Ahead of the eagerly awaited 2026 (and last Park City) edition of Sundance Film Festival (22 January–1 February 2026), Olivia Popp and Eliana Resnick had the chance to chat with John Nein, Senior Programmer and Director of Strategic Initiatives at the festival. Nein grew up between Europe and the United States and has been an active programmer at Sundance since 2001.
This conversation kicks off Purple Hour’s new PROGRAMMER TALKS series, where we aim to have a candid chat with programmers and film selectors to discover more about the deliberate curation of queer films in the context of film festivals—and what that really means for each event.
Purple Hour: Queer cinema has always been central to Sundance, and we’ve noticed that audiences are encouraged to search for these stories on the website through the festival’s “interest track” called LGBTQ+ Stories. This may seem like a small thing, but it feeds into how a festival of this size and stature seeks to engage audiences. As such, I’m curious to know: what is queer cinema for Sundance?
John Nein: As digital tools evolve and people engage with the festival through the website more than they used to, you begin to develop tools that audiences find useful. [Previously] it used to be more the catalogue and programme guide.
There are a couple of different steps in the process. We do give filmmakers the option to self-identify through their application materials. It’s interesting because not a lot of festivals do this, and sometimes we get comments from people submitting, like, “Well, this is a lot of questions.” We’re asking questions about the film team as it’s really important to us because—and we can talk about this in a minute—queer storytelling has always been part of the fabric of Sundance history. We ask those questions in the interest of understanding the film community from which our films are drawn, and also to give filmmakers the chance to self-identify.
That said, from a subject matter standpoint, we have a programming team that also looks through the programme for interest tracks, including queer cinema. And yes, of course, there are some times when we ask ourselves questions about the grey area of a film and whether something is implied, as it often is.
We have good LGBTQ representation on our programming team. We talk about interest tracks, and in many cases, we’re in touch with the filmmakers themselves. We know how it is that they hope that their films are or are not characterised for the audience. So it’s a conversation that happens around each film. We do label interest tracks—it’s in the interest of the films, finding their community, and helping people have a sense of what might be of interest to them.
Have there been any kind of internal conversations about how stretchy or fluid this category is for the festival? For instance, there have been recent stories like A Useful Ghost (2025, Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke) or Jumbo (2020, Zoé Wittock), where the term “queer” is applied to explore the unique types of relationships in the film.
We do talk about it. I think one of the issues that we always face is that we’re not the be-all, end-all representation of whether something is this or does or doesn’t fall into a track. And there are other interests—there are ways that film teams and the companies behind them worry about being pigeonholed as a certain thing, and we certainly hear those.
At the same time, we are the curators of a programme, and we believe in the kinds of stories and the diversity of stories that are part of the festival. It’s an effort to best represent the curation of the festival while being mindful of some of the reservations certain films may have, or the notion that a label inherently has. There’s no perfect science to it. But that said, I don’t know that there have been all that many instances in which there’s been a kind of grievance over that.
Festivals like Sundance provide an important and perhaps “canted” lens, to use our terminology, on the often monolithic film industry. In 2023, you talked with Jason Ropell from MUBI about distribution in the streaming era, and I was wondering if you could speak to the expansion of online platforms and how Sundance tries to help filmmakers get seen. We also have so many new platforms; Letterboxd now has its own Video Store.
I think that there’s been a fair amount of innovation and disruption in the traditional means of distribution. There is also a lot of effort in having those platforms—and they’re not all platforms. Some of them are audience engagement tools, marketing innovations, and things like that that serve traditional distributors. I’m thinking about companies like A24 that probably do it exceptionally well. One thing that you look at, or at least from our perspective, is, how do those innovations serve artists? How is it that there is a greater opportunity for work to be discovered and or for work that has played the festival to be distributed beyond the festival audience? That’s certainly one aspiration that we have as a festival, which is that this work go on to find a broader audience in some way.
What are the ways that we think about how you create visibility for these films, both at the festival and afterwards? MUBI is a company that thinks a lot about that. Letterboxd is a company that thinks a lot about that. When I think about some of the ways that represent a new way of thinking that is geared towards a younger, emerging generation of viewers, there is a kind of active participation in social media through Letterboxd. These are all things that I feel like represent both potential positives and also create new challenges. But that’s the look. I’ve been at Sundance for a very long time, and I’ve been coming for even longer.
When you talk about the new challenges, what is it that you really hope filmmakers can achieve by navigating all of them? These channels of distribution, and where a certain film would be placed—whether it’s an international competition or an American indie film—what would the outlook for so-called success be for each?
It’s a great question because the answer is, of course, that it’s different for each of those films. It really comes down to the aspirations that the film and/or filmmaker have. There are films, especially international films, where we think about opportunity in a different way.
We live at a time when international cinema in the US is certainly vibrant and interesting, but it’s also a time when it’s more difficult to find distribution for some of that work. At the same time, there’s so much opportunity for the filmmakers. One of the things that we look at each year is not just what films get distribution, but do we see that directors find agencies, or they find agents or managers? We actually have conversations with almost all the international teams, where we talk about, “What are your expectations? What are your goals? What do you want to see happen?”
If there are introductions that we can make with US producers, because we know that there are US producers who want to work with international filmmakers. Those are all ways that we have of trying to think about what the goals are. Then even for filmmakers in general, whether they’re American or international, there’s a whole range of aspirations.
We’re talking in a year in which Sundance alums like Ryan Coogler, who has Sinners (2025) this year, and Chloe Zhao, who has Hamnet (2025), have made films at a very high level, at a kind of studio level. And yet, these films, I think, reflect their independent roots. There are films in the programme this year, like from Gregg Araki and Dawn Porter. Nicole Holofcener has an episodic piece. There are people who continue to choose to make work independently. Because I think, in the end, what we want for those filmmakers, to get back to the question, is for them to have the choice, for them to decide how it is that they’d like to make films, whether it’s at a studio level or whether it’s independently. I think our goal is for them to have the opportunity to have that choice.
This is a great moment to circle back to what we both alluded to earlier—that Sundance is known as one of the first festival-level champions for queer cinema, in the 1980s. Could you speak to the history of programming of queer cinema during your time at Sundance—or even before as a spectator—and how that’s changed or how the landscape has shifted, in your view?
It’s almost impossible to think about the American independent film movement without talking about queer cinema and the platform that it had at Sundance starting in the ’80s. You had some of the first nonfiction films like The Times of Harvey Milk (1984), and then films like Parting Glances (1986) or Desert Hearts (1985), Working Girls (1986), and Longtime Companion (1989)—kind of like mid- to late ’80s, early ’90s, when it was definitely present and reflected this moment when independent storytelling was inseparable from underrepresented voices. It was part of what was incredibly exciting.
Then that explodes in the ’90s, right? That’s from where you know Gregg Araki, Todd Haynes, and Cheryl Dunye. Paris is Burning (1990, Jennie Livingston) and Rose Troche—even international filmmakers, I’m thinking of Isaac Julien, Sally Potter, and Derek Jarman. There was a moment. In fact, there was the 1992 “Barbed-Wire Kisses” panel that B. Ruby Rich moderated, which became synonymous with the bursting of what she had coined as New Queer Cinema at the time.
It was so exciting; it was so vibrant. It was everything that independent storytelling should be. What has evolved since then is that there’s a programming team that is aware of the notion that we should be attentive to what is new. We’re attentive to the idea that something evolves: “How has queer storytelling evolved? What are the new voices? How do you see this progression?”
You see milestones over the years. One thing I find interesting is that there is a shift in terms of mainstream viability for certain films, I think of Boys Don’t Cry (1999), or The Kids Are All Right (2010), or Hedwig in the Angry Inch (2001) and Call Me by Your Name (2017), where you start to see very significant companies, you start to see awards recognition, you start to see very prominent actors. I think that’s exciting.
