I recently Skyped with the creative team of the New Frontier Story Lab’s alumni project 18 Days In Egypt as part of our periodic alumni check-in sessions. Co-creator Jigar Mehta called in from the Bay Area, where he is a principal at Matter. and working to accelerate projects like 18 Days In Egypt that use story enabling technology to tell or co-create stories that change the world.

Back in 2009, when Destin Daniel Cretton was still an unheralded talent in independent film, he brought his 22-minute film, Short Term 12, to the Sundance Film Festival. At that time, about the most one could discover about the film was its terse logline: “A film about kids and the grown-ups who hit them.” It still serves as an ironically brief, but profound description of that film, which would go on to win the Jury Prize in Short Filmmaking.

Pamela Green and Jarik van Sluijs premiered their documentary “Bhutto” at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. Now they have teamed up again to tell the story of prolific filmmaker, Alice Guy-Blache. Join the team of supporters (including Executive Producer Robert Redford) by backing their Kickstarter campaign today.

Doug Aitken is reconstructing the idea of the traveling artist. The multimedia artist’s newest project, “Station to Station,” will travel by rail for three weeks in September from the Atlantic to the Pacific, making nine stops along the way in New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Minnesota, New Mexico, Arizona, and California. Each stop will feature a one-night only live event that will connect artists, musicians, and creative pioneers.

Los Angeles, CA — 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 for the first time ever in Washington State. Filmmakers traveling with the program are Julia Meltzer (The Light In Her Eyes) and Jerry Rothwell (Town Of Runners). For a full schedule of events in Washington, visit sundance.

On the final day of NEXT WEEKEND, as screenings expanded to some of our favorite cultural organizations across the city, Festival Director John Cooper hosted a panel at Sundance Cinemas to properly bookend the four days of festivities.
NEXT – Then, Now and Beyond featured four quintessential NEXT  filmmakers from various eras of cinema: Gregg Araki (Totally F***ed Up, Mysterious Skin), Allison Anders (Gas, Food Lodging; Mi Vida Loca), Hannah Fidell (A Teacher), and Shaka King (Newlyweeds). The group would be tasked with exploring the parallels and contrasts between being a NEXT filmmaker today, as opposed to the early days of Sundance.

Director Chadd Harbold’s brazen new comedy How To Be A Man made its world premiere on day three of NEXT WEEKEND, and actor/comedian Gavin McInnes stuck around after the screening to extend the unruly behavior. McInnes stars as Mark, an eccentric New Yorker who is so certain that the lump in his man boob is in fact breast cancer that he hires a young cameraman (excellently played by Liam Aiken) to document a series of instructional videos on life for his unborn son. Unfortunately for Bryan, Mark’s life tips range from how to fight a bully to lessons on picking up women, and the impressionable 20-something is coerced into playing an active role in the teachings.

In the brief lifespan of the Sundance Film Festival’s NEXT<=> section, the popular boundary-breaking category which spawned the NEXT WEEKEND film festival, the program has been strictly limited to feature-length films. Last night, on Day 2 of NEXT WEEKEND at Sundance Cinemas in Los Angeles, short films made the case that they inhabit the same blue collar, daring region of cinema that defines NEXT <=>.
In collaboration with YouTube, NEXT WEEKEND presented a shorts program that showcased a robust slate of films from 14 leading channels on the video-sharing website.

Last night Sundance Institute lifted the curtains on the first-ever NEXT WEEKEND film festival with an outdoor screening of the hilarious, idiosyncratic doc American Movie (1999) at Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles. (For those unfamiliar with the popular Cinespia summer screening series, yes, this means screening a film in a cemetery at night). Director Chris Smith and the film’s subject, quirky independent filmmaker Mark Borchardt, were in attendance along with a vibrant crowd for a double feature that saw a screening of Borchardt’s short horror film Coven, the making of which is documented in American Movie.

Beginning Tuesday, new Sundance titles will be available on iTunes via our #ArtistServices platform, which gives filmmakers unprecedented control and revenue splits. You can preorder them now, here www.itunes.

As part of our upcoming NEXT WEEKEND film festival in Los Angeles, we have programmed a fantastic shorts lineup consisting of 10 shorts that we played at the Sundance Film Festival in January, presented by YouTube. The NEXT section of the festival champions feature films with bold filmmaking style using innovative ways to tell stories. Short films fit perfectly within this adventurous realm of cinema Rather than be limited by a short run time, the filmmakers in the NEXT Shorts Program use the short format as motivation to craft something special with a personal vision.

Los Angeles, CA — Sundance Institute today announced the 15 independent films that will make their digital debut this fall through a variety of platforms and storefronts, via the Institute’s Artist Services program, which provides access to self-distribution for artists supported by the Institute. Titles will roll out between August 13 and September 17. For details visit sundance.

I remember taking a walking tour of Berlin many years ago, where the guide stopped every 10 meters to share a new and dramatic story about the surrounding space. The experience climaxed in the middle of an old city square, where she revealed layers of history: the Cold War, the Third Reich, World War I, Prussian aristocracy, even 9th Century Slavs. I visualized the atoms in my feet vibrating with the atoms of that well-trodden ground.