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.

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.

Day Two of #Sundance photos on Instagram includes a look at Main Street life, a shot of the shuttle hustle, and a photo op with an Edgerton.

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On Friday night, when Rodrigo Cortés premiered Red Lights to a packed Eccles Theatre, he offered up a piece of advice to the 1,200 audience members: “Don’t expect anything.” Duly noted, but audiences were hungry for the director’s follow-up to his much buzzed about Buried, which premiered at the 2010 Festival and boldly put Ryan Reynolds in a coffin for two suspenseful hours in a Hitchcockian, politically-charged thriller. His new film inhabits a similar tension-filled terrain; but Cortés is working on a much larger canvas here, having upgraded from Buried’s $3 million budget, claustrophobic one set, one actor storyline to Red Light’s $15-17 million budget, with an intricately twisted plot.

Director Tusi Tamasese will trade in South Pacific sand for Sundance snow when he makes his first trip to the U.S. to screen his film The Orator.

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.

Six months after Hurricane Katrina, director Benh Zeitlin was crashing on a friend’s floor in New Orleans. The Queens native had been living abroad scouting locations for his seafaring short film, Glory at Sea. “I didn’t want to be an expat; I wanted to tell stories about America,” says Zeitlin of his turn to the Big Easy.

Thursday’s opening day press conference opened with nothing less than a reference to an American “government in paralysis” – Sundance Institute President and Founder Robert Redford’s allusion to the frustrating inability of the country’s political leaders to compromise with one another. From that sobering reality, however, Redford, Keri Putnam, the Institute’s Executive Director, and John Cooper, the Director of the Sundance Film Festival, pointed out the ways in which artists contribute to a vibrant culture, and what the Institute is doing to be at the forefront of that culture. “The happy thing we’re pretty proud of is that here, for this week, we’re going to see work from artists, who even though their work might be reflective of these hard times, there’s not paralysis here,” Redford said.

Attendees of the Sundance Film Festival know Park City’s Kimball Art Center as the home of the Sundance House Presented by HP—a space dedicated to the discovery of transformative new technologies. But this year, the Kimball will offer visitors a glimpse inside its own cutting edge plans to grow and evolve by displaying five final proposals from world-renowned architects for its upcoming Transformation Project. Visitors to the Sundance House are welcome to vote on their favorites in an online poll, and the jury will announce the winning design in early February.