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In 2015, I was in a shuttle van headed toward Park City for my first Sundance. I looked out at the dusty, dry Wasatch mountains and asked the driver, “Where’s all the snow?” I had seen so many photos of the festival over the years, all with glistening white peaks in the background, and was disappointed to find things instead looking like Mars, or the outskirts of Las Vegas. It did snow eventually that year, and in the 11 years since I have been to Sundances when it seemed to never stop snowing. (I remember walking to the premiere of Call Me By Your Name in drifts that were practically waist-deep.) 

It’s fitting, I suppose, in a closing-the-loop kind of way, that this year’s festival, the last to happen in Utah, has looked similarly barren, brown, and cheerless. It’s contributed to the general off-ness of this final Park City circus, a feeling that the festival has actually already ended—the snow moved east, the great indie movies have decamped for Cannes, the journalists I used to pal around with have lost their jobs and disappeared into other careers. A certain warm nostalgia has tinged the air, sure, but it’s been heavily spiked with the bitter sense that we are only walking around in the arid, empty place where something used to be.