This May the Sundance Institute Native American and Indigenous Program is venturing across Indian Country to bring the Native Forum to Native Lands. This journey coincides with Lab Fellow and Festival Alum Taika Waititi being highlighted as the Sundance Alumni Advisory Board Member of the month. So prepare to be blogged, tweeted, eblasted, and otherwise made aware of 20+ years of Native Cinema made possible by Sundance Institute.

There’s a long-standing joke of how far China is: it’s the other side of the world. When I was little, I would imagine digging through the center of the earth straight to China. The little girl I saw on the opposite side of the planet was part doppelganger, part alien.

Los Angeles, CA — Sundance Institute today announced the 14 projects selected for its annual June Directors and Screenwriters Labs, taking place at the Sundance Resort in Utah May 30 – June 30, 2011.  Under the leadership of Michelle Satter, Director of the Sundance Feature Film Program, and the artistic direction of Gyula Gazdag, the projects selected for this year’s program include emerging filmmakers and projects from the United States, Israel, Romania, Mexico, the Philippines and Algeria. Sundance Institute is marking the 30th anniversary of its first Directors Lab, led by Robert Redford and Satter in 1981.

WASHINGTON, D.C. – On May 12, the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities and the nonprofit Sundance Institute will showcase five U.

(Los Angeles, CA – April 26, 2011) – Sundance Institute, the world-renowned nonprofit arts organization, has announced it will host its first-ever Los Angeles benefit on Wednesday, June 8 from 7:00 – 10:00 PM at Franklin Canyon Ranch in Beverly Hills, CA. Celebrate Sundance Institute, a festive evening to celebrate the Institute founded by Robert Redford, will be hosted by the Sundance Institute Board of Trustees and Celebration Host Committee including Sundance Alumni Jennifer Aniston, Miguel Arteta, Don Cheadle, Lisa Cholodenko, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Jon Hamm, Brit Marling, David Hyde Pierce, Josh Radnor, Paul Rudd, Mark Ruffalo, Quentin Tarantino, Ondi Timoner, Mike White and Alfre Woodard among others. Full host committee listed below.

Lixin Fan participated in Film Forward China with his film Last Train Home and as an Advisor for the Documentary Workshops with CNEX in Beijing. His experience was unique, as he is a Chinese filmmaker and knows firsthand the challenges of making and exhibiting a film in China as well as the nuances of a Chinese audience. We had the great privilege of screening Lixin’s film to a Chinese student audience for the first time in Beijing and then on two more occasions in Wuhan and Xi’an.

This blog is via blackberry, written on the bus in an April snowstorm en route to Calgary for my flight home from an unforgettable week at the Sundance Institute Theatre Lab at The Banff Centre.This same week I celebrated my one-year anniversary at Sundance Institute, and I can think of no more fitting way to have spent it than in the mountains among an exceptionally diverse and exciting group of new artists and Advisors collaborating to develop new work. I had forgotten the breathtaking surprise of leaving Calgary for the climb up the mountain pass to Banff, as the Rockies emerge and then encircle the horizon as the trip continues.

When the Film Forward program set out for Nashville almost two weeks ago, I was elated to be part of the team. I had never spent much time in the South and wasn’t quite sure what to expect, but having worked with The Belcourt on multiple Sundance projects, I knew I would be in for a treat.
Outside the Belcourt Theater.

Xin Sheng is a junior student at the Communication University of China in Beijing. She is the student journalist of the American Embassy in China and has internship experience at many large media organizations including the Xinhua News Agency. She loves movies, especially documentaries, and hopes to work as a journalist in the future.

The entire Sundance Institute community mourns the loss of our colleague and friend Tim Hetherington, killed while covering the conflict in Misrata, Libya. He was an amazing talent and special human being who documented the world as never captured before.
Tim came to the Sundance Film Festival in 2010 with his co-director Sebastian Junger to premiere their film Restrepo, one of the most in-the-trenches war documentaries ever made.

April 13-16, 2011, saw Sundance Institute’s Documentary Film Program lead the first ever Institute workshop for independent Chinese documentary filmmakers. Co-hosted with CNEX, a five-year-old Beijing-based foundation dedicated to supporting artistic documentaries about contemporary Chinese life, the gathering brought together 11 projects from several regions in China to work with a group of international Advisors on story and structure. More than 120 Chinese filmmakers applied for this gathering, which was supported by a special grant for the Open Society Foundations and designed by Documentary Film Program Director Cara Mertes, Ben Tsiang and Ruby Chen of CNEX, and Chinese filmmaker Lixin Fan, to best address the needs of these filmmakers in a three-day forum.

The National Association of Theater Owners today published an open letter speaking out against the launch of premium VOD, which puts films out on VOD 60 days after release. Here is that letter:
We are the artists and business professionals who help make the movie business great. We produce and direct movies.

I did not know what to expect as the plane approached Beijing. I had last visited 16 years ago, so there was no way I could have anticipated the massive changes that have occurred. One of the most striking first images was seeing cars everywhere and smog to go with it.

New York, NY — Sundance Institute today announced four projects and a total of 13 artists selected for its second Sundance Institute Theatre Lab in East Africa, taking place July 17-31, 2011 on the island of Manda off the coast of Kenya. Under the supervision of Philip Himberg, Producing Artistic Director of the Sundance Institute Theatre Program, and Roberta Levitow, Artistic Associate, the Lab will provide artists with guidance in their creative development toward final production. Sundance Institute Theatre Lab on Manda is made possible through the generosity of Wayne McGregor CBE who has provided his Manda studio, Akili, as rehearsal and convening space for the artists.