Last night, a small group of international cineastes gathered to celebrate the 2012 Sundance/NHK International Filmmaker Award. The intimate dinner helmed by Michelle Satter, director of Sundance Institute’s Feature Film Program, and Alesia Weston, the program’s associate director of international initiatives, was the perfect reunion for Sundance and longtime friends from NHK (the Japan Broadcasting Corporation), who have been teaming up for over 15 years to support filmmakers in the global arena. Asami Tomoko, Kazuko Taguchi, and Morihisa Matsudaira were present on behalf of NHK—along with last year’s award-winners, director-writer Benh Zeitlin and co-writer Lucy Alibar, whose film Beasts of the Southern Wild premiered last week in the Festival’s Dramatic Competition—to toast this year’s winner, Jens Assur for Close Far Away.

Park City, UT — Sundance Institute today announced the winner of the Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, as well as the recipients of the Alfred P. Sloan Commissioning Grant and Lab Fellowship, both presented through the Sundance Institute Feature Film Program.

Day Eight of #Sundance on Instagram takes you across the country for Sundance Film Festival U.S.A and back to Park City for Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s “hitRECord at the Movies”.

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.

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

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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.

Although he’s never been tested this way, David Gray could probably keep his audience hooked while singing the text of a John Deere tractor catalog. Gray performed on Thursday at the Sundance ASCAP Music Café on Lower Main Street to a packed house. The Café was more than packed, actually—there were people perched on steps, people pressing against the barriers set up to ensure the fire department wasn’t going to shut down the house.

For the last five years, Sundance Institute’s Documentary Film Program and the Skoll Foundation have partnered to showcase global innovative game-changers through film. This ongoing project, titled Stories of Change, has spanned the globe—both in search of stories to support, and also to participate in international convenings that shed light on these important stories, the most recent of which occurred at the Sundance Film Festival on Tuesday, where audiences got a sneak peek at a new crop of projects. These projects feature social entrepreneurs who offer creative solutions to some of the world’s most challenging issues, from poverty to health.

The buzz about Jamie Travis’s feature debut, For a Good Time, Call…, is that it’s a comedy starring raunchy women. That’s technically true: The movie is about two women who have good reason to strongly dislike one another a full 10 years after they first met, and who end up living together and starting a phone sex business—but to pass the film off as some imitative descendant of Bridesmaids would sell it short. For a Good Time, Call.

Every January, over 1,800 volunteers ascend to Park City, Utah, to work tirelessly for no pay. Last night, Sundance Institute offered its thanks by throwing them a party. It was just one event on Volunteer Appreciation Day, which also included a special film screening for volunteers and a vignette before every film that screened at the Festival thanking the volunteers for their service.

Marshall Lewy premiered more than his film, California Solo, at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. As he came out to welcome an enthusiastic crowd Wednesday night, he also revealed his one-month old daughter, Beatrice, who actually waved a tiny hand to the audience. It was a sign of good things to come.

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.