Day Seven of #Sundance on Instagram includes manic visions of a tin foiled topped Santa, an alien-like sun, and a mustached potato.

Don’t forget to use #sundance when posting to Instagram so your photo has a chance of making our daily roundup. And also follow us on Instagram at username sundanceinstitute.

On the surface, films couldn’t be more different than Mark Webber’s The End of Love and Antonio Campos’s Simon Killer. Whereas Webber’s film is a warm, handmade portrait of a young single father struggling to make ends meet (both emotionally and financially) as he raises his 3 year-old son (played by Webber’s own son, Isaac). Campos’s film, on the other hand, is a stylishly composed, bone-chilling look at a young man’s slow descent into criminality and violence.

It’s not technically true that Marta, the meek but intent girl at the heart of Alice Rohrwacher’s Corpo Celeste, is in every frame of the film, but she might as well be. Rohrwacher has so fully and subtly imagined the struggles and triumphs of Marta’s life, that this inquisitive, brave girl, who doesn’t always understand the forces arrayed against her, hovers in your mind long after the film ends.Played by Yle Vianello, Marta is just entering adolescence as her family moves from Switzerland back to Southern Italy.

The day started with the most inspiring morning at the Women in Film Brunch. There was a sobering speech by Catherine Hardwicke. It was amazing to hear how after Twilight (which made $69 million in its opening weekend) she still couldn’t get meetings to direct after that.

Love is so difficult to attain, and so elusive to keep, that it seems warranted to ask whether filmmakers who pile all manner of obstacles into their characters’ awkward search for it have a little touch of sadism. Take Dennis, the gentle, insecure, and colossal weightlifter at the heart of Mads Matthiesen’s Teddy Bear. Played by weightlifting non-actor Kim Kold, Dennis is 38 years old and a real misfit when it comes to romance – the film opens as he’s uncomfortably failing at the small talk of a first date.

Mahindra is a $14.4 billion multinational company from India that employs over one million people worldwide. Because of a partnership with Sundance Institute, it is now the happy agent of change for deserving filmmakers across the globe who want to see their artistic visions realized.

Though it’s never been easy to make independent films—not by a long shot—the current economic climate has only made it harder to finance, produce, and distribute the kinds of films that Sundance was created to showcase. This reality makes community-building events like Sunday’s annual Producers Luncheon all the more vital. As attendees chatted over omelettes and mimosas at The Shop—a beautiful old warehouse that normally serves as a yoga studio—Sundance Institute leaders handed out grants, introduced Fellows, and praised the work of producers—the unsung heroes of independent film.

Phoebe Joecks remembers the first day she volunteered for the Sundance Film Festival. Joecks is by profession a “freelance operations maven,” as she calls it. So when she volunteered at the 2008 Festival and was assigned to the Library Theatre, she already had a working background in festival logistics.

BMI, the music company that manages licensing fees for musicians, gathered no fewer than 17 Festival directors and film composers on stage at the BMI Roundtable Discussion: Music and Film, the Creative Process at the Sundance House on Wednesday. Aligning everyone’s schedules so they could participate and disclose some aspects of the director-composer relationship is difficult enough. But getting the many panelists to find the common ground necessary to converse among themselves, is an indication of the love of film the Festival engenders and the collegiality BMI encourages among its musicians.

Few filmmakers have the kind of range that James Marsh has, alternating between crowd-pleasing, Oscar-winning documentaries (Man on Wire) and pitch-black neo-noir policiers (Red Riding Trilogy: 1980). One year after his Oscar shortlisted doc Project Nim premiered on opening night of the Festival, Marsh was back in Park City on Tuesday night for the world premiere of his latest dramatic film, Shadow Dancer. A gripping, masterfully spare tale of betrayal set in sectarian, Troubles-era Belfast, Shadow Dancer is about a young IRA operative faced with an impossible choice—to accept incarceration and abandon her son, or betray her family, and her cause, by turning informant.

PARK CITY, UT – Sundance Institute and Mahindra today announced the winners of the 2012 Sundance Institute | Mahindra Global Filmmaking Award, in recognition and support of emerging independent filmmakers from around the world. The winning directors and projects are:Etienne Kallos, Vrystaat (Free State) from South Africa; Ariel Kleiman, Partisan from Australia; Dominga Sotomayor, Late To Die Young from Chile; and Shonali Bose, Margarita. With A Straw from India.

Recognizing what is dubbed the Festival’s most innovative and experimental program, the Sundance Film Festival Awards for Best Short Films were just announced in a location that most definitely subverts expectations: the Jupiter Bowl, an irreverent, fluorescently-lit, DJ pulsing mega-bowling-plex. The awards were hosted by actress Michaela Watkins who described coming back to Sundance with her second film as returning to summer camp “when your boobs come in.”
Out of the nearly 7,000 short films submitted to the Festival, 64 films were accepted into the Short Film program presented by Yahoo! The 7 favorites below were selected for awards by three jurors: Beavis and Butt-Head and King of the Hill creatorMike Judge; the director of the award-winning short film and subsequent feature film Pariah, Dee Rees; and Shane Smith, director of public programs at TIFF Bell Lightbox.

Earlier this week, a newly restored print of writer/director Julie Dash’s vibrant homage to her Gullah ancestors, Daughters of the Dust, screened at the Egyptian Theatre as part of the “From the Collection” program. The Collection is a partnership between Sundance Institute and the UCLA Film and Television Archive to provide an archive devoted to both preserving and offering access to indie films that might have otherwise disappeared.
Visually stunning and impressionistic in style, it’s no wonder Daughters of the Dust won the 1991 Festival’s Excellence in Cinematography Award.

Park City, UT — Sundance Institute this evening announced the jury prizes and honorable mentions in short filmmaking at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. The awards were presented at a ceremony in Park City, Utah. These award recipients will also be honored at the Festival’s Awards Ceremony, hosted by Parker Posey on Saturday, January 28 at 7:00 p.

Exactly one year ago, a group of activist friends armed with cameras walked out their front door to the epicenter of the Egyptian uprising. With the struggle to survive competing with the struggle to document the events, directors Omar Shargawi and Karim El Hakim capture a fierce moment of history in their film ½ Revolution, part of the Festival’s World Documentary Competition. Karim El Hakim, whose past film credits include Egypt We Are Watching You, understands the power of street protests in action.