What Does Sundance’s Former Director Have Planned for This Small Bay Area Town?

When John Cooper finally returned to film festivals, he decided to start small.

Having retired to the small town of Sebastopol, where barely anyone knew his background, the former director of the Sundance Film Festival offered to volunteer at a local documentary festival. They assigned him to work the sandwich table.

“Not telling them who I was or anything,” Cooper says on a recent afternoon in Sebastopol, recalling his amused relief at being bossed around, for a change. “And I saw some movies, and it was fun, and sweet.”

Cooper’s anonymity didn’t last long. Once people realized who he was, he was quickly promoted from sandwich server to help plan the entire 2025 Sebastopol Documentary Film Festival. After a year-long hiatus so Cooper could reshape it, the festival returns this weekend, March 27–30.

It also marks a return for Cooper, now in his late 60s, who grew up partly in Sebastopol. (“Back when the train went down Main Street,” he reminisces.) He attended Santa Rosa Junior College, doing Summer Repertory Theatre there as an actor and dancer, before moving away in the 1970s. After leaving Sundance in 2020, retirement beckoned; so did Sonoma County.

With its population of 17,000, it’s tempting to think of Sebastopol as a coastal analogue to Sundance’s tiny host city, Park City. But beyond size comparisons, Sundance is hugely influential, and comes with pressure and expectation for its director. Cooper says one of his hardest tasks used to be announcing the films that Sundance had accepted — because he’d also have to send letters of rejection to thousands more.

At the same time, going from one of the world’s biggest film institutions to a relatively under-the-radar festival in Sonoma County has its challenges. For starters, Cooper wants to make the Sebastopol festival over the radar.

“I just said, ‘We’ve got to own this town.’ Everybody knows about the Apple Blossom Parade. How does everybody know that, but they don’t know anything about this festival?” Cooper says.

Many of the festival’s changes over the past year occurred behind the scenes, involving infrastructure and sponsors. But this year’s attendees will notice one of Cooper’s primary suggestions: show fewer films. As an audience member, Cooper reasons, it’s easy to get overwhelmed looking at a packed schedule, and “you have to do so much research just to see what you need to see.”

As a result, this year’s schedule is more streamlined, with 57 films in five different auditoriums. Moreover, it’s among the festival’s most promising in years.

Festival opener The White House Effect follows the fractured response to climate change by the George H.W. Bush administration. The perils of dictatorship are explored in Democracy Noir, about the tactics of Hungary’s authoritarian leader Viktor Orbán. (“It’s a cautionary tale of literally everything that we’re doing right now,” says Cooper.)

Of local interest are The Bird Rescue Center, about volunteers in Santa Rosa who nurse native birds back to health, and Bad Hostage, which examines Stockholm syndrome through the lens of three women: Patty Hearst, Kristin Enmark and the filmmakers’ own grandmother, who was held hostage in Sebastopol in 1973.

Music is well-represented, too, with The 9 Lives of Barbara Dane, about the folk singer and activist who once rallied against a proposed PG&E nuclear power plant on the Sonoma coast. The Opener is accompanied by a live performance by Philip Labes, the film’s subject who goes from street performer to the big stage, and Big Mama Thornton: I Can’t Be Anyone But Me, about the famous blues singer, closes the weekend.

Several panel discussions dot the weekend, too, including a conversation about the state of documentary filmmaking led by Cooper himself.

“It’s so bad right now — funding, distribution, it’s all crashed and burned,” Cooper says about the documentary landscape, “after a very hot moment when documentaries were it for a while. Hulu started picking them up, HBO was doing them already, Netflix was throwing big money at making documentaries. And now they’ve all pulled back and stopped.”

Cooper’s experience and acumen have been just what the festival needed, according to Serafina Palandech, the executive director at the Sebastopol Center for the Arts, which produces the festival.

“Cooper is so generous with his time and his knowledge, and he very much flies under the radar. You would never know that he has this illustrious career and background,” Palandech says.

Along with Sebastopol, Cooper has gotten involved in nearby Healdsburg, and an effort there to build a three-screen film center from the ground up. The True West Film Center, just off the Healdsburg Plaza, is set to open in the fall with Cooper as its artistic director.

And despite his anonymity being blown in Sonoma County, he still does grunt work in this small town, where everyone pitches in. Last month, he found himself driving around the outskirts of town, putting up roadside signs advertising the festival, next to hand-painted wooden announcements for folk concerts and the local spaghetti feed.

“I didn’t even know how to put a stake in the ground!” Cooper laughs, remarking that the posts he hammered into the dirt are mostly crooked.

“But the signs,” he adds, “are perfectly tied on.”

The Sebastopol Documentary Film Festival runs March 27–30 at the Sebastopol Center for the Arts and Rialto Cinemas in Sebastopol. Details here.