Los Angeles, CA — Glenn Close will be honored at the Sundance Institute Celebration benefit on June 4, 2014 in New York for her distinguished career in entertainment and continuing advocacy of, and participation in, independent films. The Sundance Institute Vanguard Leadership Award will be presented to her by her longtime friend Jeremy Irons, with whom she has worked in film and on stage, in projects including The Real Thing, Reversal of Fortune and House of the Spirits. Also at the event filmmaker Damien Chazelle (Whiplash) will receive the Sundance Institute Vanguard Award, presented by The Lincoln Motor Company.

Park City, Utah — Sundance Institute marks the 20th anniversary of its Native American and Indigenous Program with a series of events around the country for Native artists and the public. The Institute also announced today the four artists selected for the 2014 NativeLab Fellowship, which is the centerpiece of the Institute’s year-round work with the Native community and is one of 10 residential labs the Institute will host for artists this summer, collectively representing the most promising new independent film and theatre projects.
True to founder Robert Redford’s original vision, the Institute maintains a strong commitment to supporting Native and indigenous filmmakers.

Los Angeles, CA — Sundance Institute today announced the 13 projects selected for its annual June Directors and Screenwriters Labs, taking place at the Sundance Resort in Utah from May 26 through June 26. The Labs are the centerpiece of the Institute’s year-round work with narrative feature filmmakers and are part of 10 residential labs the Institute will host for artists this summer, collectively representing the most promising new independent film and theatre projects.
Projects and participants selected for the 2014 Directors and Screenwriters Labs are from the United States, Brazil, Europe, China, India, Vietnam and Mexico.

Harrisburg
It is always rewarding to screen If You Build It with a young audience.  High school students seem to relate to the subjects in the film no matter how different their life may be from life in small town rural North Carolina.  The first screening we had on our trip to Pennsylvania was with the students of the Captial Area School for the Arts (CASA) in Harrisburg.

Los Angeles — On Monday April 28th, 2014 many of the internet’s most popular websites—including El Pais, Fandor, Huffington Post, Hulu, IndieWire, Reelhouse, RYOT News, Salon, The Guardian, Upworthy , VHX, Vimeo and VICE News —will unite in a common mission to create an international conversation and increase awareness of the global problems of poverty and hunger. Sundance Channel Global is the international media partner.   
Each site will independently showcase the Sundance Institute Short Film Challenge project in order to inspire discussion, shift perception and dismiss stereotypes of poverty and hunger.

Can the merits of a man become unhinged by one moral misstep? In Steven Knight’s Locke, protagonist Ivan Locke’s (Tom Hardy) fate teeters on that overloaded question. 
Director Knight’s latest effort is one of assured minimalism and stripped down artistry, featuring Tom Hardy in a role without the cinematic safety nets offered in his prior films. Hardy plays the titular Locke, a man of the highest moral esteem and a construction foreman with a wife and two children.

New York, NY — Sundance Institute today announced the nine projects selected to participate in its 2014 Theatre Lab, July 7-27 at the Sundance Resort in Utah. The Lab is the centerpiece of the Institute’s year-round work with the theatre community and is one of 10 residential labs the Institute will host for artists this summer, collectively representing the most promising new independent theatre and film projects.
The projects selected for the 2014 Sundance Institute Theatre Lab are (project descriptions below):
Caught by Christopher Chen, directed by TBA Ghost Supper (Spalding Gray, You’re Invited, Too) by Sheila Tousey, directed by Leigh Silverman The Good Book by Denis O’Hare & Lisa Peterson, directed by Lisa Peterson The Last of the Little Hours written & directed by Annie Baker Posterity written & directed by Doug Wright Skeleton Crew by Dominique Morisseau, directed by Kamilah Forbes So Go the Ghosts of Mexico, Part Two by Matthew Paul Olmos, directed by Lee Sunday Evans, composed/sound designed by Marios Aristopoulos T.

Park City, UT — Sundance Institute and the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities announced today that Film Forward: Advancing Cultural Dialogue will host free screenings of eight films with moderated discussions, panels and artist roundtables in Sarajevo, Zenica, Zavidovici, Banja Luka, Doboj and Brcko; Bosnia and Herzegovina. For a full schedule of events and venues in Bosnia and Herzegovina visit sundance.org/filmforward.

“Our ambition should be to rule ourselves, the true kingdom for each one of us; and true progress is to know more, and be more, and to do more.” —Oscar Wilde
The Skoll World Forum takes place in Oxford every year, a vibrant convening of civil society organizations run by committed and often renowned social entrepreneurs, all working to build sustainable human-centered business models and find solutions to “the world’s most pressing challenges.”  
This year, the conference was built around the theme of ambition.

At Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, I talked with some of the documentary students.  A student named Aimee, with a particular interest in narrative, asked about the origins of the “isolation” of protagonist Ahlo in The Rocket. The conversation broadened to displacement from home, from one’s own history and the isolation that comes form losing one’s sense of self.

I have clambered over live bombs in foreign lands but when it comes to showing my work, I am always mildly terrified, especially in places far from my home and the origin of the film.  But screening The Rocket at the Harrisburg Area Community College was full of all the emotion, curiosity and connection that makes filmmaking worthwhile.   Firstly, Will Guntrum (Department Chair – Communications, Humanities and the Arts) shook my hand with all that crushing masculinity that I thought, “Oh…he didn’t like something in the film and is about to tell me.