Producers gathered at the last Sundance Film Festival in Park City for the Sundance Institute and Amazon MGM Studios Producers Awards, where Oscar winner Shane Boris gave the morning’s keynote speech, acknowledging the joys and tumult of making movies independently.
Boris is the non-fiction producer behind Oscar-winner Navalny, Fire of Love and King Coal. At this year’s festival, he is debuting two features — climate change doc Time and Water and The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist.
“The world is clearly in crisis. What will happen with our industry is impossible to predict. We’re living in a time of great uncertainty, one in which the old rules don’t apply, and yet the new rules haven’t been written,” Boris acknowledged during his speech.
He continued: “At the moment, what is getting me through is the company I keep. I have collaborated with some of the best producers in the world. Not only have they helped me navigate extraordinarily challenging circumstances in order to turn ideals into realities, they have made space for me to have a chance to give projects something of value.”
The 2026 Sundance line-up includes 90 feature-length films, the vast majority of which were produced independently.
As a part of the morning’s programming, Sundance Institute and Amazon MGM Studios annoucned the recipients of two annual $10,000 grants, one for fiction and the other for nonfiction. Apoorva Guru Charan and Dawne Langford, who are premiering Take Me Home and Who Killed Alex Odeh? at the 2026 Festival, respectively, were the winners of this year’s awards.
Boris concluded his speech, saying, “One last thing I want to share with you, as we are all celebrating being here – and how rare and beautiful it is to have found each other in this increasingly disconnected world – is also a word of encouragement for the part of you which is reeling from how hard it was to get here (I am saying this to you and I am also telling it to myself): let’s not be daunted by the suffering of not reaching our ideals, in our art or in our life.”
The 2026 Sundance Film Festival is running Jan 22 to Feb 6.
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