Category: Festival

Growing up in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, 24-year-old filmmaker Lance Oppenheim and his sister/producer, Melissa, were surrounded by retirement homes. “It’s impossible to not hear about The Villages when you’re growing up in Florida,” he said at the premiere of his debut feature-length documentary, Some Kind of Heaven.
He’s not kidding: The Villages, the nation’s largest retirement community, stretches out over 30 square miles, comprised of identical little houses arranged in perfectly arranged little rows, occasionally punctuated by a community swimming pool or a golf course.

In the chilling documentary The Dissident, director Bryan Fogel explores the events leading up to the brutal murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. Fogel’s previous film, Icarus, won an Academy Award and a 2017 Sundance Film Festival Special Jury Prize.
During a Q&A at this year’s Fest, he told the audience why he decided to make a film about Khashoggi.

“There are more people in this crowd than in the town where I grew up,” explained director Lee Isaac Chung at the Eccles Theatre before the second Sundance Film Festival screening of his feature Minari.
The film is a very personal story for Chung, based on memories from when he was six years old and growing up in rural Arkansas. “I thought, I just want to throw it all out there and go for the film that I’ve always wanted to make.

Winners of Commissioning Grant, Episodic Storytelling Grant and Lab Fellowship Revealed
Director-Screenwriter Michael Almereyda Honored
Park City, Utah — At a reception at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival today, the beneficiaries of $70,000 in grants from Sundance Institute and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation were revealed. Doron Weber, Vice President and Program Director at the Alfred P.

The seed for the story that would become Relic was planted in writer/director Natalie Erika James’s head years ago when she visited her grandmother, who was afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease, at her grandmother’s home in rural Japan.
“It was the first time where she couldn’t remember who I was, and so there were a lot of feelings of guilt, about having not gone earlier and spending more time with her,” the Melbourne-based filmmaker told the audience after the project screened at the Park Avenue Theatre on Monday night.

It was really important to me that the audience really felt for her and her experience, and that it wasn’t just a crazy old lady horror trope.

Director of programming Kim Yutani said that within days of the first time she watched Exil, it was invited to the Festival. “This is a very rare thing to happen because we get so many [submissions], but there are certain films we know we want early. … This filmmaker has a real skill at building tension and really getting inside the mind of an outsider.

Before the world premiere of his new movie, Tesla, Michael Almereyda had some words of caution for the audience. “It’s not a conventional biopic of a neurotic mathematical inventor, so you can run for the door if you expect that,” he said. “What you’re about to see is influenced by a lot of literature written on Tesla, but also movies by Derek Jarman, novels by Henry James, and certain episodes of Drunk History.

Getting a lush, classic look for jazz-infused period romance Sylvie’s Love—set in New York City in the ’50s and ’60s—was key for writer/director Eugene Ashe.
When an audience member told Ashe she felt like she just saw a new classic at the film’s premiere, he was thrilled. “We shot the entire thing in Los Angeles for New York, and we did a lot on the classic backlots,” he said.

Sean Durkin, who won a Directing Award for his 2011 Sundance Film Festival film, Martha Marcy May Marlene, premiered his new ’80s-set movie The Nest Sunday night at the Eccles Theatre.
The audience was treated to a pre-film mini-concert by Richard Reed Parry, the film’s composer, who performed selections from the score on stand-up bass, accompanied on piano and clarinet. (Parry’s previous film scores include Boyhood and The Life of Walter Mitty.

An old man is sitting with his back to a tree in the forest, his wire-haired dog, Birba, beside him. “You know what a lady told me?” the man says to the dog. “She asked me, ‘Why don’t you get married?’” He gives her a pet.

Immediately after his undeniably Freudian mother-son relationship drama Summer White (Blanco de Verano) finished rolling at the Egyptian Theatre, Mexico City–based writer/director Rodrigo Ruiz Patterson was quick to get one thing out of the way.

While the film’s fire-starting main character is also named Rodrigo, the plot is (mostly) fictional. “This story started as something autobiographical, but then at some point, when I started writing with Raul, we figured out that my life wasn’t that interesting, so for the sake of good drama, we decided to fictionalize and make a more interesting film,” Ruiz Patterson said with a laugh, reassuring the audience at his film’s world premiere that nobody in his past ever burned down an RV.

Now in its Fifth Consecutive Year, Fellowship Honors Artistic Contributions
of Late Māori Filmmaker
Park City, Utah — Sundance Institute today announced director and producer Leya Hale as the 2020 recipient of the Sundance Institute Merata Mita Fellowship, an annual fellowship named in honor of the late Māori filmmaker Merata Mita (1942-2010). The announcement was delivered today at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival by N. Bird Runningwater, Director of the Sundance Institute’s Indigenous Program.