Plan your visit
The 2027 Sundance Film Festival runs January 21 to 31 in Boulder, Colorado — the first edition after 45 years in Park City. This page is the logistics. For the questions people actually ask, see answers.
The ticket timeline
| When | What |
|---|---|
| 15 October 2026 | Passes and ticket packages went on sale. The cheapest tiers sold out within minutes. |
| early–mid December 2026 | Film lineup and schedule announced |
| 7 January 2027 | Package holders choose their screenings |
| 8 January 2027 | Individual tickets go on sale |
| 21–31 January 2027 | The festival |
In-person packages ran roughly $350 to $925, with a $275 tier for students and 18–25s and an unlimited-access tier at $7,500 for donors. If you do not already hold a package, 8 January is your date — single tickets are the remaining route in. Check festival.sundance.org/tickets for the live position; ours is a snapshot.
Where the films play
Eleven screening venues, all in Boulder, most of them civic and university spaces fitted with cinema sound and projection for the festival:
- Boulder Theater
- Chautauqua Auditorium
- Cinemark Century Boulder — the one conventional multiplex
- eTown Hall
- Boedecker Theater and Gordon Gamm Theater, both at the Dairy Arts Center
- Macky Auditorium, Muenzinger Auditorium and Roe Green Theatre, all at CU Boulder
- Boulder High School Auditorium
- Casey Middle School Auditorium
Four further venues host talks and programming rather than screenings: the Boulder Public Library’s Canyon Theater, the Dairy Arts Center, eTown Hall, and Old Main at CU Boulder. Worth knowing before you plan a day around one of them.
Getting around
The festival is designed as a park-once event: park-and-ride hubs with dedicated festival shuttles, the free HOP bus during festival dates, and free e-bike share passes. Denver International Airport is about an hour from both Boulder and Longmont, and RTD’s AB1 and AB2 buses run the airport to Boulder on a 30-minute clockface schedule from Table Mesa. A newer route, AL, runs the airport to Longmont hourly via the Lafayette Park-n-Ride.
Staying in Longmont
Boulder has roughly 2,900 hotel rooms in total, which is why the towns north and east of it absorbed the overflow — Airbnb reported festival-date searches up over 100% in Longmont, Louisville, Lafayette, Erie and Nederland.
Longmont is about 16 miles from Boulder by CO 119 (the Diagonal), nearer 20 by US 287 — a quick 25 to 30 minute run either way in normal conditions. Downtown has locally owned restaurants, a dozen-plus breweries, boutique shops, and Hotel Longmont — the city’s first boutique hotel, 84 rooms at 508 3rd Ave, which opened in late summer 2026 with a rooftop restaurant called Longmont Supply.
The practical argument for Longmont is RTD’s BOLT bus, which runs between the two downtowns until roughly 1:25am on weekdays — late enough to get back from an evening screening without a car.
On price: when Airbnb listings for the festival’s opening night were surveyed in August 2026, Boulder homes ran $183 to nearly $8,000 a night while Longmont sat around $77 to $113. Those were the prices at the time and both will have moved.
Our local guide carries the places we have checked, and happenings carries what local businesses have confirmed for festival week.
Eating and drinking
We keep those on separate sites, because they need more depth than a logistics page can carry: sundance.food for restaurants, coffee and late-night food, and sundance.wine for wine bars, breweries, tasting rooms and good options with no alcohol. Same editorial standard, same dated verification.
Sources: Sundance Institute announcements and venue listings; City of Boulder transport guidance; RTD schedules; Boulder Reporting Lab (incl. Airbnb data); Axios Boulder. Figures checked on the date above.