The Latest

March Now Playing

Check out these Sundance Institute and Sundance Film Festival supported films hitting theatres, coming to DVD, or showing through #ArtistServices and the YouTube Screening Room this month.
Theatrical Releases
Friday, March 1
Stoker, directed by Park Chan-Wook

A Place at the Table (fka Finding North), directed by Kristi Jacobson and Lori Silverbush

The End of Love, directed by Mark Webber

A Fierce Green Fire, directed by Mark Kitchell

Friday, March 8
The Girl, directed by David Riker

Sunday, March 10
Escape Fire, 8 p.m.

Playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins to Receive Tennessee Williams Award

SALLY FIELD TO PRESENT AWARD AT SUNDANCE INSTITUTE THEATRE PROGRAM BENEFIT  APRIL 8, 2013
ADDITIONAL PROGRAMMING FOR THEATRE PROGRAM BENEFIT:
MAGGIE GYLLENHAAL, JUDY KUHN AND DAVID HYDE PIERCE TO PERFORM SELECTIONS FROM NEW MUSICAL “FUN HOME” BY LISA KRON AND JEANINE TESORI
CHERRY JONES TO PERFORM SCENES FROM NEW PLAY BY AWARD RECIPIENT JACOBS-JENKINS “APPROPRIATE”
New York, NY (2/27/2013) — Sundance Institute has announced that playwright and Sundance Institute Theatre Lab alum Branden Jacobs-Jenkins will receive the first-ever Tennessee Williams Award from the Institute’s Theatre Program, which supports the development of new work for the stage. Sundance Institute Emeritus Trustee Sally Field will present the honor and accompanying $10,000 grant at the Celebrate Sundance Institute benefit for its Theatre Program on April 8, 2013 at Stephan Weiss Studio in Greenwich Village.
The event will also include musical selections from the Sundance Institute-supported, much-anticipated new musical Fun Home by Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori, featuring performances by Maggie Gyllenhaal, Judy Kuhn, David Hyde Pierce and others.

Awards Weekend Wrap-Up: John Hawkes Earns Best Male Lead, Sugar Man Wins Best Documentary

Sundance Institute is honored to congratulate the films and filmmakers recognized at the Film Independent Spirit Awards and the Academy Awards this past weekend. The Spirit Awards assumed its traditional time and post, held the day before the Oscars in a spruced up tent on the beach in Santa Monica, CA, with host Andy Samberg helming the show. Here are the Sundance-supported winners:
28th Film Independent Spirit Awards 
Best Male Lead
John Hawkes, The Sessions
Best First Screenplay
Derek Connolly, Safety Not Guaranteed 
Best Cinematography
Ben Richardson, Beasts of the Southern Wild
John Cassavetes Award (Best Feature made for under $500,000)
Middle of Nowhere, directed by Ava DuVernay
Best Supporting Female
Helen Hunt, The Sessions 
Best Documentary
The Invisible War, directed by Kirby Dick
On Sunday, host Seth MacFarlane led the festivities at the 85th Academy Awards, where 13 Sundance-supported film and filmmakers were nominated for awards.

Short Order: ‘The Kinda Sutra’ and ‘The Raftman’s Razor’

Discover remarkable films all year long in The Screening Room, a new YouTube Channel curated by Sundance Institute. Two new films from Sundance history will be placed on our page every Friday, and we will be regularly linking to shorts from the Festival already on YouTube, so check back often for lots of surprises.This Friday, we bring you two very different, but wonderfully unique shorts.

Meet the Sundance-Supported Oscar Nominees: Beasts of the Southern Wild

Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild does much more than simply defy categorization. Rather, it creates its own world—or as Senior Programmer John Nein puts it, “Beasts exists entirely in its own universe.” And that universe is one just fantastical enough to summon our childlike wonder, but with a plausibility that captivates the intellect and invigorates the soul.

Meet the Sundance-Supported Oscar Nominees: Chasing Ice

Leading up to the 85th edition of the Academy Awards on Sunday, February 24, we’re profiling all 13 of this year’s Sundance-supported Oscar nominees. Click here for the full list of nominees.
In a Best Documentary category inhabited by five merited  (and, in the spirit of transparency, Sundance-supported) nominees, director Jeff Orlowski’s rousing debut documentary feature Chasing Ice is curiously missing.

Meet the Sundance-Supported Oscar Nominees: Searching for Sugar Man

Leading up to the 85th edition of the Academy Awards on Sunday, February 24, we’re profiling all 13 of this year’s Sundance-supported Oscar nominees. Click here for the full list of nominees.
Sometimes the most effective documentaries are those that appear to be misclassified.

Writing from an Unlocked Building With Nobody Around for Miles

Matthew Paul Olmos is currently in Wyoming attending the Sundance Institute Playwrights Retreat at Ucross Foundation, an 18-day writing colony where five playwrights and two theatre composers convene each year to workshop their written projects. Below is Olmos’s recent dispatch from Ucross.As a handful of playwrights and Wyoming locals make our way into the very close quarters inside the tiny, propeller’d plane, several people make comments at how tiny an aircraft this really is.

Meet the Sundance-Supported Oscar Nominees: Open Heart

Leading up to the 85th edition of the Academy Awards on Sunday, February 24, we’re profiling all 13 of this year’s Sundance-supported Oscar nominees. Click here for the full list of nominees.
In Africa, where juvenile disease runs rampant and affordable healthcare is all but nonexistent, the Salam Center in Sudan offers the continent’s only free-of-charge, state-of-the-art cardiac hospital.

Valentine’s Day Watch List: 12 of Our All-Time-Favorite On-Screen Romances

What better way to perpetuate the quixotic romantic desires that reside in our partners’ minds than by watching films that validate those delusions of love? This Valentine’s Day, we’re offering a short list of Sundance-supported love stories as a remedial to such lofty figments—unfortunately, the reality is not quite as attractive. From an idyllic summer love that concludes with an acerbic breakup in 500 Days of Summer to a lingering (albeit passionate) romance that traverses drug abuse and other pitfalls in Keep the Lights On, these six stories of (not always mutual) affection will jolt even the most deluded lover from their reverie.
SYLVIE’S LOVE
“The sumptuously photographed [Sylvie’s Love] feels like something Douglas Sirk—director of such classics as Magnificent Obsession and Imitation of Life—might have shot decades ago,” Sharon Knolle reported for Sundance.

Watch Sundance Short Films on the YouTube Screening Room

Starting in this month, the Sundance Film Festival will be programming short films on YouTube’s Screening Room channel, adding two new films every Friday not currently available on the website. Already a vast world for exciting short films, from intense fiction and documentary to risk-taking experimental works (and of course the wild world of cats), Sundance will be pulling Festival favorites already on YouTube into a single page alongside the new films. With millions of videos online, having a curated page provides a history of the Festival and a single go-to portal for great short films.

Meet the Sundance-Supported Oscar Nominees: 5 Broken Cameras

In 2005, Palestinian farmer Emad Burnat purchased a video camera to capture the birth of his youngest son, Gibreel. That camera, along with four others that would see destruction, created the foundation for a coursing documentary that bravely chronicles the denizens of Bi’lin—a small Palestinian farming town—as they form a peaceful resistance against the Israeli army’s attempt to encroach upon their land.
Progressing over five years, 5 Broken Cameras invokes the personal evolution of Burnat’s family in its sobering depiction of the persistent upheaval in Bi’lin, with Gibreel’s tainted youth set as the film’s emotional backdrop.

Meet the 2013 Sundance-Supported Oscar Nominees: Helen Hunt, The Sessions

Leading up to the 85th edition of the Academy Awards on Sunday, February 24, we’re profiling all 13 of this year’s Sundance-supported Oscar nominees. Click here for the full list of nominees.
Ben Lewin’s 2012 Sundance Film Festival selection The Sessions (fka The Surrogate) yielded a pair of glowing performances from John Hawkes and Helen Hunt, but—to the dismay of some—only one Oscar nomination.