In an official letter directed to the filming community, Sundance Film Festival director Tabitha Jackson announced that the event will be held again in a presential format next year, but all participants will have to be vaccinated to attend it.
In the letter, Jackson celebrated the return of the Sundance Film Festival to its home in Utah, after a fully digital edition in 2021. However, to ensure health safety during the 2022 edition, the Sundance Film Festival has a new set of sanitary rules.
Sundance is not the first film festival to apply new sanitary rules to ensure the safety of participants during the pandemic. Recently, Cannes demanded either vaccination passes or negative PCR tests to all participants in any of its screenings. The upcoming edition of the Venice Film Festival will also impose a reduced capacity for all theaters and oblige viewers to use masks all the time during the screenings. Even so, Sundance is the first festival to demand vaccination passes to all cast and crew of submitted films attending the event.
In the letter, Jackson announced Sundance is open to submissions and building a program that “will be larger than last year’s, but we will maintain a tight focus (somewhere in the realm of 80 features).” According to Jackson, the new sanitary rules, underlined in the letter, were made available as early as possible to ensure filmmakers knew Sundance’s new regulations before submitting their work and planning a trip to Utah.
As described in Jackson’s letter, here are the Sundance Film Festival new sanitary rules:
“As we plan for the 2022 Festival, one of our most important considerations is how best to safely bring together artists, audiences, volunteers, and staff from around the world. As part of our commitment to this community, we will be requiring all participants attending the Festival, or Sundance-affiliated events, in person in Utah to be fully vaccinated. We are providing this information now to ensure that all in-person participants feel comfortable attending, and can adjust their travel plans if needed. We will share our full details and processes for health precautions closer to the Festival, including theater capacity along with information on mask-wearing. We will continue to assess other elements of health and safety protocols regularly and in accordance with best practices.”
The 2022 Sundance Film Festival is set to happen from January 20 to January 30, 2022.