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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Andrew Ahn is a Los Angeles-based Korean-American filmmaker whose short film Dol (First Birthday) screened at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. Below he shares his experience at the Sundance Institute Feature Film Program’s Screenwriters Intensive held Friday, February 15.
By the end of the day, I knew I was ill.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Kirby Dick’s 2012 Sundance Film Festival Audience Award winner confronts one of the most disturbing and underpublicized injustices in America today: an epidemic of rape in the U.S. armed forces.

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.

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.

Filmmakers Stacy Peralta (Bones Brigade: An Autobiography) and Jerry Rothwell (Town of Runners) to Lead Discussions and Workshops
Los Angeles, CA — Sundance Institute and the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities announced today that FILM FORWARD: Advancing Cultural Dialogue will return for a second year to host eight free film screenings, workshops and artist roundtables in Imperial Valley, California, and Mexicali, Mexico, February 26 through March 1. For a full schedule of events visit www.sundance.