Lindsey Anderson Beer on Sundance Founders Robert Redford & Her Dad Gary

I can’t believe we are about to embark on our last Sundance in Utah. Before Covid, I attended the festival every year of my life.

Sundance — and Robert Redford — were more than inspirations for my pursuit of a life in the arts. They shaped my entire worldview about the value of artistry, and about what becomes possible when people who believe in art come together with shared purpose.

As Sundance prepares to leave Utah, and as we reckon with the loss of its founder, we are being tested on whether we still believe in the values that made independent film matter in the first place.

Sundance was never just a festival to me. It was also a place. Yes, Park City, where the festival has lived since the 1980s. But also Sundance Resort itself — the mountain where Bob made his home, where the Sundance Institute was born, and where artists, filmmakers, donors, philanthropists and billionaires, a motley crew — gathered in unlikely communion. They came from different backgrounds, different industries and different corners of the country, but they were united by a single conviction: film, filmmaking and filmmakers matter.

I practically grew up on that mountain. My father, Gary Beer, was one of the original founders of the festival and its first president, before returning to Washington, D.C. — from whence he came — after meeting Redford at an environmental fundraiser. They were introduced by the late, wonderful Salt Lake City mayor Ted Wilson. Bob wanted to know if my dad could raise money for the Sundance Institute the way he had for political causes. That question changed our lives. A native New Yorker, who smoked a pack a day, moved to Utah in the early ’80s, when you’d be hard-pressed to find a cup of coffee or a New York Times. My siblings and I were born there, raised there for a time, surrounded by filmmakers, artists, and magical thinkers who believed — perhaps irrationally, certainly stubbornly — that art could shape culture.

Those early founders coined the term “independent film,” a story unto itself, but one rooted in an uncompromising idea. It was imperative to Redford that films at Sundance be entirely free of studio involvement.

Totally free.

You didn’t need to visit his ranch to understand that he was a cowboy at heart. He had a profound respect for the environment, but also for places — their integrity, their limits, their dignity. When I was ten, I wrote him a thank-you note for letting me and a few classmates stay at his Manhattan apartment for an academic competition. As kids do, I ended the note by parroting something I had heard adults say: “We came, we saw, we conquered.” He wrote me back a several-page letter explaining why New York could never be conquered. I wish I still had it. It was my first lesson that culture isn’t something to dominate, but something to steward from within as part of a greater whole.

Redford demanded intellectual rigor from everyone around him, not just from the films he programmed. He believed in the larger forces of life, in the responsibility that comes with influence and in the idea that art was a public trust.

When he passed recently, I felt a profound loss — not just personal, but cultural. He represented an era of cinema that people now say is out of reach. He made movies that mattered, when movies mattered. I believe they still do. But for that to remain true, we have to buy into a shared dream the way the early founders of Sundance did.

Long after my father left the organization, I continued attending the festival because it was the perfect way to begin a year: a week dedicated to watching people’s dreams come true. No matter how dark, small, niche, or seemingly insane the film, those artists had not only pushed a boulder up a mountain to get their work made, they had pushed the mountain itself.

How fitting, then, and how strange, that Sundance is now literally moving mountains, from Utah to Colorado.

It was those early lessons — the importance of film, the belief in possibility — that eventually led me to Los Angeles to pursue a career in the industry. My dad had left the business long before, just in time for me to catch the bug but know no one. I moved west with my sister, Alexandra, and our childhood friend Chris Slager. We knew no one but each other. We took assistant jobs, built our networks from the ground up, and stubbornly pursued the shared delusion Sundance had instilled in us: that anything was possible if you believed in the work.

I don’t know what will happen to Sundance after the death of its founder and the displacement of its cultural roots. I am wary. I am sad about chapters closing. But I am also cautiously optimistic. Loss, after all, has been one of my greatest teachers.

If we can hold fast to the values that gave birth to Sundance — independence, rigor, community, and faith in artists — I believe the institution can continue to matter, wherever it lives. Art matters. Artists matter. Now, more than ever. Whether at Sundance, in a local coffee shop, or on a studio lot, we can continue to make movies matter, one shared dream, or delusion, at a time.

Lindsey Anderson Beer is best known for writing and directing the hit Paramount+ movie “Pet Sematary: Bloodlines.” Beer’s production company Lab Brew, which she leads with vice presidents Alexandra Banks and Spencer Walken, has a first-look deal with Paramount Pictures. Upcoming film projects include fresh takes on popular IP like “American Girl,” “Hello Kitty” and “Sleepy Hollow,” as well as “1313,” a TV project described as a darker reimagining of the Munsters.