Shawntai Genell Brown is a freelance blogger, playwright, storyteller and poet living in Detroit, Michigan. She is sharing her experience of Film Forward: Michigan on her blog: Shawntai’s Spiral Notebook.
Preparing to meet Latisha It started sweet.

Jasmila Zbanic, director of ‘Grbavica,’ writes about her experience traveling to the United States with heightened sensitivity after living through the war in Bosnia. She shares her first impressions of Puerto Rico and how they transformed as the trip progressed.
Every screening of Grbavica is different, and this one in Puerto Rico in the FILM FORWARD program is especially peculiar.

Alysa Nahmias is the co-director of Unfinished Spaces, a documentary about the visionary design of Cuba’s National Art Schools in the wake of Fidel Castro’s Revolution. She joined Film Forward in Puerto Rico this week to screen the film at the University of Puerto Rico Architecture School and participate in a post-screening discussion with audience members. I’ve been told several times since I landed here in San Juan that Puerto Ricans and Cubans consider their countries to be brothers (paises hermanos).

LOS ANGELES — Sundance Institute today announced that its president and founder, Robert Redford, will present journalist and film critic Roger Ebert with the Vanguard Leadership Award in recognition of his advocacy of independent cinema. The award presentation will take place at the third annual ‘Celebrate Sundance Institute’ benefit, chaired by Institute Trustee Lyn Lear and her husband, Norman, on June 5, 2013, in Los Angeles.Ebert is known for the Chicago Sun-Times film review column he has written since 1967.

With last week’s semi-bizarre, fully nostalgia-inducing news that Bravo is on board to adapt a television series based on the ‘80s classic Heathers, we figured another edition of Sundance Alumni Updates was in store. Winona Ryder starred in the original Heathers, which screened at the 1989 Sundance Film Festival and again at the ’89 Sundance Film Festival in Tokyo, a rapport that very few films can lay claim to. There’s more on the television adaptation here, a trailer below, and a collection of project updates involving recent Sundance alumni.

Before 2001, I had almost no idea what Sundance was, other than a prestigious film festival that happened in the mountains of Utah. A professor at the University of Oklahoma suggested I go listen to Bird Runningwater, a graduate of the university who had come back to speak on behalf of Sundance Institute and do a little outreach work in his home state. That was when I first learned about the incredible work Sundance Institute does to develop filmmakers.

Park City, UT — Sundance Institute will once again offer exclusive events and priority pass and ticket availability for the approximately 15,000 Utahns who attend the Sundance Film Festival each year. The 2013 Sundance Film Festival will be January 17 through 27, 2013.
Locals-only Festival pass and ticket package registration begins tomorrow (September 18) and will end October 10.

New York, NY — The Sundance Institute Theatre Program is now accepting submissions for the 2013 Sundance Institute Theatre Lab, which will return to the Sundance Resort in Sundance, Utah. Under the supervision of Philip Himberg, Artistic Director, and Producing Director Christopher Hibma, the three-week Lab (July 8-28, 2013) is the centerpiece of the Theatre Program’s year-round work and is designed to develop emerging and established artists and to create a place where their original work can be effectively mentored and challenged.
“The Theatre Lab is designed to surround artists with an environment that will support and amplify creative impulses and risk-taking,”.

Too often, the political landscape blurs into wide angle and you can’t see the individuals involved anymore. Films can bring humanity (and specificity) back to the political dialogue.The interactive site, Coal: A Love Story, puts short film to use in an artistic and educational way.

Actor-writer-director, Josh Radnor, whose wistful ode to love, neurosis, and early-onset midlife crisis, Liberal Arts screened (to standing ovations) in the Premieres section of the Sundance Film Festival, opens in theaters across the country on Friday, September 14. The film stars Radnor as an aimless (possibly depressed, definitely developmentally arrested) 30-something who returns to his alma mater to give a speech and falls for a vivacious, seriously age-inappropriate undergrad (Elizabeth Olsen). Calling from the O2 shortly after the film’s bow, Radnor offered the following glimpse inside his Sundance Film Festival: London experience.

Los Angeles, CA —Sundance Institute today announced the appointment of Paul Federbush to International Director, Feature Film Program (FFP). Federbush will oversee the international activities of the Institute’s Feature Film Program and is replacing Alesia Weston who left in May to join the Jerusalem Film Centre as Executive Director. Federbush will begin September 24, reporting to Michelle Satter, Founding Director, Feature Film Program.

I didn’t know what to expect when I was asked to represent filmmaker Rachel Perkins for the FILM FORWARD Oklahoma program. But my time here in Chickasaw Country was amazing. I was taken by the generosity of the Native American peoples and for this I am truly grateful.

When I was about ten years old I remember doing a project at school about Native Americans. I remember drawing a picture of the different tribes and being particularly proud of the illustration. Since then, I’ve always wanted to know more about Native American people.

It’s officially fall, and while the leaves don’t exactly change here in Los Angeles, it does mean the Feature Film Program is hard at work. We’re busy evaluating new submissions for our January Screenwriters Lab, reading new drafts of screenplays already supported in our Labs, and helping our filmmakers fine-tune their edits before submitting to our own Sundance Film Festival. All of which makes it even more exciting and rewarding to see so many of our FFP-supported films making it out into the world, hopefully to a theater near you.

Elgin James is the writer and director of ‘Little Birds,’ a 2009 Sundance Institute Screenwriters and Directors Lab project and an Official Selection of the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. Below, James details his personal transformation since participating at the Labs and chronicles the journey to completing his film, which opens in New York on August 29/ I’ve been out of prison for a few months now, and the first question people ask is “How scary was it?” Going to the Sundance Labs was scarier. Prison operated on a language I understood and had once been fluent in.