Twelve is about a coterie of super-rich teens in Manhattan whose ambition is blunted by their vanity and overweening social climbing. They go around the city saying things like, “My dad told me if I don’t get into Harvard, I have to go to Dartmouth” and “Dad’s so pissed I totaled the Porsche.” Among this crew of largely non-likable little twerps are Molly (Emma Roberts), Chris (Rory Culkin), and White Mike (Chace Crawford); White Mike is the protagonist, a once-promising kid who now supplies his friends and acquaintances with the drugs they can easily afford, except for the vicious cocktail of drugs named twelve (so dangerous he refuses to sell it).

Park City, UT-The Jury, Audience, NEXT, and other special award-winners of the 2010 Sundance Film Festival were announced tonight at the Festival’s Awards Ceremony hosted by David Hyde Pierce (star of The Perfect Host which premiered in this year’s Park City at Midnight section) in Park City, Utah. Highlights from the Awards Ceremony can be seen on the Festival website, www.sundance.

Thirty-four films were awarded prizes in 29 categories, honoring both veteran and first-time filmmakers from the U.S. to Spain, Cambodia, and beyond.

As the madness winds down at tonight’s awards ceremony, the 2010 Sundance Film Festival will have been chewed over in a thousand conversations. Yet each topic has an expiration date. Whether it be DIY’s direction, breakout filmmakers, or undiscovered gems, Sundance changes the chatter every year.

The group of scientists and filmmakers speaking at the Discovery Panel at Filmmaker Lodge seemed to want to discuss nothing but dinosaurs. Metaphorically speaking, and otherwise.Moderator Joe Palca of NPR led the discussion with Harvard physics professor Peter Galison, paleontologist Paul Sereno, filmmaker Braden King, neuroscientist Darcy Kelley, and filmmaker Diane Bell, whose film Obselidia was the winner of the Alfred P.

It’s hard to deny that higher education gets a bad wrap sometimes. Lackluster student events, hollow campus causes, (occasionally) crappy college radio, even school food – they all go hand-in-hand with some people’s perception of student films. Beyond the food part—because, c’mon, that sneeze guard hardly does the trick—no one here on the Festival staff would agree with the assumption that collegiate-made film is in any way inferior to professional filmmakers’ output.

Gaspar Noe. Louis C.K.

If you tell one tiny story well, it becomes universal.—Amir Bar-Lev, director of The Tillman SoryPeople, rather than politics or polemics, were what mattered to the directors behind three of the most topical and socially vital films in this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Veteran broadcaster Lynne Kirby moderated “The New War Stories” panel at the Filmmaker Lodge on Monday, which brought together documentarians Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger (Restrepo), Amir Bar-Lev (The Tillman Story), and dramatic filmmaker Mohamed Al-Daradji (Son of Babylon) to discuss their different approaches to making films about contemporary war and conflict.

EDITOR’S NOTE: For live updates from the 2020 Sundance Film Festival awards ceremony, go here. Below, you’ll find live updates from the 2010 Festival awards ceremony.GRAND JURY PRIZE: DRAMATICActress Parker Posey awarded this prize to Winter’s Bone.

Park City, UT – The 2010 Sundance Film Festival is pleased to announce that Obselidia, directed by Diane Bell, is the recipient of this year’s Alfred P. Sloan Prize. The Prize, which carries a $20,000 cash award by the Alfred P.

“We’re all going to become straight,” HOWL co-director Rob Epstein blurted out near the end of the Queer Cinema’s Next Wave panel earlier this week. He was joking, of course, as he answered an audience member’s question about “where the community is moving as far as the stories that are going to be told” in the future. The panel, which was organized by Sundance Institute Associate GLAAD (Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) and held at the Filmmaker Lodge on Tuesday, featured Epstein and his longtime co-director, Jeffrey Friedman; their HOWL producer Christine Walker; and New Frontier performance artist Kalup Linzy, who screened a clip from his alternately funny and trippy video series Sweet, Sampled, and LeftOva.

You hear something often enough, and it starts to seem true. And as the directors of Russian Lessons have known for at least as long as the Putin administration has been in power, when you’re part of the government-allied Russian media, people believe what you say even if it is rather strange.
As becomes immediately clear in Russian Lessons, investigative filmmakers Andrei Nekrasov and Olga Konskaya, the husband-and-wife directors ofthe hard-charging documentary, are not part of the mainstream Russian media.

Novelist Russell Banks has been publishing books for nearly 40 years, but in terms of film he’s still something of a newcomer. In 1997, when he was well into his 50s and long suspicious of the business of movies, two of cinema’s most renowned auteurs, Paul Schrader and Atom Egoyan, involved him in the process of adapting his novels Affliction and The Sweet Hereafter, respectively. Both films were critically acclaimed, and Banks has remained active within the world of independent film ever since.

The Filmmaker Lodge was packed with people—and possibilities—as all nine filmmakers from this year’s inaugural NEXT section gathered together for the first time. With Sundance Film Festival’s newly minted Festival director, John Cooper moderating, the conversation was lively, insightful, and frequently silly.Cooper began by explaining the genesis of NEXT, citing the need to “carve out” a protected space in the Festival program for the burgeoning low- and no-budget filmmaking scene.

I was a tad perplexed when I learned that Louis C.K., one of my favorite comics no one knows about, was premiering his standup film Louis C.