While the Sundance Film Festival officially kicked off Thursday evening in Park City, nearby Salt Lake City hosted its own opening weekend celebration on Friday in the form of the Salt Lake City Gala and Screening at the Rose Wagner Theater. The event had a decidedly local flavor (with locals sporting dinner jackets instead of snow parkas) as sponsors, dignitaries, and filmgoers attended screenings and mingled at VIP receptions.
Zions Bank CEO Scott Anderson and Utah Governor Gary Herbert kicked things off by thanking Sundance Institute and praising the community for being an excellent host to the Festival.

The word “arbitrage” is often used in the cutthroat world of high finance, defining the practice of buying low and selling high (and hopefully getting filthy rich in the process). It’s the founding principle of capitalism, and the force many believe to be behind the greed attributed to America’s current financial crisis.In Nicholas Jarecki’s directorial debut, Arbitrage, the definition of the word is more nebulous.

Sometime around 10:30 am on Day Three of the Sundance Film Festival, a pack of road-weary filmmakers piled out of a snow-shrouded bus and into a halcyon vision of rustic repose otherwise known as the Directors Brunch. As they were ushered into a large open-air converted barn at the Sundance Resort where tea and sympathy (and a mid-morning feast) awaited them, the group seemed to exhale a collective sigh of relief — as if this were the creative homecoming they’d been hoping for much of their professional lives. Or, in the immortal words of David Byrne (and the title of one of this year’s Premiere selections): This must be the place.

Gingger Shankar is a Sundance Institute Alumni Advisory Board Member and the director of the 2012 New Frontier installation Himalaya Song.
On Day 3, Mridu, Dave, and I (Himalaya Song) were able to start really settling in to the groove of things. We had our first major rehearsal on Thursday and now we’re two days away from our first performance.

If you think the American justice system is chugging along just fine, West of Memphis will sober you up from that crazy trip in about two minutes flat. Amy Berg’s encyclopedic account of the bungled case of the West Memphis Three is actually two and a half hours long, but because the case first went to trial in 1994 in West Memphis, Arkansas, and its legal twists haven’t slowed during the subsequent 18 years, Berg has quite a bit of ground to cover. In 1993, three poor West Memphis teenagers were accused of brutally fracturing the skulls of three boys and sexually mutilating them to satisfy the demands of a satanic cult led by one of the three teens, Damien Echols.

When Sundance introduced the first New Frontier program at the Festival in 2007, in a cramped basement space on Main Street in Park City, it felt like a heady first glimpse into a future in which cinema was migrating beyond the theatre—even beyond movies. Just six years later, we’re living in that future. This year’s survey of multimedia, multi-platform projects, experiments, performances, and installations still leans forward and anticipates new developments in cinematic culture, but it’s also about how we live now.

This is my fifth time to Park City for the Sundance Film Festival. Every year brings the familiar excitement of digging up winter clothes, trying to get tickets to the movies you want to see (which are always sold out!), and emailing friends to see who will be up there and if there’s an extra room (or floor) available. This year is especially exciting for me.

Park City, UT — Sundance Institute today announced that Eddie Izzard will perform at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. The stand-up event takes place Saturday, January 21, 10:00 p.m.

Day Two of #Sundance photos on Instagram includes a look at Main Street life, a shot of the shuttle hustle, and a photo op with an Edgerton.

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On Friday night, when Rodrigo Cortés premiered Red Lights to a packed Eccles Theatre, he offered up a piece of advice to the 1,200 audience members: “Don’t expect anything.” Duly noted, but audiences were hungry for the director’s follow-up to his much buzzed about Buried, which premiered at the 2010 Festival and boldly put Ryan Reynolds in a coffin for two suspenseful hours in a Hitchcockian, politically-charged thriller. His new film inhabits a similar tension-filled terrain; but Cortés is working on a much larger canvas here, having upgraded from Buried’s $3 million budget, claustrophobic one set, one actor storyline to Red Light’s $15-17 million budget, with an intricately twisted plot.

Director Tusi Tamasese will trade in South Pacific sand for Sundance snow when he makes his first trip to the U.S. to screen his film The Orator.

If cultural historians were to happen upon a time capsule containing the 2012 Sundance Film Festival’s Day One lineup of films, they’d have a comprehensive overview of the breadth and depth of high quality independent filmmaking programmed into this year’s Festival. What’s more, this diverse array of works by established and up-and-coming talents would offer a microcosmic snapshot of the state of our society at large – its passions and preoccupations as well as cultural and creative sensibilities.Because we don’t yet live in a space-age world where it’s possible for one human to see two movies at the same time—hey, few could have ever predicted we’d have talking maps or the toothpaste pump, so don’t rule it out—we dispatched our crack team of writers to attend each Day One screening.

Park City, UT – Sundance Institute today announced that Ice-T and hip hop icons Chuck D (Public Enemy) and Grandmaster Caz will perform at ‘A Celebration of Music in Film’ on January 21 at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. ‘A Celebration of Music in Film,’ one of the most anticipated music events at the annual Festival, this year celebrates SOMETHING FROM NOTHING: THE ART OF RAP, by director Ice-T, co-director Andy Baybutt and producer Paul Toogood.
The event takes place Saturday, January 21, 8:30 p.

Six months after Hurricane Katrina, director Benh Zeitlin was crashing on a friend’s floor in New Orleans. The Queens native had been living abroad scouting locations for his seafaring short film, Glory at Sea. “I didn’t want to be an expat; I wanted to tell stories about America,” says Zeitlin of his turn to the Big Easy.