Category: Festival

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.

“I really love this film not [only] because it is funny, not [only] because it gave us a breath of fresh air, but it’s also a really smart film,” said senior programmer John Nein at the Wednesday screening of Save Yourselves! “It’s a very, very clever satirical idea of urban culture, of social connectedness, of narcissism. It made us think; it made us laugh.”
The story begins with young Brooklyn couple Jack and Su coming to the realization that they need to disconnect from the technology they’ve become overly dependent on.

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.