Category: News

I spent this past week traveling around Puerto Rico showing Beasts of the Southern Wild to a variety of audiences in San Juan and Ponce with Film Forward. Over the past year and a half I have screened Beasts in many places and done tons of Q&As and events around the film, however I can very safely say that none of the other screenings or events were anything like this week.
The week started with the opening night screening at the incredible Teatro Arriví a beautiful restored old theater.

Los Angeles, CA — Sundance Institute today announced the selection of 22 Fellows representing nine documentary film projects to participate in the 2013 Documentary Edit and Story Labs, June 21-29 and July 5-13 at Sundance Resort in Sundance, Utah.
Built upon the immersive Lab model launched in 1981 by Sundance Institute President & Founder Robert Redford, each session of the Documentary Edit and Story Labs brings together director and editor teams with world-renowned documentary filmmakers and Sundance Institute staff to support creative risk-taking around issues of story, dramatic structure and character development.
Keri Putnam, Executive Director of Sundance Institute, said, “Sundance Institute provides support to film projects at all moments in their lifecycle, and our Documentary Edit and Story Labs focus specifically on critical moments of postproduction.

In 1521, the conquistador Ponce de León built his colonial residence in San Juan, naming it Casa Blanca. Today, almost 500 years later, the house is a museum where I had the privilege of screening my film Valley of Saints. In Puerto Rico, it’s hard not to see that the dialogue we’re having isn’t just between people, but between the past and the present.

Filmmakers Jeff Orlowski, Chasing Ice Patricia Riggen, Under The Same Moon (La Misma Luna)
Los Angeles, CA — Sundance Institute and the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities announced today that FILM FORWARD: Advancing Cultural Dialogue concluded its third year hosting free screenings of seven films, panel discussions and artist roundtables in China.  Filmmakers Jeff Orlowski and Patricia Riggen traveled with the program and participated in film events at Beijing Film Academy, Inside Out Museum, Chinese Academy of Drama, Chinese University of Communications, Anhui University, Kafka Bookstore, and CNEX Foundation. For filmmaker blogs and a recap of events visit www.

In showing Beasts of the Southern Wild across San Juan this week, a really interesting conversation emerged.  The conversation was not so much a discussion about the movie but rather a conversation around an idea that the film explores which is a very real question for Puerto Ricans.  The question is: if a natural disaster was coming towards your community and you had the option of staying or leaving, what would you do?
The protagonists of Beasts deal with this with question when a storm comes towards their home.

WHAT:

Sundance Institute invites New York area filmmakers to attend a day-long filmmaking workshop.
ShortsLab: New York offers filmmakers the opportunity to participate in an intensive one-day seminar of screenings and discussions with firsthand insight and access into the world of story development, production and exhibition of narrative short-form films.
Sundance Institute and the Sundance Film Festival have long supported the creation and exhibition of short films.

It may be true that the most memorable fathers in film are those who brazenly renounce their parental duties—or fail in their attempts at patriarchy altogether. Think Jeff Daniels as Bernard Berkman in The Squid and the Whale, a pompous intellectual and the out-of-touch father of a dysfunctional family traversing the treacherous landscape of divorce. Even still, cinema has also provided more than a few samples of admirable parenting, some of which we’ve selected for our Sundance-supported Father’s Day film list below.

This week, we offer two very different takes on boys and their dads to remind you to call home on Father’s Day this Sunday. From the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, we have Long Distance Information. Consisting of a single straightforward scene of only a quick phone conversation between two static figures, this tightly packed short stars British stalwart and reliably grizzly-voiced Peter Mullan as a perfectly cast father figure receiving a call from a son.

On June 8, Sundance Film Festival Director John Cooper accepted the Human Rights Campaign Equality Award on behalf of Sundance Institute. Below are his remarks from the awards ceremony held in Salt Lake City, Utah. 
“Thank you.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Sundance Institute and Americans for the Arts, the nation’s leading nonprofit organization for advancing the arts and arts education, released a report based on findings from the annual National Arts Policy Roundtable (NAPR) led by Robert Redford, Sundance Institute founder and president, and Robert L.

LOS ANGELES — Sundance Institute and TED, the nonprofit known for “ideas worth spreading,” announced that filmmaker Jerry Rothwell has been selected to receive the first-ever Sundance Institute | TED Prize Filmmaker Award — the centerpiece of which is a grant of $125,000 to make a documentary film about the 2013 TED Prize winner Sugata Mitra and his wish, A School in the Cloud. The prize was awarded during the TEDGlobal 2013 Conference, taking place June 10 to 14, 2013, in Edinburgh, Scotland.Selected from a highly competitive pool of outstanding global submissions, the UK-based Rothwell and his producers — Al Morrow and Dan Demissie — proposed a film, Like Whirlwinds, that will look at the development of Mitra’s latest and most ambitious project, ”A School in the Cloud.

A world without borders.Ryan Roberts, the Cultural Affairs Officer at the American Institute in Taiwan explains to me early on in our first orientation meeting, that Taiwan has a heavy influx of immigrants from the Philippines. They’re mainly domestics and factory workers, but there’s also a number of imported “domestic partners.