Category: Artist Spotlight

This interview was originally published following Hasan Minhaj’s fellowship at the 2014 New Frontier Story Lab with “Homecoming King” (FKA “Sakoon). It is updated below to coincide with the premiere of “Homecoming King” at New York’s Cherry Lane Theatre. Comedian Hasan Minhaj has an infectious X-factor.

The main character in Michael Almereyda’s new film, Experimenter, is a social psychologist, moral thinker, innovator, and filmmaker. While it would be too convenient and reductive to draw too solid a line between Stanley Milgram, author of the still enlightening, still controversial “obedience experiments” and the director, it’s not hard to see why an artist of Almereyda’s intellect and formal dexterity would be attracted to his story. Among many other things, Milgram was interested in what people are capable of doing to one another and why, how they respond to authority, how they form communities, how they manage to morally justify their actions and their lives—matters of supreme interest to a dramatist and director of actors by trade.

Transitioning from short films to features is treading a familiar, tried and true path for filmmakers. But there’s a rare tribe of filmmakers who pass through the selection gauntlet to place a film in the Sundance Film Festival shorts program, and then prevail over another, equally daunting competition to do the same for a feature film. To achieve that, you must be doing something right.

Filmmaker Louie Psihoyos and his team of activists and innovators that made The Cove are back with a new mission to save more endangered species. Where The Cove centered on the plight of dolphins, his latest film Racing Extinction, which premiered early this year in the U.S.

At one point during our recent conversation, Sky Ferreira empathized with Lorelei Linklater, daughter of director Richard Linklater and an actress in his Oscar-winning drama Boyhood. The parallels proved uncanny to the 23-year-old singer, who heard the story of Lorelei bawling her way through her first viewing of the film. It was a reaction to reliving her coming-of-age—including, in its entirety the “awkward phase.

Erica Freed Marker is the recipient of the 2015 Sally Menke Memorial Editing Fellowship. The fellowship honors the memory of the beloved Sundance Institute mentor and prolific editor Sally Menke by supporting an emerging narrative editor’s understanding of craft, expanding their artistic community, and providing momentum to their editing career through participation in the Directors Lab and year-round mentorship from several accomplished editors. This year, Marker will work closely with Dylan Tichenor (co-editor, Zero Dark Thirty, The Town, There Will be Blood) and two other editing mentors.

Countless actors have been said to have a love affair with the camera, and the same can be said of filmmaker Alfonso Gomez-Rejon. He’s one of the few directors working today whose prowess behind the camera can leave viewers breathless yet it never overpowers the actors or storyline. His camera becomes a character and subtly comments on scenes with a sudden movement or unexpected angle, rather than overwhelming them.

It’s easy to dismiss musical composition as an abstruse kind of necessity in film and television.
It’s an element of the artistic equation that the average viewer knows little about despite its universal resonance. We’re acutely aware that Jaws’s most menacing moments would be toothless without its iconic John Williams score, or that The Social Network’s nefarious ambiance is owed to Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s calculated score, but that tends to be the depth of our wisdom.

Don’t look now, but it’s been 17 years since John Cameron Mitchell premiered and starred in his raucously eccentric musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch Off-Broadway. In the ensuing years, Mitchell worked to refine the film adaptation of Hedwig at the 1999 Sundance Institute Screenwriters and Directors Labs before eventually premiering the film at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival. There, Hedwig immediately enticed audiences and garnered instant “cult classic” designations from critics while also winning the Audience Award and the Directing Award.

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’s commitment to developing and nurturing the next generation of creative voices. Knight Fellows were in residence for five days during the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, where they participated in a specially curated program.

Director Sydney Freeland’s tenacity to make Drunktown’s Finest was born from a misguided news story. After seeing her hometown of Gallup, New Mexico, portrayed as “Drunktown, USA,” she felt compelled to offer a corrective. Enter: Drunktown’s Finest, an unwaveringly honest drama that sheds light on the southwest’s Navajo Nation through the lenses of three disparate characters—a transgender aspiring model, a man headed off to basic training, and a Christian woman.

For the past two decades, Adam Scott has steadily built an impressive resume of appealing performances on both the small screen in cult series like Party Down and Tell Me You Love Me, and in mainstream studio films such as The Aviator and Monster-in-Law.
Probably best-known for his winning portrayal of Ben Wyatt in the recently departed NBC sitcom Parks and Recreation, Scott has also become a regular at the Sundance Film Festival over the years with his work in comedies such as 2011’s Our Idiot Brother, 2012’s Bachelorette, and last year’s A.C.