Category: News

One of the best things about the Off Screen program at the Sundance Film Festival is that you never know what might happen when some new combination of people get together and start talking. This is true of the Cinema Cafe series, where the casual setting creates all sort of moments of unexpected insight and fun. This was especially true for your humble correspondent on Tuesday morning, when I found myself sharing a stage with Kevin Clash, puppeteer and subject of Festival documentary Being Elmo, and Phil Shane, co-director of the same.

Park City, UT – Sundance Institute today announced that Another Earth, directed and written by Mike Cahill and written by Brit Marling, is the recipient of the 2011 Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Now in its ninth year, the Prize carries a $20,000 cash award by the Alfred P.

** MEDIA ALERT **
WHAT: Sundance Institute and NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation) have announced Cherien Dabis, director of May in the Summer, as winner of the 2011 Sundance / NHK International Filmmaker Award.
Originally created to celebrate 100 years of Cinema, the annual award recognizes and supports a visionary filmmaker on his or her next film. Sundance Institute staff works closely with the winner throughout the year, providing creative and strategic support through the development, financing and production of their films.

In documentaries as in life, there are few things as fascinating as a world in flux. For Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times, director Andrew Rossi followed the staff of the grey lady’s Media Desk from 2009-2010, chronicling an industry and institution in crisis through the eyes of reporters assigned to do the same. Effortlessly and entertainingly, Rossi’s film manages to tell the larger story of rampant newspaper closings and online threats to traditional journalistic models, as well as the moment-by-moment, deadline-by-deadline reality of running the most vital news organization in the world.

What makes a film independent? Its financing? The edginess of the director’s vision? However you define indie film, the notion of being an outsider – because of a film’s content, or its production outside the studio system – is common to almost everyone’s definition of indie film, as Emanuel Levy points out in his 1999 book Cinema of Outsiders: The Rise of American Independent Film. But a number of movies in this year’s Festival lineup, in addition to being indie films, feature outsiders as characters, or the filmmakers are outsiders to the material they’re covering.
Take Matthew Bate, the Australian director of Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure, which is screening in the World Cinema Documentary Competition.

Chaz Bono, the delightfully precocious child of Sonny and Cher, never felt comfortable as a woman. After spending most of his life trying to cope with an existence in a body that was never meant to be his, Chaz finally made the bold decision to undergo gender reassignment and share his journey to manhood in front of a camera crew. Becoming Chaz is the result, a film that starts out as a story about transition and eventually evolves into a true love story.

Fast becoming an expert in the fiction short-form, British filmmaker Daniel Mulloy makes his third appearance at the Festival this year, bringing with him the masterfully executed Baby. Mulloy previously premiered the BAFTA-winning short Antonio’s Breakfast at the 2006 Festival, and subsequently returned to Park City the next year with another short, Dad. Screening at the close of Shorts Program IV, his newest piece follows the alluring aftermath when a young woman intervenes in a mugging.

Miguel Arteta’s first trip to the Sundance Film Festival was in 1997 with his celebrated debut feature, Star Maps, a film that not only put the filmmaker on the map but joined a handful of other low budget features to kick-start a new era of American independent filmmaking. Arteta followed Star Maps with Chuck and Buck in 2000, an edgy character study starring Mike White and Chris Weitz. The film was another low-budget effort, and was shot on DV, and again, Arteta earned acclaim, this time for exploring the potential of digital video as a new tool for independent filmmakers, and for continuing to build his own highly personal filmmaking style.

Animator David OReilly isn’t exactly a new kid on the block. Sure, he’s considered up-and-coming, and his 1985 birth year doesn’t exactly qualify him as an age-old veteran. But instead of resting on his laurels after his 2010 short Please Say Something—which screened at the 2010 Festival, won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, and Grand Prize at the Ottawa International Animation Festival, among others—he’s hit the ground running with another edgy, twisted, hysterical follow-up venture, The External World, and has graduated quickly from the moniker of “kid” to something a bit more seasoned .

Sundance may be synonymous with American independent cinema, but in recent years the Institute has made far-ranging commitments to going global. The inaugural recipients of the Sundance Institute/Mahindra Global Filmmaking Award were announced on Tuesday at the Sundance House Presented by HP at Kimball Arts Center, drawing mid-Festival fanfare for an ambitious partnership between the American nonprofit and one of India’s largest corporations. “We’re always looking to discover more about the world through film, and where the film communities are flourishing,” said Alesia Weston, associate director of the Sundance Institute Feature Film Program.

It’s the Wednesday of the Festival. This is when most of us filmmakers relax. Our films have all screened.

Whenever a movie star moves behind the camera to direct, expectations always seem to be both great and small. A high profile brings an outsized level of interest, but also a suspicion of vanity, that a pretty face is straining to be taken seriously. But then there are the actor’s actors, the kinds of professionals for whom the transition seems completely natural and inevitable.