Today is the first day of the 2023 Sundance Film Festival.

• It will take place in Park City, Sundance Resort and Salt Lake City through Sunday, Jan. 29.

Why it matters: This is the first time the festival is being held in person after two years of going virtual due to the pandemic.

• In 2020, about 116,800 attended the festival between Jan. 23 and Feb. 2, according to an economic impact study.
• Of those attendees, nearly 44,000 were from out of state, and spent $135 million in Utah during the festival, per the analysis.

Details: In-person film screenings will be shown throughout the festival. The festival's second half will feature virtual screenings of some films starting Jan. 24.

• The Premieres section includes the biopic of a gay amateur wrestler "Cassandro" starring Gael García Bernal; "Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie," a documentary about the actor living with Parkinson's; and the thriller "Eileen" starring Thomasin McKenzie and Anne Hathaway.

The intrigue: This year, the festival is expanding its presence in Salt Lake City by hosting screenings at the Megaplex Theatre at The Gateway "where locals can experience those discoveries in a space they frequent year-round," Vicente said.

Of note: All festival staff and volunteers will be required to wear a mask and take weekly COVID-19 tests.

• Officials are encouraging visitors to wear masks and get vaccinated and tested for the virus.

Ticket sales for individual films got off to a rocky start last week due to website glitches, but the system was working fairly well as of yesterday.

Driving the news: About 400 of the festival's roughly 750 film screenings still had available tickets as of yesterday afternoon.

Yes, but: This weekend's Park City screenings — the ones most likely to attract celebrities — are nearly all sold out.

• That said, availability was popping up for some previously "sold out" screenings on Wednesday, and festival staffers have said to check back frequently to see if tickets have freed up for your preferred screenings.

How it works:

• Create an account or sign in if you already have one.
• Click "Program" on the top bar, navigate through the movies, and click "favorite" on the films and screenings you want to attend. Alternatively, hover on the word "Program" and click "Schedule" for a calendar view that also lets you "favorite" your choices.
• Click the calendar icon at the upper right corner of the website. You will see each screening you "favorited" for each day of the festival, with a button showing whether the screening is sold out.
• If tickets are available, you can click the pink button that states "Order tickets." A plain dialogue box will say "Buy additional tickets." Click that to open a window where you choose the number of tickets and submit payment information.

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Utah filmmaker Jake Van Wagoner said it feels "surreal" to have his second feature film included in the Sundance Film Festival for the first time this year.

What's happening: His all-ages, sci-fi comedy, "Aliens Abducted My Parents and Now I Feel Kinda Left Out," is an official selection in the festival's kid's section.

• There were more than 4,000 feature film submissions across all categories.

Details: The coming-of-age movie centers around the friendship between Itsy, a teenager and aspiring reporter, and her neighbor, Calvin, who has an obsession with space and believes his parents were abducted by extraterrestrial beings.

• While the movie is set in the fictional town of Pebble Falls, most of the film was shot in rural Utah in 2021, Van Wagoner told Axios.
• "Even though the movie doesn't take place in Utah … just based on the economics and landscape … we knew that we wanted to shoot it in Utah," Van Wagoner, who lives in Wasatch County, said.

What's next: "Aliens" — for short— premieres tomorrow at Broadway Centre Cinemas at 6pm.

💉A Midvale plastic surgeon and two of his employees are accused of destroying COVID vaccine doses and giving children saline injections instead at the request of their anti-vax parents, according to federal charges. (FOX 13)

• They're also accused of distributing nearly 2,000 falsified vaccine cards.

🤖 Ras the Robot, whom you may have seen dancing downtown and at Utah festivals, started as a labor of love, but now is a full-time job for his Salt Lake City creator. (Utah Business)

🏆 Two Utah businesses are finalists for the prestigious Good Food Awards. (Good Food Foundation)

🏘 A new, 2,000-acre vacation housing development is under construction at Brian Head Resort in Southern Utah. (KSL.com)

💼 Check out who's hiring now.

1. Event Marketing Specialist at O.C. Tanner.
2. Sales Coordinator at USANA Health Sciences.
3. Director Enterprise Apps at BroadPath.

Want more opportunities? Check out our Job Board.

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Here are movie screenings that Sundance is offering free of charge for locals! You just need to create an account to sign up.

• "Aliens Abducted My Parents and Now I Feel Kinda Left Out": 6:15pm Tuesday at the Grand Theatre in Salt Lake City.
• "Radical": 9:30pm Tuesday at the Library Center Theatre in Park City.
• "Shayda": 9pm Wednesday at Redstone Cinemas in Park City.
• "Little Richard: I Am Everything": 6:15pm Thursday at the Grand Theatre.

You also can register for free "Best of Fest" screenings for narrative and documentary categories, but you won't know what you're seeing until award winners are announced Jan. 27.

• The winning narrative film has two free screenings on Jan. 28: 6:15pm at the Grand in Salt Lake, and 9pm at the Eccles Center Theater in Park City.
• The winning documentary plays Jan. 29: 3pm at the Eccles in Park City, and 3:15pm at the Grand.

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