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.

There was a reason the film industry buzz humming through Park City seemed particularly insistent during this year’s Festival. Whether it’s because two of the critical stand-outs from last year’s Festival — Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone and Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids Are All Right — fared well at the box office, or because the economy appears to be slowly recovering, nearly twice the 14 films sold to distributors during the 2010 Festival have been acquired this year, 27 as of now. Nine of 16 U.

Victoria Gan is sophomore at Princeton University majoring in politics and is on the executive board of the campus film club Subtitles Film Society. She attended the 2011 Sundance Film Festival through the Film School Pass program and wrote about her Festival experience below.In a word, Sundance is immersion.

NEW YORK, NY — Sundance Institute today announced the artists and projects selected for its 2011 Theatre Lab to be held at The Banff Centre in Alberta, Canada, from March 27-April 17. The centerpiece of Sundance Institute’s Theatre Program, the Theatre Lab is a three-week developmental retreat designed to provide a private, creative environment for playwrights, directors, composers and librettists to devise and refine new work with the support of creative advisors, full casts and rehearsal space.  This year, Sundance has 31 fellows or generative artists, including playwrights, composers, directors and creative teams.

Park City, UT-The Jury, Audience, NEXT! and other special award-winners of the 2011 Sundance Film Festival were announced tonight at the Festival’s Awards Ceremony hosted by Tim Blake Nelson (star of Flypaper which premiered in this year’s Premieres section) in Park City, Utah. Highlights from the Awards Ceremony can be seen on the Festival website, www.sundance.

Hi everyone, and welcome to the live blog for the 2011 Sundance Film Festival Awards Ceremony. I’m Eric Hynes, writer for the Sundance website, and I’ll be your eyes and ears throughout tonight’s festivities. With traditional host the Park City Racquet Club closed for renovations, this year’s closing night Awards Ceremony moves a few miles north of Park City to the Basin Recreation Fieldhouse at Kimball Junction.

It’s an aspect of filmmaking that gets very little attention, and that very few people in the film industry know how to talk about. So rather than shed just a little light on the subject, Sundance Film Festival and BMI positively flooded it. Ten directors and eleven composers crowded onto the stage at Sundance House Presented by HP on Wednesday afternoon for “Music and Film: The Creative Process,” a roundtable discussion on the process of scoring music for film.

When asked about his favorite Festival experience thus far, veteran filmmaker David Zellner is quick to respond: “Sharing our feature Goliath with an enthusiastic audience. A close second was eating hamburgers on Main Street with Magic Johnson, Gaspar Noe, and Louie Anderson.”To call the Zellner Bros (David and Nathan) “seasoned vets” doesn’t fully summarize how crazy and uncommon their run has been.

Kelly Reichardt has a long relationship with Sundance, from her first feature River of Grass (1994) through the popular Old Joy (2006) and this year’s Meek’s Cutoff, the story of Western pioneers lost on the trail. Before River, Reichardt worked in the art department on many independent films, including seminal features by Hal Hartley and Todd Haynes’s Poison; she is still close friends with Haynes. “I worked on a lot of people’s first film,” Reichardt remembers.

On the center screen, a man sits behind the wheel of a car. Simultaneously, on a narrower screen to the left, the landscape blurs in retreat. And on another screen to the right is a close-up of the dashboard.

The big idea yesterday at the “Power of Story: The Big Idea” panel, presented by TimeWarner and Sundance Institute, was collaboration: how it works and why it’s necessary in filmmaking. But the panel also revealed that a smart filmmaker isn’t threatened by working with other creative people; it’s possible to hold fast to your vision while inviting in ideas from others. Boys Don’t Cry filmmaker Kimberly Peirce started things off with an emotional wallop by screening a rape scene from that now-iconic film.

Park City, UT – Sundance Institute today announced that Another Earth, directed and written by Mike Cahill and written by Brit Marling, is the recipient of the 2011 Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Now in its ninth year, the Prize carries a $20,000 cash award by the Alfred P.

If she were American rather than Danish, Susanne Bier would likely be one of the more recognizable filmmakers in the world. She specializes in emotionally gripping, character-based dramas that manage to be both accessible and aesthetically accomplished. Pigeonholed in the American arthouse, she’s really making stories for the masses.