From KCRW in Santa Monica, this is The Treatment.

Welcome to the treatment, which you can also hear at KCRW.com.

I'm Elvis Mitchell.

My guest, Utah Native Trevor Groff, started as an intern at the Sundance Film Festival in 1991.

The first year, it was renamed the Sundance Film Festival and has been there ever since, mostly paid.

Effable and ambitious, he's known around the world as the champion of independent film that pushes boundaries.

He's now in his third season as Sundance

Director of Programming, and he was also artistic director of the Cinevacus Film Festival. He's a friend of

mine, and I'm thrilled to have him here. Trevor, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for

having me on, Elvis. Having really grown up at a film festival, I wonder how you, at what point you started to define your sensibility

as a programmer, because the kind of stuff you tend to pick is definitely more outside of

the mainstream.

And I hate to use the word edgier, let's say less conventional and narrative terms than most

film.

Yeah, I think, I mean, it's a good question.

The first time I went to the Sundance Film Festival, I was a senior in high school. And I was 1989. And, you know, I saw a few

film. It was always, it seemed like this place that was not for, you know, people not in the industry.

Even, even back then, it had a little bit of that reputation. And, you know, for a high school kid, I just sort of took a chance. I snuck up there and I saw a couple of films. I think I saw Heather's.

Was that the first thing you saw? Yeah. Heather was the very first film I saw at the Sundance Film Festival, and then I saw Sex Lies and Videotape.

That was the year that that launched and really kind of put Sundance on the map as a Discovery Festival.

I also saw a bunch of John Cassavetti's films, you know, which really opened up my world to a different kind of storytelling in film.

And I think that's where it began. And then a couple

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