Category: News

Los Angeles, CA — March 11, 2009—Sundance Institute today announced the appointment of John Cooper as Director of the Sundance Film Festival. Effective immediately, Mr. Cooper will serve as the Festival’s artistic director leading the Festival’s programming and strategic growth, also overseeing activities such as content production, online initiatives and key national and international partnerships.

LOS ANGELES, CA – Sundance Institute today confirmed that effective February 28, 2009, Geoffrey Gilmore is resigning his position as Director, Sundance Film Festival.
Gilmore joined Sundance Institute in 1990. As Director of the Sundance Film Festival he has worked as part of a team of programmers who select films for the annual event, the preeminent showcase for independent film.

When two lifelong buddies decide to take their friendship into unchartered sexual territory, homo awkwardness gives way to a philosophical gabfest in Lynn Shelton’s Humpday. As the shlubbier half of the pair, Festival regular Mark Duplass helped devise the film’s treatment, improvised much of his own dialogue and gamely swapped spit with his male co-star, Joshua Leonard. In a series of conversations with us, Duplass discussed Humpday as well as his role as one of the “founders” of the mumblecore aesthetic.

Sophie Barthes’ haunting comedy Cold Souls takes a literal cognitive journey into filmmaking. Paul Giamatti stars as himself, an actor in the midst of a Chekhovian breakdown; he suffers from an indefinable throb, a pressure, a pain. He turns to the new technology of a glossy white soul-extraction machine to escape his spiritual crisis.

Los Angeles, CA – Sundance Institute and the Ucross Foundation of Wyoming announced today the projects chosen to participate in the 2009 SUNDANCE INSTITUTE PLAYWRIGHTS RETREAT AT UCROSS held February 2-22, 2009. This residency program offers five playwrights and two composers three weeks in which to begin or refine new work at an idyllic working ranch in northeastern Wyoming.  Sundance and Ucross celebrate the tenth year of their residency collaboration in 2009.

Park City, UT —Sundance Institute today announced the launch of a new year-round community film series which expands on the popular Sundance Institute Documentary Film Series to offer works that best represent the Institute’s spectrum of programs and artists. In addition to documentary films, the series will present narrative films, short films, works-in-progress, and film music showcases, featuring the filmmakers and composers in person to introduce the film, moderate discussions and facilitate Q&A discussions with audiences. An outdoor screening is also planned for August.

What makes a person want to reveal private family history to a wide public? What makes us want to watch a movie that accomplishes that act? Natalia Almada (El General) and Dana Perry’s Boy Interrupted) documentaries are unflinching, brooding, unapologetically dark, and personal. Almada, who won the Festival’s Directing Award: U.S.

In Barking Water, the latest film from Sundance Institute Lab alum Sterlin Harjo, Irene (Casey Camp-Horinek) takes Frankie (Richard Ray Whitman) on one last road trip, driving him from the hospital across Oklahoma to see his daughter and grandchild. Along the way, they meet and spend time with friends, family, and random strangers, each encounter shedding a bit more light on the couple’s on-again, off-again relationship and the complicated nature of love and regret. After a recent screening of the film, the director and actors gathered to answer questions from the audience, offering insights into how and why the film was made.

Stanley Nelson has been writing, directing, and producing documentary projects for more than two decades. His 2009 Sundance Film Festival entry, Wounded Knee, is the fifth and final episode in his series chronicling key moments in Native American history and culture (the series airs on PBS’s American Experience). Wounded Knee centers on the events that took place among inhabitants of the Pine Ridge Reservation in 1973 and the occupation of the town Wounded Knee as an act of resistance against the U.

Park City, UT–The jury and audience award-winners of the 2009 Sundance Film Festival were announced tonight at the Festival’s closing Awards Ceremony hosted by actor Jane Lynch in Park City, Utah. Films receiving jury awards were selected from the four categories: U.S.

PARK CITY, UTAH — The 2009 Sundance Film Festival is pleased to announce that Adam, directed by Max Mayer, is the recipient of this year’s Alfred P. Sloan Prize. The prize, which carries a $20,000 cash award to the filmmaker provided by the Alfred P.

Sin Nombre, Cary Joji Fukunaga’s harrowing first feature, is one of the most emotionally devastating films in the Festival lineup this year; it is also one of the most thrilling and emotionally redemptive. Sin Nombre, which was supported by the Sundance Institute Labs, is the story of two Central American immigrants, Sayra (Paulina Gaitan) and Casper (Edgar Flores), whose journey from Honduras, through Mexico, and into America is the same one an estimated 70,000 Central Americans take every year in an attempt to leave behind the numbing poverty of their lives. They perch uneasily on top of Mexican freight trains, and it’s far from a safe passage.