Partner Event — Sundance Film Festival 2026
PARK CITY, UT — On Thursday afternoon inside The Box, a smaller event space housed within The Ray theatre in Park City, the ACLU hosted one of the festival’s most urgent conversations: “Free Expression and the Future of Film.” Moderated by Carrie Lozano, President & CEO of ITVS, the panel brought together filmmaker-advocates Sharon Liese, Julie Christeas, Carlos López Estrada, and ACLU of Utah attorney Abby Cook for a discussion that began as a constitutional grounding and quickly widened into a sweeping indictment of the political moment unfolding around us.
The question at the center:
What happens to art—and to democracy—when truth-telling becomes dangerous?
Setting the Frame: What the First Amendment Actually Protects
Speaker: Abby Cook, ACLU of Utah
Lozano opened by grounding the room in the national crisis—media defunding, book bans, censorship settlements, and the violent suppression of protests in Minnesota, where videos of ICE raids and police killings were still surfacing online.
Cook then brought the audience back to constitutional bedrock.
“Most people say ‘First Amendment’ without really knowing what it protects,” she said.
“Or who can violate it.”
She laid out the basics with startling clarity:
- “Speech, press, religion, assembly, petition—those are your core protections.”
- “Only the government can violate them—federal, state, local.”
- “Artistic expression is protected speech. Full stop.”
- “If the government restricts protected speech, it must prove real harm and use the narrowest possible tools.”
Her warning landed hard:
“If the government can silence one disfavored voice—whether a newspaper, a queer filmmaker, or a student activist—what stops them from silencing you tomorrow?”
The panel then moved from legal principle to lived consequences—nowhere more vividly than in the story Sharon Liese brought to the stage.
“Seized”: When Police Raid a Newspaper
Speaker: Sharon Liese, Director/Producer of Seized
To understand how abstract constitutional ideals become real-world violence, look no further than Seized, Liese’s documentary about the 2023 police raid on the Marion County Record in Kansas.
During the raid, officers seized computers, searched the home of the paper’s publisher, and triggered the death of 98-year-old co-publisher Joan Meyer. The incident shocked the nation. But Liese recognized deeper implications.
“It felt like a canary in the coal mine,” she said.
“A preview of what happens when local officials feel empowered to silence the press.”
She drove to Marion immediately. What she found was not a simple “press vs. police” narrative. The town itself was fracturing:
- Residents who championed a free press balked when coverage touched their own lives.
- Long-standing grudges against the paper erupted.
- Rumors circulated that Liese had been hired to glorify editor Eric Meyer.
“People were afraid of being on camera,” she said.
“There was this enormous distrust.”
Liese summed it up:
“Everyone said they believed in the First Amendment—except when the story had to do with them.”
Seized reveals a community with a fractured democratic identity—mirroring the national climate more closely than anyone wanted to admit.
Then came the twist: defense attorneys in the resulting legal case asked the judge to delay proceedings until they could watch the documentary.
“The film became part of the legal process,” Liese noted.
“That’s when I realized how deeply this story cuts.”
Cook, listening, offered her starkest line of the afternoon:
“If police targeted the Record because they didn’t like its editorial line—that is the worst kind of free-speech discrimination. It keeps me up at night.”
What happened in Marion, she warned, is not an anomaly. It is a blueprint.
Queer Narratives, Funding Threats, and the Self-Censorship Spiral
Speaker: Julie Christeas, Founder/CEO of Tandem Pictures; Producer of Run Amok
If Seized showed the danger of government overreach, Run Amok exposed the more insidious threat of institutional self-censorship. (Run Amok follows a teenage girl who stages an elaborate musical about the one day her high school wishes it could forget.) After finishing the film, Christeas traveled to Ohio for her next project. A university had agreed to host the production—until administrators abruptly reversed course.
The reason?
“They told us the protagonist was queer,” Christeas said.
“And that their funding was being threatened.”
Administrators described direct pressure from lawmakers:
- “True American history” courses—especially those addressing slavery—were being scrutinized.
- Women’s leadership programs were being flagged.
- Hosting a queer film, they feared, could jeopardize their funding.
Christeas and her partner pushed back:
“We said, ‘You have the chance right now to stand up to fascism.’”
The answer was devastating:
“We can’t.”
For Christeas, the moment crystallized how censorship metastasizes:
- authoritarian pressure from above
- institutional fear in the middle
- self-censorship below
“All these layers work together to shrink the space for artistic courage.”
Artists as Infrastructure: Antigravity Academy and the Power of Early-Career Filmmakers
Speaker: Carlos López Estrada
López Estrada—director of Blindspotting, Raya and the Last Dragon, and multiple Sundance shorts—shifted the conversation from constraint to possibility.
Three years ago, he founded Antigravity Academy, which supports early-career filmmakers with talent but limited access due to class, geography, or structural barriers. This year, two Antigravity-produced shorts premiered at Sundance.
What inspires him most is community:
“They’re so intentional. So fierce. So determined to tell stories no one has heard before.”
He described what happens when artists receive even modest support:
“Give a young filmmaker a little belief—just a bit of backing—and something miraculous happens.”
He also cautioned against tying value to institutional validation:
“Not every film will change a law. Not every short will premiere at Sundance. But empowering someone—that’s resistance.”
Book Bans, Youth Plaintiffs, and Utah’s Sensitive Materials Law
Speaker: Abby Cook
Cook then explained the ACLU of Utah’s lawsuit challenging the state’s “Sensitive Materials” statute, which allows just three districts to ban a book statewide.
Among the targeted titles:
- The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
- I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
- Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur
The plaintiffs include four authors and two students who relied on the books for representation, connection, and survival.
Cook made clear:
“Young people today are sharper, more self-aware, and more justice-driven than many adults. They know censorship when they see it.”
During the audience Q&A, a woman from Minneapolis took the mic—her voice trembling—as she shared that she lived within a mile of both Renee Good, killed during an ICE raid, and Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse murdered that morning.
Her question cut through the room:
“How do we stay safe? And how do we keep telling the truth?”
Lozano directed her to WITNESS.org, which trains citizens to safely film police and document abuses.
Cook added:
“You can’t exercise your rights if you’re not alive to use them.
Care for yourself. Care for your community.
There are many ways to resist.”
López Estrada offered another form of resistance:
“Support the artists in your city. Share their work. Connect them.
That’s protest too.”
Nihilism, Tone, and Sincerity in a Fractured World
By the final stretch, the panel had moved from external threats—book bans, police raids, funding intimidation—to the internal crisis facing artists today:
How do you create meaning in a culture exhausted by irony, cynicism, and doomscrolling?
An audience member asked the question directly.
López Estrada answered first.
“I’ve seen this fear of sincerity,” he said.
“Especially in early-career artists. Everyone wants to be clever, or subversive, or sophisticated. But sincerity? People are scared of that.”
He described watching filmmakers hesitate to make personal work—even when those stories are the ones the world needs.
Then he delivered a line that shifted the room:
“If the picture doesn’t mean anything to you, then why paint it?”
In his work with Antigravity Academy, he sees something “almost miraculous” happen when artists allow themselves to make work that is heartfelt, raw, or imperfect.
“People think sincerity is naïve,” he said.
“But honestly, with the world how it is? Sincerity feels radical.”
Christeas picked up the thread, pointing to misinformation and deepfakes:
“We’re being told everything is fake. Everything is manipulated.
So when you choose to be sincere, you’re choosing to be defiant.”
For her, sincerity pairs with an equally vital artistic principle:
“Curiosity is the way forward.
Not agreement. Not certainty. Curiosity.”
Lozano framed it succinctly: sincerity becomes a strategy for survival—emotionally, politically, and artistically.
López Estrada added one final note:
“You don’t have to change the whole world with one film.
Sometimes just showing someone a little belief is enough.
Empowering someone to tell their story—that’s resistance.”
In a culture fatigued by cynicism, sincerity becomes its own form of defiance.
Closing: “Independents Are Unstoppable”
Lozano closed with a rallying cry Sundance was built for:
“We don’t know the future of film.
We just know we can’t stop.
If we do, they win.”
Cook reaffirmed her faith in artists and young people.
López Estrada praised the importance of showing up—“breathing the same air.”
Christeas pointed out the most obvious truth of the hour: the room was full.
And that matters.
Because in a time of newsroom raids, defunded public media, book bans, anti-queer legislation, and violent crackdowns on protestors, the most radical act might simply be this:
We are still telling stories.
We are still gathering.
We are still refusing to be quiet.
Independent film, for all its precarity, remains a living rehearsal of the First Amendment.
And—as one panelist reminded us—independents are unstoppable.
Leave a Reply