Make Longmont your base camp for festival week

The 2027 Sundance Film Festival runs January 21 to 31, and every screening is in Boulder. Which raises the question nobody puts on a festival page: how do you get back after a drink?

A quick sixteen miles up the Diagonal Highway, Longmont has a fuller answer than its size suggests — and one piece of infrastructure that makes the difference.

The bus is the argument

RTD’s BOLT route runs between downtown Longmont and downtown Boulder until roughly 1:25am Monday to Friday, 1:14am on Saturday and 12:21am on Sunday. An evening screening plus a glass afterwards does not require a designated driver or a surge-priced ride.

What is already programmed

Küper Wine Bar, at 704 Main Street, is so far the only business in town that has published its own dated festival-week plans: daily tastings, a morning wine and wellness session, a sparkling-wine morning, an evening of film scores with the Longmont Symphony, and an artisan market on the final Saturday. They are on our happenings page with dates, and on Küper’s own Sundance page.

More will appear here, dated, as they publish.

Beer and spirits

Longmont’s downtown carries a dozen-plus breweries and several award-winning distilleries and tasting rooms among the restaurants — a denser concentration than most towns its size, and the reason the place had a reputation before Sundance was ever coming. Several of the wine bars and distilleries run small live-music rooms, which tend toward jazz and acoustic rather than volume.

The guide picks out the rooms worth your evening.

If you are not drinking

A week of screenings and tastings is a lot. We keep a zero-proof group in the guide, held to the same standard as the rest.

Longmont and Sundance already overlap

The Longmont Museum has screened festival films for a while: festival-curated shorts in June 2026, American Pachuco with director Luis Valdez and festival director Eugene Hernandez in February 2026, and Frida, the 2024 Sundance editing-award winner, with director Carla Gutierrez in conversation.

For context on cost: the Daily Camera’s August 2026 survey of Airbnb listings for opening night put Boulder homes at $183 to nearly $8,000 and Longmont around $77 to $113. Both will have moved.

Sources: RTD Route BOLT schedule; Küper Wine Bar’s published festival-week programme; Visit Longmont; Longmont Museum and Downtown Longmont listings; Boulder Daily Camera, August 2026. Checked as dated.