Category: News

“One half for me, one for you,” repeats Hatidze to her bees in Honeyland, winner of the World Cinema Documentary Grand Jury Prize at the 2019 Festival. In taking only half of their honey, she explains, she sustains her hives and ensures their future wellbeing.
Honeyland is in good company of Festival documentary films dedicated to demonstrating the need for human restraint to ensure species’ protection and illuminating the struggle for survival amidst climate change, poaching, and other looming threats.

There’s no one path to becoming an episodic-content creator—and this year’s lab artists proved it. As part of the Sundance Institute | YouTube New Voices Lab, 15 artists spent April 8 through April 11 in Solvang, California, working with Sundance Institute mentors to workshop and hone their episodic craft and projects. And it quickly became apparent—from a reality-TV producer to stand-up comedians to a former professional ballerina, each creator had a different story to tell.

Ryah Aqel is a filmmaker and cultural producer based in metro Detroit. She is a 2019 Knight Foundation fellow with Sundance Institute.I never understood my mother’s music.

Tracy Nguyen-Chung is a filmmaker and member of Brown Girls Doc Mafia.The Sundance Film Festival can be overwhelming for filmmakers trying to make the most of the opportunity to interact with the industry. But at the 2019 Festival, women and nonbinary people of color had an ally in Brown Girls Doc Mafia.

Linda Pfafflin is the director of ticketing at Sundance Institute and is retiring this month. She attended the Sundance Film Festival for the first time as a patron in 1998 before becoming a volunteer and then an employee.
After 21 years, it’s still all about serendipity.

Los Angeles — Sundance Institute announced today that Jason Blum, Ebs Burnough, Lynette Wallworth and Lisa-Michele Church will join the Institute’s Board of Trustees. The new Trustees bring deep experience and broad expertise spanning communications, emerging media, and film production to the Institute’s governance, and will work closely with President & Founder Robert Redford, Board Chair Pat Mitchell and Executive DirectorKeri Putnam

“Jason, Ebs, Lynette and Lisa-Michele each have their own incredible wealth of knowledge of the current cultural landscape, and visionary perspectives on how to shape the work we do. We are so grateful to welcome their unique perspectives to the table,” said Pat Mitchell.

As we come to the end of Women’s History Month, I’m heartened to celebrate the recognition and discourse around the gaps in representation of women in media. This is no longer a problem that lives in the shadows. I think back to the history of early cinema and the women pioneers who were erased from the record (check them out here and here), and I wish we were celebrating more concrete progress.

Alana Hauser is the manager of Sundance Institute’s Catalyst and Women at Sundance programs.
In a recent New York Times interview, film composer Tamar-kali identified herself as “an outlier within the outliers.” As an Afro-indigenous punk rocker and composer for Sundance Film Festival features Mudbound and Come Sunday, Tamar-kali is one of few women, and even fewer women of color, in the male-dominated field of film music.

Austin-based Monique Walton produced the 2014 short film Skunk (written and directed by Annie Silverstein), which won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival’s Cinéfondation and screened at festivals worldwide. She has produced numerous short films and documentaries and leads youth media workshops for students of color in Austin. Walton was selected for the 2016 Sundance Creative Producing Lab and was named the Mark Silverman Honoree for her upcoming feature Bull, about a wayward Houston teen’s run-in with her neighbor, an aging bullfighter who’s seen his best days in the arena.

Two-Day Workshop Supported by Universal Filmed Entertainment Group Launches Year-Round Support for Fellows

Los Angeles, CA — The fourth annual FilmTwo Initiative launches today in LA to support the career sustainability of thirteen artists developing their second features. FilmTwo encompasses two days of focused programming, including a writing workshop (led by Joan Tewkesbury), industry mentoring sessions, and one-on-one story meetings, kicking off a year of tailored creative and tactical support as part of the Institute’s continuum of support for artists at key inflection points in their careers. The FilmTwo Initiative is supported by Universal Filmed Entertainment Group.

Sundance Institute Programmer Hussain Currimbhoy sat down with Rajendra Roy, the Celeste Bartos Chief Curator of Film at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, to discuss the shifts in the industry and how they’re affecting everything from festivals and theaters to distribution and the Academy Awards. Rajendra Roy: It’s super timely we would have this chat. Everything is changing and everything is going to have to function in new ways.

Last week, Claudio Rojas, one of the main subjects in Cristina Ibarra and Alex Rivera’s documentary The Infiltrators, was detained by ICE. In the film, Claudio acted as the inside source about conditions in a for-profit detention center in Florida where he had been detained for overstaying his visa in 2012. The Infiltrators had just premiered to great acclaim at Sundance Film Festival, winning the NEXT Innovator and Audience Awards, and was about to be screened at the Miami Film Festival with Claudio in attendance.