The festival opened with five screenings, one from each category in competition: Sing Your Song, Pariah, The Guard, Project Nim, and Shorts Program I.

[4] Keri Putnam, Executive Director of the Sundance Institute said, "For an artist to make it to the Festival among 10,000 submissions is an incredible achievement in his or her own right.

Helen Fisher was initially announced as a member of the Alfred P. Sloan Prize Jury,[12] but was not included in the final list of jurors.

The cities and films included:[15] Bob Tourtellotte of Reuters wrote "Sundance 2011 has proven to be exceptionally strong, audiences and filmmakers seem to agree.

"[17] Kenneth Turan, film critic for the Los Angeles Times, wrote "though the festival has gotten ever bigger — and (thankfully) more efficient in moving its close to 50,000 attendees in and out of its far-flung theaters — it still retains the scrappy, antic spirit that has animated it from the start.

"[18] He also wrote that the foreign language film competition "is a strength at Sundance, and yet that field is given even less popular attention than the documentaries.

Dramatic Grand Jury Prize winners have been nominated for Best Picture for two years (referring to Precious and Winter's Bone).

"[19] Jada Yuan of New York magazine wrote "perhaps the biggest highlight of the festival is just how ripe it's been for acquisitions, with nearly 30 films getting picked up, the most at any Sundance ever.

"[20] On "why everyone is suddenly so bullish on independent film", Owen Gleiberman wrote that the "energy and optimism at Sundance this year wasn't just hype."

He said the factors he thought were driving a new evolving vision of the indie film world included: "The deals haven’t gotten cheaper — they've gotten smarter", a belief that last year's new festival director John Cooper and director of programming Trevor Groth "have re-energized the festival, heightening its quality and organizing the movies with a tempting new shape and vision", video on demand gives distributors a safety net and more confidence, and the audiences for Sundance movies are not going away, saying "The Oscars...have become a testament to the central place that Sundance movies now occupy.

"[18] Turan wrote "In documentaries, the situation was reversed: The quality was sky high, but hardly any were acquired for theatrical release" because audiences are "reluctant to embrace the genre.