Eugene Hernandez Is Spotlighting New Voices in Film

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The first time Eugene Hernandez attended the Sundance Film Festival, he was 26 years old and feeling hopeful about, well, everything. It was 1993, and President Bill Clinton had just been inaugurated; Hernandez had volunteered for the campaign. And he was feeling inspired by the independent filMMAkers—Quentin Tarantino, Todd Haynes, Gregg Araki—who had been championed by the festival. “I didn’t know what a festival was,” Hernandez says. “I kept hearing about Sundance as this place where these cool movies that really were meaningful to me were coming from.”

So he figured out how to get a badge and bunked in a hostel with an old college friend. In the festival’s first few days, he saw a movie that changed everything for him: Robert Rodriguez’s adventurous ultra-low-budget neo-Western El Mariachi, shot in Mexico. “It was a movie made by someone who I felt had a similar background,” Hernandez says. “Robert said that he found inspiration in the things that were available to him. He had access to a farm, a truck, a gun, a guitar. So he crafted a story around those elements. It blew me away.”

Hernandez, 55, is now the director of the very festival that changed his life, as well as the head of public programming at Sundance Institute. He previously helmed the New York Film Festival, also serving as senior vice president of Film at Lincoln Center; before that, he founded the groundbreaking independent-film-focused web publication IndieWire. Hernandez has devoted his career to helping emerging filMMAkers find their audience. “Sundance has this long-standing, venerable connection to the artist, holding up the artist, protecting the artist, nurturing the artist,” he says. “That’s challenging in this moment.”

Hernandez says the festival received 17,000 entries last year. But the barriers to entry in filMMAking are still high, and Hernandez, who was born and raised in Indio, Calif.—all four of his grandparents were from Mexico—is dedicated to finding creative ways to help. “I think a lot about my own background. I didn’t grow up with friends or family who worked in the industry, or with the means to be able to get internships—or to even know what internships in the industry were,” he says. “Sundance was my bridge to finding out about the opportunities that existed, and about the kind of DIY approach of so many women and people of color and queer folks, people who were trying to tell stories through a different lens.”

Hernandez knows he’s in a rare position, as a person with the ability to bring today’s new voices to audiences—which will inspire the independent filMMAkers of tomorrow. But he also knows he’s in good company, as film-festival directors around the world become a more diverse group. “It’s such a great moment,” he says, “for a true sense of discovery and diversity among cultural leaders.”