Sundance brings free Local Lens screenings back to Park City

Sundance will bring six free Local Lens screenings back to Utah on July 18 and 19, including a Park City showing set for July 19 at the Library Center Theatre in the Park City Library’s Jim Santy Auditorium. The series comes as Sundance prepares to move its flagship festival to Boulder, Colorado, in 2027, keeping a direct line to local audiences even as the festival’s home base changes.

The Park City and Salt Lake City screenings are part of a collaboration with Park City Film and Utah Film Center. All Local Lens screenings will be presented with open captions, and tickets are limited to two per screening for Utah locals. Filmmakers are expected to introduce the films and take part in post-screening question-and-answer sessions.

This year’s program includes Union County, Take Me Home, The Lake and TheyDream, all titles from the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. Take Me Home won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award: U.S. Dramatic, The Lake won the U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Impact for Change, and TheyDream won the NEXT Special Jury Award for Creative Expression. The schedule also identifies Adam Meeks, Liz Sargent, Abby Ellis and William David Caballero as the featured artists expected to attend and speak with audiences in both Park City and Salt Lake City.

For Summit County, the setting matters as much as the slate. The Jim Santy Auditorium has 424 theater-style seats, including wheelchair spaces, and Park City Film says the first movie there screened on March 30, 1995. Since then, the nonprofit says it has shown more than 1,500 films in the room, making it one of the town’s longest-running film venues and home base for Summit County’s only nonprofit art house cinema.

That history gives Local Lens a different weight here than it would in a larger market. The screenings remain free, they are open to local residents, and they keep Park City in Sundance’s year-round orbit at a moment when the organization is shifting its main festival to Boulder. For a town where film has helped define the winter economy, the shoulder seasons and the cultural identity around Main Street and the library theater, the July return is both access and continuity.