Category: News

SALLY FIELD TO PRESENT AWARD AT SUNDANCE INSTITUTE THEATRE PROGRAM BENEFIT  APRIL 8, 2013
ADDITIONAL PROGRAMMING FOR THEATRE PROGRAM BENEFIT:
MAGGIE GYLLENHAAL, JUDY KUHN AND DAVID HYDE PIERCE TO PERFORM SELECTIONS FROM NEW MUSICAL “FUN HOME” BY LISA KRON AND JEANINE TESORI
CHERRY JONES TO PERFORM SCENES FROM NEW PLAY BY AWARD RECIPIENT JACOBS-JENKINS “APPROPRIATE”
New York, NY (2/27/2013) — Sundance Institute has announced that playwright and Sundance Institute Theatre Lab alum Branden Jacobs-Jenkins will receive the first-ever Tennessee Williams Award from the Institute’s Theatre Program, which supports the development of new work for the stage. Sundance Institute Emeritus Trustee Sally Field will present the honor and accompanying $10,000 grant at the Celebrate Sundance Institute benefit for its Theatre Program on April 8, 2013 at Stephan Weiss Studio in Greenwich Village.
The event will also include musical selections from the Sundance Institute-supported, much-anticipated new musical Fun Home by Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori, featuring performances by Maggie Gyllenhaal, Judy Kuhn, David Hyde Pierce and others.

The O2, 27 February 2013 — Sundance Institute and The O2 announced Peaches as the first headlining act for the second Sundance London film and music festival, which will also host the UK premiere of Peaches Does Herself. Tickets for Peaches’ Friday 26 April performance at indigO2 in The O2 as well as a music-and-movie ticket package will be on sale from 9am GMT Friday 1 March online.

Los Angeles, CA — Sundance Institute and TED today announced the first collaboration between the two organizations, which will jointly award $125,000 for a short documentary film project about the work of Sugata Mitra, winner of the annual TED Prize. The Institute’s Documentary Film Program and Fund will accept proposals March 1 through April 15, 2013 at sundance.org/ted and will design and oversee the selection process in collaboration with TED.

Sundance Institute is honored to congratulate the films and filmmakers recognized at the Film Independent Spirit Awards and the Academy Awards this past weekend. The Spirit Awards assumed its traditional time and post, held the day before the Oscars in a spruced up tent on the beach in Santa Monica, CA, with host Andy Samberg helming the show. Here are the Sundance-supported winners:
28th Film Independent Spirit Awards 
Best Male Lead
John Hawkes, The Sessions
Best First Screenplay
Derek Connolly, Safety Not Guaranteed 
Best Cinematography
Ben Richardson, Beasts of the Southern Wild
John Cassavetes Award (Best Feature made for under $500,000)
Middle of Nowhere, directed by Ava DuVernay
Best Supporting Female
Helen Hunt, The Sessions 
Best Documentary
The Invisible War, directed by Kirby Dick
On Sunday, host Seth MacFarlane led the festivities at the 85th Academy Awards, where 13 Sundance-supported film and filmmakers were nominated for awards.

Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild does much more than simply defy categorization. Rather, it creates its own world—or as Senior Programmer John Nein puts it, “Beasts exists entirely in its own universe.” And that universe is one just fantastical enough to summon our childlike wonder, but with a plausibility that captivates the intellect and invigorates the soul.

Discover remarkable films all year long in The Screening Room, a new YouTube Channel curated by Sundance Institute. Two new films from Sundance history will be placed on our page every Friday, and we will be regularly linking to shorts from the Festival already on YouTube, so check back often for lots of surprises.This Friday, we bring you two very different, but wonderfully unique shorts.

Leading up to the 85th edition of the Academy Awards on Sunday, February 24, we’re profiling all 13 of this year’s Sundance-supported Oscar nominees. Click here for the full list of nominees.
In a Best Documentary category inhabited by five merited  (and, in the spirit of transparency, Sundance-supported) nominees, director Jeff Orlowski’s rousing debut documentary feature Chasing Ice is curiously missing.

Andrew Ahn is a Los Angeles-based Korean-American filmmaker whose short film Dol (First Birthday) screened at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. Below he shares his experience at the Sundance Institute Feature Film Program’s Screenwriters Intensive held Friday, February 15.
By the end of the day, I knew I was ill.

Leading up to the 85th edition of the Academy Awards on Sunday, February 24, we’re profiling all 13 of this year’s Sundance-supported Oscar nominees. Click here for the full list of nominees.
Sometimes the most effective documentaries are those that appear to be misclassified.

Leading up to the 85th edition of the Academy Awards on Sunday, February 24, we’re profiling all 13 of this year’s Sundance-supported Oscar nominees. Click here for the full list of nominees.
In Africa, where juvenile disease runs rampant and affordable healthcare is all but nonexistent, the Salam Center in Sudan offers the continent’s only free-of-charge, state-of-the-art cardiac hospital.

Matthew Paul Olmos is currently in Wyoming attending the Sundance Institute Playwrights Retreat at Ucross Foundation, an 18-day writing colony where five playwrights and two theatre composers convene each year to workshop their written projects. Below is Olmos’s recent dispatch from Ucross.As a handful of playwrights and Wyoming locals make our way into the very close quarters inside the tiny, propeller’d plane, several people make comments at how tiny an aircraft this really is.

What better way to perpetuate the quixotic romantic desires that reside in our partners’ minds than by watching films that validate those delusions of love? This Valentine’s Day, we’re offering a short list of Sundance-supported love stories as a remedial to such lofty figments—unfortunately, the reality is not quite as attractive. From an idyllic summer love that concludes with an acerbic breakup in 500 Days of Summer to a lingering (albeit passionate) romance that traverses drug abuse and other pitfalls in Keep the Lights On, these six stories of (not always mutual) affection will jolt even the most deluded lover from their reverie.
SYLVIE’S LOVE
“The sumptuously photographed [Sylvie’s Love] feels like something Douglas Sirk—director of such classics as Magnificent Obsession and Imitation of Life—might have shot decades ago,” Sharon Knolle reported for Sundance.