In 1521, the conquistador Ponce de León built his colonial residence in San Juan, naming it Casa Blanca. Today, almost 500 years later, the house is a museum where I had the privilege of screening my film Valley of Saints. In Puerto Rico, it’s hard not to see that the dialogue we’re having isn’t just between people, but between the past and the present.

Filmmakers Jeff Orlowski, Chasing Ice Patricia Riggen, Under The Same Moon (La Misma Luna)
Los Angeles, CA — Sundance Institute and the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities announced today that FILM FORWARD: Advancing Cultural Dialogue concluded its third year hosting free screenings of seven films, panel discussions and artist roundtables in China.  Filmmakers Jeff Orlowski and Patricia Riggen traveled with the program and participated in film events at Beijing Film Academy, Inside Out Museum, Chinese Academy of Drama, Chinese University of Communications, Anhui University, Kafka Bookstore, and CNEX Foundation. For filmmaker blogs and a recap of events visit www.

In showing Beasts of the Southern Wild across San Juan this week, a really interesting conversation emerged.  The conversation was not so much a discussion about the movie but rather a conversation around an idea that the film explores which is a very real question for Puerto Ricans.  The question is: if a natural disaster was coming towards your community and you had the option of staying or leaving, what would you do?
The protagonists of Beasts deal with this with question when a storm comes towards their home.

WHAT:

Sundance Institute invites New York area filmmakers to attend a day-long filmmaking workshop.
ShortsLab: New York offers filmmakers the opportunity to participate in an intensive one-day seminar of screenings and discussions with firsthand insight and access into the world of story development, production and exhibition of narrative short-form films.
Sundance Institute and the Sundance Film Festival have long supported the creation and exhibition of short films.

It may be true that the most memorable fathers in film are those who brazenly renounce their parental duties—or fail in their attempts at patriarchy altogether. Think Jeff Daniels as Bernard Berkman in The Squid and the Whale, a pompous intellectual and the out-of-touch father of a dysfunctional family traversing the treacherous landscape of divorce. Even still, cinema has also provided more than a few samples of admirable parenting, some of which we’ve selected for our Sundance-supported Father’s Day film list below.

This week, we offer two very different takes on boys and their dads to remind you to call home on Father’s Day this Sunday. From the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, we have Long Distance Information. Consisting of a single straightforward scene of only a quick phone conversation between two static figures, this tightly packed short stars British stalwart and reliably grizzly-voiced Peter Mullan as a perfectly cast father figure receiving a call from a son.

On June 8, Sundance Film Festival Director John Cooper accepted the Human Rights Campaign Equality Award on behalf of Sundance Institute. Below are his remarks from the awards ceremony held in Salt Lake City, Utah. 
“Thank you.

LOS ANGELES — Sundance Institute and TED, the nonprofit known for “ideas worth spreading,” announced that filmmaker Jerry Rothwell has been selected to receive the first-ever Sundance Institute | TED Prize Filmmaker Award — the centerpiece of which is a grant of $125,000 to make a documentary film about the 2013 TED Prize winner Sugata Mitra and his wish, A School in the Cloud. The prize was awarded during the TEDGlobal 2013 Conference, taking place June 10 to 14, 2013, in Edinburgh, Scotland.Selected from a highly competitive pool of outstanding global submissions, the UK-based Rothwell and his producers — Al Morrow and Dan Demissie — proposed a film, Like Whirlwinds, that will look at the development of Mitra’s latest and most ambitious project, ”A School in the Cloud.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Sundance Institute and Americans for the Arts, the nation’s leading nonprofit organization for advancing the arts and arts education, released a report based on findings from the annual National Arts Policy Roundtable (NAPR) led by Robert Redford, Sundance Institute founder and president, and Robert L.

A world without borders.Ryan Roberts, the Cultural Affairs Officer at the American Institute in Taiwan explains to me early on in our first orientation meeting, that Taiwan has a heavy influx of immigrants from the Philippines. They’re mainly domestics and factory workers, but there’s also a number of imported “domestic partners.

On June 6 in Los Angeles, the Sundance community came out in force to celebrate two of its own at the third annual ‘Celebrate Sundance Institute’ benefit. Ryan Coogler, the first-time writer/director of the Sundance and Cannes Award-winning film Fruitvale Station, and Roger Ebert, the legendary advocate for authentic storytelling in film who passed away in April of this year, were honored with this year’s Vanguard Awards. Additionally, Sundance Institute Executive Director Keri Putnam announced the creation of the Roger Ebert Scholarship for Film Criticism, in memory of the revered journalist.

For the past two years, Film Forward has travelled to China as one of four international locations. This year unique in that the close of our time in China, we also travelled to Taiwan. Taiwan and China are currently facing significant growth and development, but they are handling these challenges in very different ways.

Los Angeles, CA — Last night, Wednesday, June 5, the third annual ‘Celebrate Sundance Institute’ benefit in Los Angeles honored the life and work of beloved journalist and film critic Roger Ebert with the Vanguard Leadership Award in Memoriam. The event also honored filmmaker Ryan Coogler – whose debut feature film, Fruitvale Station, was selected for Sundance Institute’s Screenwriters Lab and went on to win both the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival – with the Vanguard Award, Presented by Tiffany & Co.
At the event, Sundance Institute also announced the establishment of the Roger Ebert Scholarship for Film Criticism, in memory of Roger Ebert.

Los Angeles, CA — Sundance Institute today announced the four independent films that will make their digital debut on June 18 through a variety of platforms and storefronts, via the Institute’s Artist Services program. In addition, three previously announced titles will expand to additional portals. For details visit sundance.

This week we turn the spotlight onto the diverse and talented short work of Talmage Cooley. His two short film played back-to-back editions of the Sundance Film Festival in 2004 and 2005. Though both are quality works, they two could not be more dissimilar.