At some point in the history of leisure there was a grave and universal lapse in judgment—the moment when summertime was declared moviegoing season. Now, it’s not lost on me that summer is an auspicious release time for both big studio and independent films. The kids are out of school and the theater offers respite from the heat—I get it.

Jeffrey Palmer is a Kiowa filmmaker and media artist and was a Fellow at the 2012 Sundance Institute Native Lab in Mescalero, New Mexico. Below he shares his experience this past May at the Lab.
The Sundance Institute Native Lab was one the most exciting and fulfilling experiences in my young professional career.

Bogota, Colombia — Sundance Institute will present FILM FORWARD: Advancing Cultural Dialogue in cities throughout the Republic of Colombia from July 9 to 14, 2012, in collaboration with the U.S. Embassy in Colombia, the Colombian/American Bi-national Center (BNC) and Proimágenes.

POV is in its 25th season of showcasing independent non-fiction films on PBS, which continues this Thursday with the Sundance Institute-supported documentary Granito: How to Nail a Dictator. Browse the schedule below of Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program-supported films airing throughout the summer and fall seasons, or click here for PBS’ complete POV schedule.
The new season airs on PBS Thursdays at 10 p.

Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady directed the 2012 Sundance Film Festival Official Selection “Detropia,” a documentary exploring the rise and fall of Detroit. They are using Kickstarter to raise funds for an independent release of their film. Click here to help bring “Detropia to theaters.

Take one cursory glance at the annals of the Sundance Film Festival and you’ll notice a persistent and invariable trend: first-time directors. The theme is as astounding as it is inspiring. In 2012 alone, 44 of the 112 feature-film selections were crafted by first-time directors, and a handful of others had made their debuts at Sundance in years past.

Park City, UT — Sundance Institute announced today that Paris is Burning, by director Jennie Livingston, has been added to The Sundance Collection at UCLA, 21 years after its premiere at the 1991 Sundance Film Festival. The negative and other key film elements from the film are now safely archived and will undergo critical preservation work.
Paris is Burning documents “The Children” – black and Latino, part of the New York under class and homosexual.

Most people who identify as LGBTQ+ can vividly recall the first time they identified with a character on screen. It lets us know that we’re not alone, and in a way, it validates us or even changes how we think about ourselves. And long before every Hollywood romantic comedy had a snarky gay best friend (I happen to love Rupert Everett’s character in My Best Friend’s Wedding, by the way), independent films were home to some of the first fully dimensional LGBTQ+ characters and stories.

Cheers to 15 years of the Sundance Institute’s Summer Film Series!
Wednesday night we launched our 2012 Summer Film Series with Joe Berlinger’s Under African Skies. It was a brisk summer evening at Red Butte Garden, but over 700 people attended. Prior to the screening we had a lively dance and drum performance by Best of Africa.

It’s easy to draw parallels between photographer Hank Willis Thomas’ foray into transmedia storytelling and the blossoming New Frontier programs at Sundance Institute. Thomas has expanded his craft to include sculpture, painting, video, and other mediums, seemingly in harmony with the introduction of New Frontier at the Sundance Film Festival and the subsequent New Frontier Story Lab. Appropriately, he is an alumni of last year’s inaugural New Frontier Story Lab and most recently premiered his transmedia megalogue project Question Bridge: Black Males at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival.

You’d be hard-pressed to find any socially minded documentarian whose highest goal isn’t to make a film that becomes a catalyst for direct and positive social change. But meaningful transformation, social or otherwise, is often so stubbornly resistant to even the most compelling storytelling that any shift is slow in coming and often undetectable until years after the relevant film has left theaters.But documentary filmmakers Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering seem to have beat those steep odds in spectacular fashion with this week’s news that the Pentagon is revamping its rules on reporting and prosecuting military sex crimes.

Los Angeles, CA — Sundance Institute today announced the selection of 24 Documentary Film Fellows representing nine film projects to participate in the 2012 Documentary Edit and Story Labs, June 22-30 and July 6-14 at Sundance Resort in Sundance, Utah. This year’s addition of a second Lab doubles the amount of documentary films and filmmakers the Institute is supporting in the post-production phase.
The Documentary Edit and Story Labs support the creative development of Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program and Fund (DFP) filmmaker teams in critical moments of the postproduction process.

Parenting is an inexact science. In fact, it’s probably not a science at all. There is no hard-and-fast guideline, no determinate order of operations to raising a happy and successful child, and the work generally outweighs the leisure.

Welcome to “Short Order,” a new bi-weekly feature, where we’ll serve up recomendations for the most interesting and innovative short films available on the web every other week. Many of our selections will be timed to a news or cultural event. But we are most interested in providing an entertaining and edifying cinematic diversion on alternate Friday afternoons, often delivered with a dose of context about the filmmaker and information about what’s going on in the short filmmaking community.