ESTES PARK, COLO.- The storied Sundance Directors Lab has helped develop the early films of Quentin Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson, Ryan Coogler and Chloé Zhao. But when this year’s cohort of filmmakers arrived for the intensive workshop, the setting could easily have felt ominous. For the first time, the lab was taking place not at the Sundance Mountain Resort in Utah but in Colorado, at the Stanley Hotel, known more as the inspiration for “The Shining” than for fostering little movies that could.

Contrary to the inn that gnawed at Jack Torrance’s sanity, the hotel in Estes Park is actually a thriving operation and as good a place as any to collaborate and create in peace. Yet the behemoth in the Rockies — with its seances, ghost sightings and, yes, a hedge maze — can’t help but seem like a symbol for an especially chilling moment for Sundance and the movie industry at large.

For more than four decades, the Sundance Film Festival has been a beacon to hungry filmmakers with stories that often proved there were moviegoers beyond those Hollywood courted. The festival remains the bright object that the Sundance Institute presents to the world. But it is the organization’s founder, Robert Redford, and the artist-support programs to which he is committed — for Indigenous filmmakers, for financiers, for producers and others — that have quietly, steadfastly nurtured the young talents so many associate with the festival’s breakout films.

Of all the programs, the flagship Directors Lab embodies the Sundance Institute’s long game. Since 1981, a carefully chosen cohort of filmmakers and an equally curated group of veteran advisers, along with small crews and actors, have regularly convened to shoot scenes from the up-and-coming artists’ screenplays.

In May, nine writer-directors got to work on two sequences they would rehearse, film and screen for all the participants. The fellows would revise their work at a follow-up screenwriters’ gathering the next month.

As the artists, their advisers and crews arrived at the Stanley Hotel, a disquieting thrum was beginning to grow louder. Post-pandemic and post-Hollywood strikes, the storytelling industry — studio and indie alike — appeared to be under duress. Or worse. The vertiginous box office heights of “Barbenheimer” had given way to the kind of returns that left the bottom-line-driven industry asking, what next?

For lovers of independent film, the shuttering of Participant Media in April also felt like a harbinger of uncertain times ahead. The company behind Oscar winners like “Spotlight,” “Green Book” and “An Inconvenient Truth” had helped shape the possibilities for socially conscious movies, many of which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.

And the Sundance Institute itself hasn’t been spared. For nearly five decades, the organization and its labs forged the demand for independent movies, then fed it. There were ups and some downs, but the brand seemed assured. Now the institute, entwined often with the health of the industry, is wrestling with economic challenges nudged by concerns about theatrical audiences, the contraction in jobs, the rise of artificial intelligence, as well as shifts in philanthropic giving. What a time to embark on a career in movies.

Whether the fellows at the Stanley Hotel become as well known as some of their predecessors, time will tell, but many of the advisers have solid indie bona fides, among them actors Ed Harris and André Holland, and directors Rick Famuyiwa, Miguel Arteta, Andrew Haigh, Karyn Kusama and Sian Heder.

Michelle Satter, the founding senior director of the institute, and Ilyse McKimmie, deputy director of feature film, helped the fellows identify the scenes they’d shoot: not their darlings, but sequences that vexed or stumped them, that felt essential yet elusive. In a sense, they were here not to succeed but to falter and in doing so perhaps become the filmmakers their projects require. The advisers were there to help them embrace that conundrum.

“We always say that failure is just a steppingstone to profound learning,” Satter said over the din of lunch. “I also tell them that your worst day of the lab is going to be your best day of the lab.”

That could sound hokey were her methods not borne out by the fellows’ track record. Ringing the dining room where all the participants ate were posters of lab-supported work: There was “Black Panther” director Ryan Coogler’s “Fruitvale Station”; Chris Eyre’s groundbreaking Indigenous dramedy, “Smoke Signals,” Benh Zeitlin’s Academy Award-nominated debut, “Beasts of the Southern Wild”; and Oscar-winning director Chloé Zhao’s first film, “Songs My Brothers Taught Me.” Consider it a ring of aspiration.

Satter has been conjuring up the lab’s creative spirit since the start. The artistic director, Gyula Gazdag, a Hungarian filmmaker, has been with the institute almost as long. And McKimmie is nearing her 25th anniversary.

“We are dealing with artists who are at the very beginning of their careers with a lot of insecurity, with a lot of pressure, and with a lot of sometimes false expectations,” said Gazdag, sitting in the hotel lobby shortly before the final screenings of the fellows’ scenes. “Our job is to recognize the very special and personal nature of the talent and figure out what is it that they need in order to be able to deliver the best possible work.”

One of the advisers, Heder, the director of the Oscar-winning “CODA,” saw “a tension in allowing someone to fail safely but support them so that they also have an opportunity to turn it around and succeed,” she said. Still, she acknowledged that the stakes were high: “Failing means you can never work again. Failing means you don’t get another movie.”

Then there are the long-term challenges that emerging filmmakers face in building a career, not just getting a first feature made. In the turbulence engulfing the film industry, McKimmie actually sees potential, citing different paths that have opened up, like television, gaming and podcasting. “It’s not necessarily easier access in those,” she acknowledged, “but there’s a wider canvas that they can pursue.”

Peruse the filmmakers’ resumes, and it’s clear that the lab hasn’t exactly taken a flier. This year’s rising talents have made shorts that screened at film festivals and often won awards; one fellow was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and another was undertaking her sophomore feature.

“If you feel like your script is in great shape, and you just are coming to Sundance because you think the Sundance stamp of approval is going to help you get your movie made, then, that’s not what we’re in it for,” Satter said. Instead she’s interested in applicants willing to say, “I’ve got this thing I’m really excited about it. I also need help with it.”

Diana Peralta's first scene from “No Love Lost” established the dynamic of three sisters who share a house. Her second scene introduced an estranged sibling into the mix. “So much of being sisters is unspoken and just how we respond to each other physically in a space. And that’s where the advisers were so helpful,” she said. “I didn’t realize until starting to workshop that there’s so much deeper happening in my writing.”

At lunch, Peralta said, she and Heder “went line by line to figure out where can this be turned for this character. ‘Make sure you get that glance, make sure you get that turn, that expression, that body language shift.’”

What’s shot at the lab, stays at the lab. The scenes are not for public consumption. “I’m not trying to impress the studio,” Peralta said. “I’m not trying to impress a producer. I’m really just experimenting with turning up the dials, turning down the dials, seeing how these women interact.”

Learning how characters interact was a revelation for several fellows. On “Rubber Hut,” about a laid-off flight attendant in Rhode Island who turns a parking-lot Fotomat into a condom-dispensing kiosk, Hanna Gray Organschi chose scenes that felt “very messy to me and that I think I know can work, but I didn’t yet know how.”

Keisha Rae Witherspoon was shooting a sci-fi-hued drama, “Arc,” and production that day had ended a bit early, an accomplishment. “Honestly, I think every piece of advice I got today was helpful. From my script supervisor, even my gaffer,” she said.

When one fellow, Sylvia Khoury, was in medical school, she practiced on people like her “I’m Heather” protagonist, a woman who acts in patient-doctor trainings. “The extreme unreality of the situation is very odd,” she said. “It was important to me that this character finds empowerment and respect through this encounter. So, it was about marrying the slightly surreal circumstances with a real, genuine, true discovery.”

Khoury is also a playwright; her drama “Selling Kabul” was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2022. “Coming from theater, never having written a screenplay and never having been on set, I think I also was curious to figure out what my own taste was. And I think I’m already starting to crack that, which seems wild to me.”

On the first day of filming, four directors blocked their scenes while the others were already shooting. That night they all came together for a screening of adviser Karyn Kusama’s “Girlfight.” A grand jury prize winner at the 2000 Sundance Film Festival, the movie introduced Michelle Rodriguez as a tough teenager who decides she wants to box.

The intervening years hadn’t laid a glove on Kusama’s knockout debut. During a post-screening conversation, she talked about trying to get back to an earlier innocence as a filmmaker, about “the value of being naive,” echoing the ways the lab tries to cultivate freshness before the industry takes over. But the advisers were also reminded of a less-burdened version of themselves. Being at the lab rejuvenates them, as well.

With his baseball cap pulled down and his measured, commanding voice, Ed Harris could be cast as the most intimidating camp counselor around. Yet, the actor has shown up to the lab as an adviser for more than three decades, offering his expertise and insights to the fellows.

Why does he keep returning? “First of all, I love coming here,” he said. “Second of all, it’s a very unique opportunity for these filmmakers — and for us guys who come as advisers — to work on storytelling in a totally safe environment.” And, he added, “you learn a lot. They learn a lot. We learn a lot.”

With its insta-camaraderie, lasting friendships and continuing collaborations, as well as the in-nature setting, the lab’s former fellows and advisers often speak about it with the fondness of campers and counselors reminiscing about the best sleepaway camp ever.

“Every time I come back from the lab, my wife says, ‘You make much better decisions and much more exciting decisions,’” said director Miguel Arteta (“Beatriz at Dinner”), a veteran of 17 installments. “‘I wish you’d go to the lab every year, please, because this is the man that I want to be married to.’”

Reinaldo Marcus Green had just arrived from Japan, where his film “Bob Marley: One Love” premiered. “The institute, the lab, changed my life,” he said of his time working on his first film, “Monsters and Men,” which won a special jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival in 2018. “It literally changed my life. Robert Elswit — I met him as an adviser at my lab. He’s become not only my friend but my closest collaborator. Pam Martin? Met her as an adviser at the lab.” Elswit shot Green’s Oscar-nominated biopic, “King Richard,” as well as “One Love.” Martin edited both and was nominated for her work on “King Richard.”

In an auditorium with a huge window looking out over a pond and an outcrop of granite boulders, the advisers gathered with Satter, McKimmie and Gazdag twice a day. Sitting in folding chairs arranged in a circle, the group brought to mind concerned therapists in a rehab facility conferring before rounds. They compared notes, talked in quiet voices about what they saw this filmmaker confronting, how that one interacted with a cinematographer or script supervisor. What kind of rapport were they establishing with actors? Were the sets energetic?

Always leaning into the circle was Satter, whose soft-spokenness invited its own leaning in. It’s something Andrew Haigh, director of last year’s touching ghost story “All of Us Strangers,” noted. “She sets the tone, and she completely sets it in such a gentle way that you don’t feel like it’s been set,” he said. “Thank you for saying that,” Rick Famuyiwa (“The Mandalorian”), a onetime lab beneficiary and recurring adviser, added sitting nearby. “I’ve been trying to figure it out.”

In late 2020, Redford sold the Sundance Mountain Resort property, which is now undergoing renovations. Those are not the only changes facing the institute, which brought on a new festival director, Eugene Hernandez, in 2022 and an acting CEO, Amanda Kelso, in March. The next month, the institute announced it had begun considering locations outside Park City for the festival starting in 2027. In July, Sundance announced six finalists, including Boulder, Colorado, and a Park City-Salt Lake City team-up.

For Sundance and other nonprofits, finding money continues to be a challenge, Satter said. “Fundraising is tough. It’s tough for everyone,” she added. “So, we have to look at opportunities but hold on to what is core and essential to Sundance. And these labs are core and essential to what we do.”

On the set of “Here for the Weekend,” the Bee Gees’ “Night Fever” played yet again on a cellphone, setting the mood for Jane Casey Modderno’s first scene of her dramatic comedy about three transgender friends living in Palm Springs, California. The song never got old even as the lead character, Cherry (Eve Lindley from “National Anthem”), repeatedly sauntered into a makeshift living room carrying a plate of grapes and trading barbs with her pals while the writer-director watched. “This is the most delightful thing,” Modernno said as the blocking for the next day’s shoot began to flow.

It was a small but bonding gesture from a young director to all the people making the scene come alive. “I mean, I love it.” She laughed. Her actors, crew and an adviser, who sneaked in to watch, laughed, too.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.