I have always wanted to go to Turkey, and Istanbul in particular. I have read various Orhun Pamuk books that describe both the melancholic beauty and deep history of the city. I have heard that Istanbul is the “most romantic city in the world,” that it is the bridge between east and west, that it straddles old and new, and that it manages to balance the secular and religious with ease, style and grace.

All of us at the Sundance Institute are deeply saddened by the loss of our great friend and filmmaker Gary Winick.
Over many years, Gary was the first to sign up as a Creative Advisor for our Directors Lab. His beautiful spirit and passion for the creative process made the Lab that much richer and a lot more fun.

With the Independent Spirit Awards on Saturday and the Academy Awards on Sunday, a number of Sundance alumni were honored last weekend.
The 2011 Independent Spirit Awards returned to their traditional location on the beach in Santa Monica for Saturday’s ceremony, hosted by Joel McHale. No fewer than six films from the 2010 Sundance Film Festival received a total of seven Spirit Awards.

ISTANBUL, TURKEY — Film Forward: Advancing Cultural Dialogue, a Sundance Institute initiative created in partnership with U.S. federal cultural agencies, will be presented in The Republic of Turkey in conjunction with the !F Istanbul International Independent Film Festival and the Embassy of the United States, Ankara, Turkey, it was announced today by Keri Putnam, Executive Director of Sundance Institute.

İSTANBUL, TÜRKİYE — Sundance Enstitüsü Yönetici Direktörü Keri Putnam’ın bugün yaptığı açıklamaya göre, Sundance Enstitüsü ve Amerikan’ın çeşitli federal kültürel kurumlarının ortaklığıyla başlatılan “Film Forward: Kültürel Diyaloğun Geliştirilmesi” girişimi, !F İstanbul Uluslararası Bağımsız Film Festivali ve ABD’nin Ankara Büyükelçiliği ile yapılan işbirliği neticesinde Türkiye’ye geliyor.
Sundance Enstitüsü, ABD Başkanının Sanat ve Beşeri Bilimler Komitesi (PCAH), Amerikan federal kültürel kurumları, Ulusal Sanat Fonu (NEA) , Ulusal Beşeri Bilimler Fonu (NEH) ve Müze ve Kütüphane Hizmetleri Enstitüsü’nün (IMLS) ortak bir girişimi olan Film Forward programının amacı, filmleri bir araç olarak kullanarak kültürel diyaloğa yeni seyirciler kazandırmaktır.
Film Forward dünya turu kapsamında gidilecek 14 yer arasında Türkiye de bulunuyor.

Walking around Park City every January, I can’t shake how strange and random it all seems. Everywhere I go I see a friend who I may or may not have seen for a year, but who I will likely see three times a day for the next week or so. Everyone I meet – and at a film festival, meeting lots of great people is unavoidable – undoubtedly shares multiple friends and acquaintances.

Liza Johnson attended the 2008 Screenwriters and Directors Labs with Return, her first narrative feature film. With principal photography wrapping in upstate New York last November, she has just completed the 10th week of editing on Return. The film features Linda Cardellini as a soldier coming home from a tour of duty, and also stars Michael Shannon and John Slattery.

The 2011 Festival may have come and gone, but you’ve still yet to meet all eight of the Sundance Film Festival shorts programmers. Todd Luoto has worked as the Los Angeles in-house programmer since 2006. If you’ve called asking a random shorts question, you probably talked to him.

We are facing a crisis.In 1981, with a grant from the NEA, Robert Redford founded the nonprofit Sundance Institute. In the past 30 years our artist development programs and Sundance Film Festival have supported world-renowned, ground-breaking work and introduced a global audience to the best in new independent film and theater.

The 2011 Festival may have come and gone, but you’ve still yet to meet all eight of the Sundance Film Festival shorts programmers. Lisa Ogdie is our true renaissance woman on the Sundance Film Festival team. In addition to assisting Festival Director John Cooper and managing public programming, Lisa still finds time every fall to fulfill a unique, but invaluable, role on the shorts programming team.

In the week before the masses arrived in Park City for this year’s Sundance Film Festival, a more intimate gathering was held in the snowy mountains that are home to the Sundance Resort: our annual January Screenwriters Lab. Fifteen fellows came together with sixteen creative advisors to dig into their feature screenplays and explore issues of craft, storytelling, and communicating personal vision. In the process, a deep sense of creative revitalization and community was shared by all.

Two of the international films in the Festival this year, Mad Bastards, from Australia and directed by Brendan Fletcher, and Knuckle, from Ireland and directed by Ian Palmer, deal with family violence. Mad Bastards follows the angry adult TJ, his estranged 13-year-old son, the possible legacy of domestic violence, and the transformation from a young boy to a man. Although it is a fiction film, it is based on real people, places, and events and uses some of the real people as actors.

UCROSS, WY – The 2011 Sundance Institute Playwrights’ Retreat at Ucross began today and will run through February 25 in Ucross, Wyoming. This unique residency program offers playwrights and theatre composers — both emerging and established artists — peer mentorship, professional growth, and a chance to explore unpressured creativity at an idyllic 20,000 acre cattle ranch in northeastern Wyoming. The Playwrights Retreat, supported by the Sundance Institute Theatre Program, is made possible through the generosity of Ucross Foundation.