Category: News

Sometime around 10:30 am on Day Three of the Sundance Film Festival, a pack of road-weary filmmakers piled out of a snow-shrouded bus and into a halcyon vision of rustic repose otherwise known as the Directors Brunch. As they were ushered into a large open-air converted barn at the Sundance Resort where tea and sympathy (and a mid-morning feast) awaited them, the group seemed to exhale a collective sigh of relief — as if this were the creative homecoming they’d been hoping for much of their professional lives. Or, in the immortal words of David Byrne (and the title of one of this year’s Premiere selections): This must be the place.

When Sundance introduced the first New Frontier program at the Festival in 2007, in a cramped basement space on Main Street in Park City, it felt like a heady first glimpse into a future in which cinema was migrating beyond the theatre—even beyond movies. Just six years later, we’re living in that future. This year’s survey of multimedia, multi-platform projects, experiments, performances, and installations still leans forward and anticipates new developments in cinematic culture, but it’s also about how we live now.

If you think the American justice system is chugging along just fine, West of Memphis will sober you up from that crazy trip in about two minutes flat. Amy Berg’s encyclopedic account of the bungled case of the West Memphis Three is actually two and a half hours long, but because the case first went to trial in 1994 in West Memphis, Arkansas, and its legal twists haven’t slowed during the subsequent 18 years, Berg has quite a bit of ground to cover. In 1993, three poor West Memphis teenagers were accused of brutally fracturing the skulls of three boys and sexually mutilating them to satisfy the demands of a satanic cult led by one of the three teens, Damien Echols.

Director Tusi Tamasese will trade in South Pacific sand for Sundance snow when he makes his first trip to the U.S. to screen his film The Orator.

On Friday night, when Rodrigo Cortés premiered Red Lights to a packed Eccles Theatre, he offered up a piece of advice to the 1,200 audience members: “Don’t expect anything.” Duly noted, but audiences were hungry for the director’s follow-up to his much buzzed about Buried, which premiered at the 2010 Festival and boldly put Ryan Reynolds in a coffin for two suspenseful hours in a Hitchcockian, politically-charged thriller. His new film inhabits a similar tension-filled terrain; but Cortés is working on a much larger canvas here, having upgraded from Buried’s $3 million budget, claustrophobic one set, one actor storyline to Red Light’s $15-17 million budget, with an intricately twisted plot.

Day Two of #Sundance photos on Instagram includes a look at Main Street life, a shot of the shuttle hustle, and a photo op with an Edgerton.

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This is my fifth time to Park City for the Sundance Film Festival. Every year brings the familiar excitement of digging up winter clothes, trying to get tickets to the movies you want to see (which are always sold out!), and emailing friends to see who will be up there and if there’s an extra room (or floor) available. This year is especially exciting for me.

Park City, UT — Sundance Institute today announced that Eddie Izzard will perform at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. The stand-up event takes place Saturday, January 21, 10:00 p.m.

Attendees of the Sundance Film Festival know Park City’s Kimball Art Center as the home of the Sundance House Presented by HP—a space dedicated to the discovery of transformative new technologies. But this year, the Kimball will offer visitors a glimpse inside its own cutting edge plans to grow and evolve by displaying five final proposals from world-renowned architects for its upcoming Transformation Project. Visitors to the Sundance House are welcome to vote on their favorites in an online poll, and the jury will announce the winning design in early February.

Thursday’s opening day press conference opened with nothing less than a reference to an American “government in paralysis” – Sundance Institute President and Founder Robert Redford’s allusion to the frustrating inability of the country’s political leaders to compromise with one another. From that sobering reality, however, Redford, Keri Putnam, the Institute’s Executive Director, and John Cooper, the Director of the Sundance Film Festival, pointed out the ways in which artists contribute to a vibrant culture, and what the Institute is doing to be at the forefront of that culture. “The happy thing we’re pretty proud of is that here, for this week, we’re going to see work from artists, who even though their work might be reflective of these hard times, there’s not paralysis here,” Redford said.

Six months after Hurricane Katrina, director Benh Zeitlin was crashing on a friend’s floor in New Orleans. The Queens native had been living abroad scouting locations for his seafaring short film, Glory at Sea. “I didn’t want to be an expat; I wanted to tell stories about America,” says Zeitlin of his turn to the Big Easy.

If cultural historians were to happen upon a time capsule containing the 2012 Sundance Film Festival’s Day One lineup of films, they’d have a comprehensive overview of the breadth and depth of high quality independent filmmaking programmed into this year’s Festival. What’s more, this diverse array of works by established and up-and-coming talents would offer a microcosmic snapshot of the state of our society at large – its passions and preoccupations as well as cultural and creative sensibilities.Because we don’t yet live in a space-age world where it’s possible for one human to see two movies at the same time—hey, few could have ever predicted we’d have talking maps or the toothpaste pump, so don’t rule it out—we dispatched our crack team of writers to attend each Day One screening.