The last dance after the divorce was always going to be sad and awkward, if amiable. Park City, the jilted spouse after four decades, has had most of a year to blunt the worst of the pain. What’s done is done. Wish the ex the best before she flies off to Boulder, and now’s the time to rememb er all the great things accomplished together. It’s not like we lost our love for the Sundance Film Festival or wished for them to depart. God no. The passing in autumn of Robert Redford — heart, soul, brains and Creator of everything Sundance — sharpened the finality of a long, productive era. I thought I heard this in his daughter Amy Redford’s speech to the press on the eve of the festival where her dad once hustled passers-by into the Egyptian to come in and view films. I mean her voice, her expressions, her posture. I picked up lingering grief, nostalgia, an earnest ginning up of hope for the next turn of the festival when it moves to the Denver suburbs. “My dad loved this place, so we invite you to stay curious about this community,” she said while thanking Park City leaders, volunteers, fresh and veteran filmmakers, film fest staff and board members, and the press, hundreds deep as I looked around. She said her dad did what I do: Read The New York Times each morning. That’s cool, one tiny thing in common with a legend, though I’m sure his daily pile ran deeper just as mine does. “But as many of you might know, he didn’t love press conferences,” she said. “He did, however, know the power of it. It’s not an easy time to be a journalist, so I want to thank you. Thank you for hanging in there. Thank you for bringing your words and your megaphone.” I’ll admit that was good to hear. If everyone has a story, that’s not one exactly reverberating in the halls of the White House these days, nor from those taking their us-vs.-them cues from there. This also makes the single page of her dad’s values expressed for Sundance all the more relevant. The film festival might be the shooting star, the big bang expression, but Robert Redford was really about nurturing the creation of independent stories from new voices told fearlessly through a lens focused on environmental and cultural stewardship. I’m trying to get the core words in a sentence. If this sounds “woke,” well, too bad. He was after truth. I’m not talking about virtue signaling, that sin widely shared by MAGA with the fanatic libs they detest. This thread they have in common, which could bind them if they recognized the simple fact. Everyone has a story. That’s true, too, as well as the film festival’s theme this year. I learned a few of those in the pit after listening to Amy and her fellow festival leaders speak. There was the retired doctor from Toronto who had gone to Iran, where her mother had died just 10 days before, and then barely made it out and to Park City for her first Sundance, overjoyed to cover the festival. She’d gone back to school for a master’s in cinematography. Here she could use it while telling her own stories. I sat for a time with the KSL reporter who made time from covering comparatively huge news beats to get the tale of Sundance’s last appearance here. She was looking big picture, with a much wider net than our dozen or so wags on the festival are casting. Then I bumped into a freelance You Tube journalist brimming over with his first credential after years of trying. Will he try for Boulder next year? He wasn’t sure, but probably. His Sundance memories most likely will come from there someday, hard as that is to imagine for some of us. I made friends standing on street corners waiting for the light, at the Impact Lounge, at the Ray, walking the trail from Prospector to Main Street, everywhere.   I talked with a retired Delta pilot as we waited for an interview before a full house audience of one of the filmmakers for “The Lake,” Park City native Fletcher Keyes. Later I tapped the shoulder of the daughter the pilot had pointed out at another seat, saying, “Hey, you’re Tom’s daughter!” Our wide-ranging though brief conversation from there left me with a new Russian author and novel to read, Ivan Goncharov’s “Oblomov.” The “logic” of it was, um, alternative but true, too, as we shared snippets of our life stories in a few minutes. Don’t ask me how we landed on Russian literature and her characterization of the novel as life changing. But there you go. Maybe my Sundance highlight.    And yes, I’m working in another part of Robert’s one-sheet intent here: Building community. This is to say, that yes, at least in the moment as we bond over our stories, however awkwardly, I’ve bumbled only into joy in the first days. No one is mourning at present. We’re living in the moment, melancholy chased away like those polar bears from the town dump in Churchill, Canada, in the documentary “Nuisance Bear” I got to see Saturday, 10 years in the making for an instant of awe and inspiration. And isn’t that the way with film at its best? At Sundance, anyway. Don Rogers is the editor and publisher of The Park Record. He can be reached at [email protected] or (970) 376-0745.   The post Journalism Matters: Joy dominates last days of Sundance in Park City appeared first on Park Record. ...read more read less