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“They told me it would be a down home, laid back event,” juror Barry Jenkins said as he elicited teenage girl-like screams from announcing some of the Short Film awards. The Sundance Film Festival Awards for Best Short Film were just announced at the yearly shorts award party at the, ahem, very striking Jupiter Bowl.
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Park City, UT –The 2011 Sundance Film Festival this evening announced the jury prizes in shorts filmmaking and gave honorable mentions based on outstanding achievement and merit. The awards were presented at a ceremony held in Park City, Utah. These award recipients will also be honored at the Festival’s Awards Ceremony hosted by Sundance Alum Tim Blake Nelson on Saturday, January 29.

From the way Hollywood deals with matters of faith, you’d think it was a closed case. Either belief is passively assumed, an unchallenged fact of existence—think of all those hackneyed, string-scored, skyward-glancing, safely vague happy endings—or it’s something to be feared and vilified. In other words: inspirational treacle or horror.

PARK CITY, UT –Sundance Institute today announced a new program to connect its artists with audiences by offering access to top-tier creative funding and marketing backed by the Institute’s promotional support.  These essential services will act as building blocks for future program components which aim to provide filmmakers access to a broad and open array of third-party digital distribution platforms. Adding to the nonprofit Institute’s acclaimed programs for Screenwriters, Directors, Film Composers, Producers and Theatre artists around the world, the new services were developed based on research and input from filmmakers, industry advisors, its Technology Committee and its Board of Directors, including President Robert Redford.

There’s never been a film quite like Bengali Detective. It has the jack-of-all-eclecticism of a big budget Bollywood musical—part detective story, part underdog yarn, part ensemble city tale—except for one unlikely detail: it’s all real. “It’s always been a dream of mine to make a documentary that could step into genre,” says Phil Cox, a 36-year-old Londoner whose second feature is a long way from the embedded combat reporting that established him as a filmmaker to watch (Cox’s reports from Darfur, broadcast on Channel 4, are credited with alerting the world to the genocide crisis there).

Whenever a movie star moves behind the camera to direct, expectations always seem to be both great and small. A high profile brings an outsized level of interest, but also a suspicion of vanity, that a pretty face is straining to be taken seriously. But then there are the actor’s actors, the kinds of professionals for whom the transition seems completely natural and inevitable.

We had our world premiere of Circumstance at the Library Theatre during the Sundance Film Festival. After being involved with the project since the 2007 Sundance Institute Composers Lab, there were so many mixed emotions going into the premiere! There were nerves, of course, as well as this feeling of relief. I have been so proud of this film and could not wait for people to see it, so to finally be there at the theater waiting for it to start was quite emotional.

At a festival that showcases films from around the world, that exposes audiences here and beyond to a wide spectrum of cultures, classes, and political realities, and that was founded by an actor turned influential advocate, it’s apparent that art can have an impact on society. But what kind of an impact? And what responsibility do artists have to the future of our country, the education of our children, and the greater good? These were among the questions that three renowned artists wrestled with at Power of Story: Making Art Matter, a panel discussion held at the Egyptian Theatre on Saturday. Moderated by Rachel Goslins, who serves as the Executive Director of the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities, the panel featured pioneering broadcaster and constitutional rights advocate Norman Lear, stage and screen director and former producer of New York’s Public Theater, George C.

Billy Luther studied filmmaking at Hampshire College, where he developed an affinity for documentary, but he says that much of his real education happened working in various organizations, including the National Museum of the American Indian and Third World Newsreel. Luther, who belongs to the Navajo, Hopi, and Laguna Pueblo tribes, has also won numerous grants and fellowships, including a Tribeca Film Institute Media Fellowship and Sundance Institute’s Native Initiative/Ford Foundation Fellowship. Luther screened his first feature film, Miss Navajo, at the Festival in 2007, and is back this year with a new documentary, GRAB, a portrait of contemporary life in the Laguna Pueblo tribe in New Mexico, which honors family members in an annual tradition that involves throwing food and gifts from the rooftops of their homes to the community that gathers below.

Another morning at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival means another fascinating conversation at the Cinema Cafe in the Filmmakers Lodge. This time it was a meeting of the minds between two writer/directors, Athina Rachel Tsangari (Attenberg) and Richard Ayoade (Submarine). Both films deal with young people finding their way into the adult world, but the other similarities between these two filmmakers are less obvious.

Motion pictures are significant cultural, historical, and aesthetic artifacts, yet 50% of all films made before 1950 no longer exist, says These Amazing Shadows co-director Paul Mariano. His film documents the National Film Registry’s work to preserve significant films for future generations and highlights the need for such preservation: film reflects and challenges our culture; it binds us together; and it will stand as a critical record to future generations of who we are and how we live. Mariano and his co-director Kurt Norton and Library of Congress film preservationist George Willeman answered questions following the Sundance Film Festival premiere in Park City.

PARK CITY, UT — Sundance Institute and Mahindra today announced the winners of the inaugural Sundance Institute|Mahindra Global Filmmaking Award, in recognition and support ofemerging independent filmmakers from around the world. The winning directors and projects are: Bogdan Mustata, WOLF from Romania; Ernesto Contreras, I DREAM IN ANOTHER LANGUAGE from Mexico; Seng Tat Liew, IN WHAT CITY DOES IT LIVE? from Malaysia; and Talya Lavie, ZERO MOTIVATION from Israel. The awards were presented at a private ceremony at the Sundance Film Festival, currently underway in Park City, Utah.

You might recognize Joshua Leonard. “I think of myself as a guy who was lucky enough to make a living as an actor for the last decade – but only as of the last few years have I felt I was any good at it,” Leonard admits. His many roles include two textbook examples of independent cinema – the early benchmark The Blair Witch Project (which screened at the 1999 Festival) and the recent breakout Humpday (which screened at the 2009 Festival).