Category: Artist Spotlight

In recognition of the crucial role of editors in the art of storytelling, the Feature Film Program has created a series of initiatives to focus on the craft. The Rough Cut Screening series is a year round initiative that supports approximately 20 feature films in post production, providing feedback to projects that are alumni of the Feature Film Program. Two other initiatives – the Sally Menke Memorial Editing Fellowship and the Editing Intensive – took place just this past month in conjunction with our annual Directors Lab.

The Asian American Fellowship recently selected Eliza Lee as its third-annual fellow. With support from the A3 Foundation, the fellowship aims to further the presence of Asian American voices in independent film by supporting a writer or writer/director on the development of their feature screenplay.
Lee, whose most recent credit includes the screenplay for A Beautiful Lie about crime novelist Patricia Highsmith, recently attended the Sundance Institute Screenwriters Intensive and spoke with us about her creative origins, inspiration culled from the Hong Kong New Wave, and how she hopes to balance the scales when it comes to women on screen.

It’s been a few years since filmmaker Jeff Orlowski premiered his viscerally jarring climate change documentary Chasing Ice, which tracks photographer James Balog’s ambitious efforts to gather visual evidence of the earth’s melting glaciers. Balog, originally a skeptic of climate change, deploys customized cameras across the Arctic to provide the first-ever depiction and most palpable example of mankind’s indelible carbon footprint.
Earlier this year, Orlowski was awarded with the first-ever Sundance Institute | Discovery Impact Fellowship for his work in elevating awareness around environmental protection.

Earlier this month, the Theatre Program-supported show Fun Home collaborated with Spotify to record the very first Broadway “Spotify Session.” The show did a live performance of a re-invention of six of its songs at Spotify’s NYC Headquarters and released them as an exclusive album on Friday, March 4th. More recently, Samantha Power, U.

For all the incessant parsing of cinema’s very real diversity problem, few voices have confronted the issues in earnest. The coverage has been pervasive, and has – if only superficially – begun to effect change. Last week on the heels of Black History Month, we gathered a pair of vibrant and urgent creative voices for a wide-ranging and pleasantly meandering conversation.

At age 6, Brie Larson told her mother she wanted to be an actress. Twenty years later, Larson gleams in the Hollywood spotlight for her critically acclaimed performance in the gripping drama Room, which has earned her an Oscar Best Actress nomination. Early in her career—long before this award-buzzy role in which Larson plays a resilient mother held prisoner in a tiny shed with her son—the actress learned to say no to roles that did not personally speak to her.

An alumnus of Sundance Institute’s artist labs and a two-time Festival participant, Matthew Heineman has been making nonfiction cinema for a decade. Now, alongside fellow Sundance Documentary Film Program-supported filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer (The Look of Silence), Heineman is in the running for an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature. His film Cartel Land, which has been honored with a DGA Award and the prestigious Polk Journalism Award, is a deeply disturbing and wildly entertaining vérité film about the international drug war, set at the U.

Sundance Institute annually selects up to four artists from the eight Knight resident communities to attend the Sundance Film Festival. These artists reflect Sundance Institute and the Knight Foundation’s commitment to developing and nurturing the next generation of creative voices. Knight Fellows are afforded a five-day residency at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, where they participate in a specially curated program.

Earlier this week, editor Kate Amend presented a keynote highlighting the role of an editor and her journey through the ranks of the industry during Sundance Institute and the Karen Schmeer Fellowship’s Art of Editing Brunch. Below we’ve published Amend’s speech in full.
I’m so happy to be here with my fellow editors.

Director Howard Brookner made his initial mark on the cinematic landscape in 1983 with Burroughs: The Movie, a widely praised look at legendary beat generation writer William S. Burroughs, which also served as a document of New York’s fabled downtown scene during what many consider its artistic heyday. Brookner’s follow-up was another acclaimed non-fiction film, 1986’s Robert Wilson and the Civil Wars, about the famed theater director.

With racial diversity in the entertainment industry such a passionately debated issue at the moment, the time couldn’t be more ideal for Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation. A powerfully-rendered epic that not only shares a title with D.W.

First dates can be awkward, but they often make for fascinating cinema. In the tradition of Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise and Andrew Haigh’s Weekend, Southside With You follows two young people getting to know one another as audiences get a chance to learn about them.
What distinguishes writer-director Richard Tanne’s first feature from the pack is the protagonists here are 26-year-old attorney Michelle Robinson (Tika Sumpter), who is rather reluctantly squired around Chicago one summer afternoon with her firm’s new associate, 28-year-old Barack Obama (Parker Sawyers).