Tabitha Jackson was given some bad lemons when she was handed Festival Director duties at the Sundance Film Festival, succeeding Jon Cooper’s incredible 11 year reign.
Jackson immediately had to deal with a pandemic that shook the industry to its core. Sundance takes place during the wintry month of January and, much to their bad luck, that’s when COVID-19 waves peaked in both 2021 and 2022.
Jackson and her crew decided that it was best to make the festival go virtual these last two years and the results have been fairly decent, including premiering the first ever Sundance movie to win the Best Picture Oscar (“CODA”).
Then again, the lineups still lacked the overall quality of past Sundance editions, with many filmmakers refusing to premiere their films virtually. This cost Sundance dearly this year, as they lost out on The Daniels’ critically-acclaimed “Everything Everywhere All At Once” to indie rival fest SXSW.
First Showing’s Alex Billington has been the person, that I know of at least, who has been following the deterioration of Sundance closely during the Jackson era. He had this to say today on Twitter:
Big shake ups at Sundance!! Lots of resignations this year. I always felt something was off with her - she knows filmmaking (where she came from) but was not good at running a festival. I hope they hire someone better, Sundance is slipping they need to get back on track again.
If you remember, Jon Cooper’s last year as Fest Director was quite exceptional, premiering the likes of “The Father,” “Promising Young Woman,” “Never Rarely Sometimes Always,” “ Palm Springs,” “Minari,” “Zola,” “Dick Johnson is Dead,” Time,” and many more.
An anonymous person recently messaged me, “between you and me, I ALWAYS felt like Jackson replacing Cooper was a diversity hire and that she had no idea how to actually run a festival. She comes from the doc world and knows how to MAKE films, but not how to run a fest, and it never seemed like she got a handle or understood how to run something as iconic as Sundance.”
Let’s not forget that Sundance lost quite a few important people these last few years, including CEO Keri Putnam, who left in 2021 to join TIFF. Many of their most important diversity hires are now gone.
My anonymous source went on to add, “they [Sundance] just think [diversity hires] are something they need to always do now, yet no other festival is doing it as intensely as they are, because, here’s a little secret, most of the industry is against it.”
I’m not going to add my two cents to this topic, but it sure looks as though the people at Sundance have a major problem in their hands and it doesn’t help that many virologists are predicting the next big COVID wave to show up again next winter.