Los Angeles, CA – The Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program and the Skoll Foundation today announced a special Celebrating “Stories of Change” panel to be held at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. The panel celebrates the fifth anniversary of the Stories of Change: Social Entrepreneurship in Focus Through Documentary initiative, dedicated to exploring film’s role in advancing knowledge about social entrepreneurship.
At this special event on Tuesday, January 24, 3:00 p.

Some of the brightest young inhabitants of Hollywood’s thriving comedy community were on hand for the world premiere of Celeste and Jesse Forever at the Eccles Theater on Friday night, from film’s top-flight cast to supporters Seth Rogen and Aziz Ansari.
Directed by Sundance veteran Lee Toland Krieger (The Vicious Kind), and written and starring Rashida Jones (The Social Network, NBC’s “Parks and Recreation”) and Will McCormack, the film chronicles the long, strange breakup of the titular married couple, played by Jones and Andy Samberg (“Saturday Night Live”).
Shifting between broad comedy and insightful drama, sweetness and bitterness, the film proves to be a great showcase for the two leads as well as for an ensemble that includes Emma Roberts, Elijah Wood, Chris Messina, Eric Christian Olsen, and Ari Graynor.

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.

Day Three of #Sundance on Instagram was all about the heaps of snow that fell on Park City. Between the cold stare of Eric Wareheim and the cold journey to a 6:00am screening, you may need to wear a sweater to look at these.

Don’t forget to use #sundance when posting to Instagram so your photo has a chance of making our daily roundup.

Yesterday afternoon, Ice-T, a pop-cultural jack-of-all trades, added one more notch to his creative tool belt: director. He premiered his film, Something From Nothing: The Art of Rap, in the Festival’s Documentary Premieres program. Co-directed by Andy Baybutt, the doc follows Ice-T as he literally takes to the streets to interview the pantheon of rap and hip-hop masters from over the last 30 years about the craft and skill of rapping; and how this art form redefined a generation.

Some three decades after his emergence as a pioneering hip hop artist, Ice-T is once again beefing up his resume as an entertainment extraordinaire. Having worked extensively in front of the camera on Law & Order, the reality series Ice Loves Coco, and a heap of feature films (including New Jack City and the upcoming Goats, which is playing in the Premieres section at this year’s Festival), Ice-T has now migrated behind the camera to the role he seems destined to play: director. His debut documentary, Something From Nothing: The Art of Rap, screens in the Documentary Premieres section of the 2012 Sundance Film Festival and offers an intimate glimpse into the creative process of making rap music.

In addition to directing some of the most celebrated films of the past 30 years, Stephen Frears has mastered the art of self-deprecation. It goes deeper than humbly and nimbly deflecting attention away from himself, which of course he does. He can seem gruff in interviews, but his approach is less confrontational than a shrugging, “you’re asking the wrong guy” forthrightness, which is consistent with Frears’s working method.

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.

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.