Category: Artist Spotlight

It’s kind of fun to envision a band like Sleigh Bells scoring a film: Alexis Krauss’ teasing, silky vocals strewn across Derek Miller’s shattering guitar riffs and a barrage of beats. The duo’s penchant for pitting seductive melodies against hardcore arrangements often conjures its own powerful, albeit chaotic, imagery. With last year’s music video for “I Can Only Stare,” off their LP Jessica Rabbit, we got a feel for what that film and music pairing might look like.

A singular film about a singular woman, Dina took snowy Park City by storm earlier this year, winning the Grand Jury Prize in the U.S. Documentary competition and introducing the world to the one and only Dina Buno.

As incoherent as it may sound, on September 8, 2016, I was fortunate enough to be sick at home. I was missing out on an important rehearsal for a live streaming (an assignment for college) because the doctor had given me a three-day order to stay at home, as I was on the border of getting pneumonia. I was feeling very badly.

At the end of the summer, my life was completely flipped upside down. I quit my job, broke up with my boyfriend, and moved back home in what seemed like a step backwards for a recent college graduate. Needless to say, I was feeling weird and creatively stuck.

Jessie Littlebird is based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and is a 2017 Sundance Institute Full Circle Fellow, a program aimed at supporting the next generation of Native American storytellers. This blog was originally published on Pyragraph.I had the opportunity to attend the 2017 Sundance Film Festival this year after being chosen as a Full Circle Fellow through Sundance’s Native and Indigenous Program.

Coming into Sundance Institute’s Playwrights Residency in Germany, I thought my play would require some adjustments – crossing off some ideas, adding a few details. But I thought mostly that it was almost done and that this residency would help me refine it. I thought one piece was missing to complete the puzzle; turned out, a lot of pieces were placed upside down and needed relocation.

Before her film debuted at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival, and before it was made available to millions of homes and devices last week via Netflix, director Kitty Green met with Sundance.org to discuss Casting JonBenet. It’s the second feature for the Australian born filmmaker, following Ukraine Is Not a Brothel, which tracked a group of topless feminist activists in Ukraine whose efforts at social change seemed undermined by the shadowy figures who had orchestrated and funded their rise.

All These Sleepless Nights opens Friday, April 7, at the Nuart Theatre in Los Angeles before expanding throughout the country. The following interview was originally published during the film’s premiere at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival. The music pounds, young people flirt and dance and mope and opine, and the camera swings all around them, doing more than just watch.

Librettist Elise Thoron and composer Frank London’s new opera “Hatuey: Memory of Fire” premieres in Havana this March. Below they retrace their journey at the Sundance Institute Theatre Program’s residency at Ucross, their recent rehearsals, and the cultural significance of opening their play in Cuba.
Sitting having a daiquiri at the Nacional Hotel, gazing at the vast sea, down the Malecon with palm trees golden in afternoon sun, words from our new Cuban nightclub opera Hatuey Memoria del Fuego float in our head: “S’z himl un vaser un shtilkayt in bloy…” (Sky and water and stillness in blue…) Our hero Oscar was a young poet who came to Havana from the frozen steppe of the Ukraine.

Before finding out that I’d been accepted into the Sundance Ignite Fellowship program, I was at a bit of a crossroads in my filmmaking career.I’d just graduated with a film degree from Northwestern University and my first foray into the work world wasn’t exactly what I’d expected. Transitional periods can be lonely.

Sundance. Since the Festival’s humble beginnings in 1978, the name has become synonymous with boundary-pushing filmmaking of all shapes and forms — to such an extent that a common goal amongst aspiring independent filmmakers is to make it there, someday. As the Festival has grown in size and scope, however, “getting into Sundance” has become an increasingly difficult proposition for that particular demographic, especially as digital filmmaking tools have given more people than ever the ability to make a movie.

It felt so strange leaving the airport in Salt Lake City and leaving the bubble I’d been caught up in for almost a week. I am sure the latitude and jetlag was behind some of it, but not all of it. I tried to grasp the feelings from what I had experienced and it was just too surreal and overwhelming to even know where I should begin.