LOS ANGELES—Robert Redford, Founder and President of Sundance Institute, and Wally Weisman, Chairman of the Board, today announced the appointment of Keri Putnam as the Institute’s new Executive Director. “In the spirit of moving forward with new ideas and a fresh approach in the environment that surrounds us, Keri’s appointment reflects the new direction in which Sundance Institute is headed,” Redford said.Putnam, who recently served as President of Production for Miramax Films, the Walt Disney Company’s specialty film division, has an extensive background in independent film production and acquisition, as well as years of experience in programming.

Park City, UT — On Thursday, March 4 at 7 p.m. at the Park City Public Library, Sundance Institute will present a free screening of Hoop Dreams , the revolutionary documentary  that explores issues of race, poverty, and education in modern America through the stories of two aspiring basketball players.

Los Angeles, CA — Sundance Institute announced today the projects chosen to participate in its two new Theatre Labs at MASS MoCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art) and on Governors Island, to be held in March and June of this year, respectively. Under the artistic direction of Philip Himberg, Producing Artistic Director of the Sundance Institute Theatre Program, the Labs will provide these projects with guidance in the development of new work for the stage.
The pilot Labs were created because of a temporary loss of space at the Sundance Resort in Sundance, Utah, due to renovation.

Ucross, WY – The 2010 Sundance Institute’s Playwrights’ Retreat at Ucross begins today and will run through February 19, 2010. This unique residency program offers six playwrights and two theatre composers — both emerging and established artists — peer mentorship, professional growth, and a chance to explore unpressured creativity at an idyllic working ranch in northeastern Wyoming. The Playwrights Retreat, supported by the Sundance Institute Theatre Program, is made possible through the generosity of The Ucross Foundation.

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.

Director Sam Taylor-Wood’s Nowhere Boy intimately portrays a slice of John Lennon’s life, just before he leaps into that explosion known as The Beatles. We meet John (Aaron Johnson) as a rebellious yet sensitive teen, who bunks school authorities and bumps heads with his cultured and forcibly subdued aunt Mimi (Kristen Scott Thomas), with whom he lives. John reunites with his mother, Julia (Ann-Marie Duff) and heartbreakingly and thrillingly enters the world of music as he wrestles with his troubled past.

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.