Benjamin Ree’s documentary The Painter and the Thief won a World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award for Creative Storytelling at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. On Friday, May 22, the film’s distributor, Neon, has teamed up with Filmbot to present a special opening-night screening with Ree as well as the project’s subjects, Barbora Kysilkov and (the painter) and Karl-Bertil Nordland (the thief) at 8:00 p.m.
Nicole Newnham and Jim LeBrecht’s inspiring documentary, Crip Camp, was an opening-night selection at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, where it had its debut and won the Audience Award: U.S. Documentary.
Eliza Hittman’s latest film, Never Rarely Sometimes Always, won prizes at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, where it had its debut, and at Berlinale, where it was awarded the Silver Bear. Below, hear what Hittman and her two lead actresses had to say at the Festival in January, and see photos from the premiere. Watch the trailer here.
Our time on the mountain during the 2020 Sundance Film Festival was split between the premieres of 118 features, 74 shorts, 8 episodic works, and 9 special events, not to mention countless parties, panels, and live music. (Oh, and snorkeling around the pool at Festival HQ for Spaced Out, a New Frontier project.)
We also celebrated our longtime Festival director, John Cooper, who closed out his tenure in style with a choreographed “Last Dance” routine (complete with backup dancers) at our Awards Ceremony; we welcomed our new Festival director, Tabitha Jackson, previously director of our Documentary Film Program; and we gathered around a bonfire at dusk to kick off a new decade and imagine a brighter future.
Max Richter isn’t your average composer. Sure, he’s written plenty of dreamy film scores, but he’s also undertaken something a bit more complicated: an eight-hour composition meant to be listened to during a full night’s sleep.
Aptly titled Sleep, the album is quite a commitment to listen to—and even bigger of a commitment to perform live.
I think it’s safe to say that a lot of us have tried VR at least once at this point—I know I’ve played my fair share of beat saber. But New Frontier, the Festival’s category for cutting-edge media technology, offers VR technology and experiences that I’m sure you haven’t experienced before. I quite literally wandered with my mouth hanging open; from live performances to headset VR, there was something thrilling around every corner.
“For myself as a young queer person growing up in Miami, seeing Walter on TV living his life so valiantly, so unabashedly himself, gave me hope,” said Mucho Mucho Amor co-director Kareem Tabsch at a Sundance Film Festival screening of his new documentary. “I saw in him a sense of otherness and difference that I recognized in myself. And it was incredibly powerful.
In her third feature-length documentary, Kirsten Johnson films her father, Dick Johnson, dying over and over again in ridiculously comical setups. The truth is, he is dying … eventually. Although her father is suffering from dementia and could be gone any day, he is—spoiler alert!—still among the living.
Shalini Kantayya’s documentary Coded Bias premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January as part of the U.S. Documentary Competition.
Patricia Vidal Delgado’s first feature film follows senior Aleteia (Monica Betancourt), who’s just transferred to Compton High School. She’s more interested in continuing her underground activism than making friends, although she’s careful not to jeopardize her all-important scholarship to UCLA.
When she’s paired up with the popular Rosarito (Kailei Lopez) for a school assignment, she’s surprised to be taken under the other girl’s wing.
The first thing you’ll experience in The Mountains Are a Dream That Call to Me is the single gong of a bell. In Buddhist tradition, bells are often used to begin meditation sessions, to ward off negativity, and to bring listeners back to the present moment. And that’s precisely what this bell sound does for the viewers—invites them into a new space.