sydney Film Festival, Sarasota Film Festival, and the Woods Hole Film Festival where it won the Best of Fest Audience Award. Last August, Picturehouse acquired North American distribution rights for the film, which also screened earlier this month at the Salt Lake Film Society’s Broadway Centre Cinemas
Plan C has taken three honors: Anthem Award Gold Winner, Webby Winner-Public Service, Social Impact & Activist and a Bronze Telly Award. The center also sponsored events and community spaces last year, including a film festival in Kanab, Strengthening Arts and Film in Pakistan, TedX in Park City and Vista House in California.
The fiscal sponsorship program has proven its concept, especially for filmmakers who are not just looking to submit their films to Sundance but to give them life extending to national and international film festival circuits as well as distribution in theatrical channels and broadcast and streaming platforms. Once a project is accepted into the program, the film can take advantage of the film center’s role as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, making it easier for donors to contribute directly to the project of their choice. It has become a win-win model for all stakeholders, including donors who contribute to specific center’s fiscal sponsorship initiatives. Donations are completely tax-deductible, and filmmakers receive 94 percent of the donations, as the center only uses six percent of each donation to cover administrative expenses. And, every film that receives fiscal sponsorship is eventually presented at one of the many free, public screenings the center offers every year.
In fact, the administrative fees from processing $18 million of fiscal sponsorship funds last year is sufficient to cover the center’s annual operating budget costs of more than $1 million. The center has long been known for its prudent, lean-and-mean approach to operating budgets so as not to sacrifice any funding potential for creative projects that benefit Utah filmmakers. Last year, 76 new fiscally sponsored film projects began, with 29 being Utah-based.
The five fiscally sponsored films on the Sundance slate this year include (more about them in tomorrow’s Part 2 preview): Come See Me in the Good Light, Folktales, The Librarians, Move Ya Body: The Birth of House and Sally. Mellus reiterated the films epitomize the kind of artistic excellence the center looks for in how the filmmakers illuminate the possibilities of human connection and ways to advocate for communities, which is central to the film center’s mission and criteria for determining if projects merit fiscal sponsorship. Folktales and The Librarians already have attracted a good bit of advance attention. In fact, Mellus and her staff have assisted in assembling a Sundance team of seven assistants for The Librarians because networking during major festivals can help momentum for a film’s visibility long after Sundance is over.
In its new home, the center’s space will be available to shine the light on the results of its fiscal sponsorship program with showcases of the films. Mellus also sees impact in the program’s versatile accommodation of small and larger documentary projects. For example, Folktales entailed $2.3 million in budgeting and Move Ya Body: The Birth of House, $2.7 million.
And, as with many other major arts organizations in Utah, the Utah Film Center has been just as extensively involved in educational programs around the state, which assure that new generations of Utahns are cultivating a literate appreciation for films and for filmmaking. Last year, media arts programs reached 458 schools in 42 school districts, with more than 850 teachers and 20,000 students. Mellus said the emphasis is on statewide reach. For example, an annual rural Utah tour, led by Julie Gale, director of the center’s education program, included: Bryce Valley Elementary in Tropic, Boulder Elementary, and Flaming Gorge Elementary schools, featuring free classroom workshops including the art of movie watching and appreciation, writing screenplays, creating animation and an introduction to stop-motion animation.
Just as critical in artist support as the center’s fiscal sponsorship program is the Artist Foundry, with filmmaker Amanda Madden as manager. After the pandemic-related break in programming, the Foundry has not only recovered but has established its most robust offerings in its history. Workshops cover all aspects of the filmmaking process, including marketing and promotion as well as the business end of sales and distribution strategies. Filmmakers meet the craft aspects of the creative and production process, such as ideal treatment of documentary film subjects. Likewise, support is provided for some of the state’s niche and independent film festivals, including the Wasatch Picture Show, Post Credits Film Showcase, Zion Independent Film Festival, and Wasatch Mountain Film Festival.
Likewise, the Foundry has curated showcases to screen films by Utah-based filmmakers, which underscore the ongoing expansion of the the bench of talent and skills that have made the state an ideal location for pursuing creative and artistic interests in the form of film and television. There also will be opportunities to screen Utah-made films, such as the aforementioned award-winning Alien Country. Anchoring the statewide network even deeper, the center has formalized its relationship with the Utah Documentary Association (UDA), making it an affiliate.
GERALYN DREYFOUS
Undoubtedly, the fiscal sponsorship program has boosted Utah Film Center’s international profile in film. There is no question that Geralyn Dreyfous, one of the cofounders of the center and an internationally known executive producer, has served as a linchpin in strengthening the center’s reputation. The strength of Dreyfous’ expansive word-of-mouth and the philosophical kinship Dreyfous and the center share on films that aspire to common artistic goals of connection, compassion and community have fostered Utah’s continuously enlarging role in the world of independent film, Mellus explained.
Dreyfous is cofounder of Impact Partners and Gamechanger Films. This year, Impact Partners has three documentary films in Sundance, two of which also have the film center’s fiscal sponsorship — Folktales and Move Ya Body: The Birth of House — and Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore. Dreyfous also is executive producer for the documentary How to Build A Library, set in Nairobi, and the narrative feature All That’s Left of You (اللي باقي منك), about three generations of a Palestinian family living in Gaza’s West Bank (more about these films as well in tomorrow’s Part 2).
In an interview with The Utah Review, Dreyfous said this year’s festival is one “of great discovery,” adding that only 13 films are coming in with distribution deals, a smaller than average number compared to other years. More than four of ten Sundance feature length films highlight debut directors. Slightly less than half of the feature films selected were directed by female filmmakers as well as those by people of color. Nearly one-third of the films were directed by one or more individuals who identify as LGBTQ+.
If there were some defining characteristics of this year’s slate, Dreyfous said, “there is a lot of dark and dry humor and not in places where one might expect it.” One example is Coexistence, My Ass, an entry in the World Cinema Documentary Competition that is directed by Amber Fares. The subject of the film is Noam Shuster Eliassi, a comedian who has created a personal and political one-woman show about the struggle for equality in Israel/Palestine. It is a solid example of how the personal narrative unfolds naturally as a political story without confounding the realities of a situation within a propagandistic frame. Dreyfous added that humor finds its way into intimate, quiet films including those dealing with human mortality. Come See Me in the Good Light, directed and produced by Ryan White, a Sundance alumnus filmmaker, centers around Andrea Gibson, Colorado’s poet laureate who has incurable cancer and her partner, poet Megan Falley.
Impact Partners Film’s Sundance entries in 2024 have had an excellent year. The documentaries Sugarcane and Union are among the 15 on the shortlist for possible Academy Award nominations as Best Documentary. Union, a documentary film directed by Brett Story and Steve Maing, does an excellent job in highlighting how the union landscape of the 2020s is burdened with a new set of perils and impediments for the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), which was formed in New York City’s Staten Island. The film received a U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for the Art of Change at Sundance.
Sugarcane, directed by Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie, examines the horrific legacy of federal Indian residential and boarding schools in North America. The film takes the viewer to the Williams Lake First Nation in British Columbia and the school at the center of the investigation, St. Joseph’s Mission, which was operated by the Roman Catholic Church. After the film was screened at the White House last year, then President Joe Biden issued an apology in late October for the U.S. Indian Boarding Schools program, the first of its kind by a sitting U.S. president. The U.S. Department of the Interior also published the second and final volume of its Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative investigative report. Named Best Documentary by The National Board of Review, the film screened in December on the National Geographic channel and is available for streaming on Disney+ and Hulu.
Another documentary, Gaucho Gaucho, directed by Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw, has been nominated for a Producers Guild of America Award for Outstanding Producer of Documentary Motion Pictures. Gaucho Gaucho, which premiered in the U.S. Documentary Competition at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, raises the directors’ artistic presentation to a new level of distinction. Shot in black and white, this magnificent and majestic film celebrates the community of Argentinian cowboys and cowgirls, who preserve a tradition that defies the contemporary zeitgeist.
As the film industry continues to deal with economic and market factors that continue to drive matters of consolidation, budgets and layoffs, Dreyfous said the challenge of distribution strategies and partners for documentaries in particular has become even more complex, given that streamers rely on content business models that dictate having audiences of at least two million in order to be considered for screening potential. There is a real fear of missing out on a great film that has screened at Sundance but potential audiences who did not see it at a major festival have few or no options to see it, either in a movie theater or on a streaming platform.
The rise of alternate streaming platforms with niche and specialized areas of subject interests has already begun. One example is Jolt, which Impact Partners founded. Jolt works with filmmakers to make their completed projects available for a limited time, as the platform focuses on a finely curated slate of films to ensure that they can reach the largest possible audience at a time. Two elements stand out in Jolt’s model. Filmmakers retain all of their creative rights and data. To facilitate optimal data-driven algorithms for a specific film and its relevant potential audience, Jolt suggests a minimum ticket price while users also can gift tickets to individuals whom they believe also will be interested in a specific film.
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