Category: News

Park City, Utah — With less than two weeks until the program is announced, and less than three
months until Day One, Sundance Institute today announces new hires on its programming team and new initiatives to
deepen support for independent storytellers and broaden access to the Festival. The 2019 Festival will showcase work
drawn from over 14,200 submissions, a record high.
Kim Yutani, the Festival’s recently-named Director of Programming, said: “This
year’s record-breaking number of submissions are phenomenally strong: we’re invigorated and inspired by
the work we’ve been seeing.

ReFrame and IMDbPro Recognize Gender-Balanced TV Programs including “GLOW,” “Insecure,” “Jane the Virgin,” “The Handmaid’s Tale,” “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” and “This Is Us”
Los Angeles, CA — ReFrame™ (ReFrameProject.org), a coalition of industry professionals and partner companies founded by Women In Film and Sundance Institute—whose mission is to increase the number of women of all backgrounds working in film, TV and media—and IMDbPro (imdbpro.

Fifteen Filmmakers Ages 18 to 24 Selected from Short Film Competition to Receive Year of Creative and Professional Mentorship, All-Expenses-Paid Trip to 2019 Sundance Film Festival

Los Angeles, CA — Sundance Institute and Adobe announced the class of 2019 Sundance Ignite Fellows today, chosen from a broad global pool of more than 1,200 applicants. The fifteen 18-to-24-year-old filmmakers selected for this one-year fellowship hail from three continents, with creative groundings spanning from personal documentaries to commercial content to narrative shorts.
“This year’s Sundance Ignite fellows are an immensely talented group of emerging artists, creating stories that are at the forefront of what’s next in our culture.

The Sundance ShortsCast is now live on Soundcloud, where you can listen to upcoming filmmakers discuss the unique and crazy backstories behind their short films that played the Sundance Film Festival. These bite-sized podcasts were recorded during the Festival and go up every Monday and Wednesday. To kick off the series, we checked in with ShortCast host and Sundance Film Festival senior programmer Mike Plante.

Independent Vision and Voice Recognized Across All Stages of Production

LOS ANGELES — Thirty-three nonfiction works from seventeen countries comprise the latest Sundance Institute Documentary Fund and Stories of Change Grantees, announced today. 81% of the supported projects have at least one woman producer or director; 48% originate from outside the US.

“From renowned Argentinian director Lucrecia Martel addressing the legacy of 500 years of colonial history in her first feature documentary, to first-time Chinese director Runze Yu exploring a profoundly intimate domestic space, these are the vivid individual threads that form the narrative tapestry of our culture and we are proud to support them.

From Unrestricted Grants to Custom-Tailored Support, Documentary Film Program Celebrates Innovative Approaches to Nonfiction Filmmaking
Los Angeles — Ten independent filmmakers working at the vanguard of inventive artistic practice in story, craft and form will receive distinctive opportunities from Sundance Institute’s Art of Nonfiction Fellowship and Fund.
“This year’s cohort reflects our continuing desire to explore the space in between,” said Tabitha Jackson, Director of the Documentary Film Program. “The space between art and film, between photography and moving image, between poetry and social justice, between artist and audience.

In an age when streaming corporations are creating and exhibiting great films and challenging the idea of what independent film is, when traditional borders between television, film, and art are liquefying, and when the act of creating art is under new consideration thanks to developments in artificial intelligence—what does it mean to be a programmer or curator? I sat down with some of my favorite programmers and curators for a series of face-to-face interviews to discuss working in a time of great change and innovation. It feels like we programmers are on shifting grounds. The usual parameters that lend meaning to our society and to our work are changing and I wanted to hear how these developments were affecting the world’s best practitioners.

Sundance Institute and Science Sandbox Celebrate
Innovative, Nonfiction Storytelling With Tailored Financial and Creative Support
Park City — Sundance Institute, in collaboration with Science Sandbox, an initiative of the Simons
Foundation, announced the inaugural five filmmakers and projects being supported by the Science Sandbox Nonfiction
Initiative, a new program aiding innovative artists in creating science-focused works and in connecting those
projects with audiences. The program aims to elevate the voices of independent artists who are working at the
intersection of science and nonfiction storytelling, encourage critical thinking, promote educated discourse and
highlight the overlap of science and art.
The five selected artists will receive non-recoupable grants and access to Sundance Institute’s year round
continuum of support, which can help address creative, financial and production issues.

We lost Audrey Wells, one of the greats this past week. Audrey was a beautiful, fierce, brilliant and spirited mother, wife, friend, writer, and devoted creative advisor at the Sundance Institute Screenwriters Lab.
I first met Audrey in 1999 at our Sundance Film Festival when we premiered her feature directorial debut Gueniviere, which won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award.

Tonight, for the first time I can remember, I feel out of place in the country I was born into and the citizenship I’ve loved my whole life. For weeks I’ve watched with sadness as our civil servants have failed us, turning toward bigotry, mean-spiritedness, and mockery as the now-normal tools of the trade.How can we expect the next generation to step up and serve, to be interested in public life, and to aspire to get involved when all we show them is how to spar, attack, and destroy each other?It’s hard to blame young people for calling us out, and pointing to our conflicts between the values we declare, and those we stand behind only when it’s convenient to partisanship.

Fifth Year of Program Introduces 12 Fellows and 9 New Television Pilots Selected for Lab and
Customized Year-Round SupportLos Angeles — Sundance Institute has selected nine original television pilots for support at its
fifth annual Episodic Lab, which runs from September 27 to October 2 at the Sundance Mountain Resort in Utah. With
topics and formats ranging from half-hour comedies about friendships put to the test to historical dramas about the
struggle for Native American land sovereignty, the broad scope of this year’s projects – and the diverse backgrounds
of their creators – speak to the Institute’s long-term support of the episodic format. The Episodic Lab is the
centerpiece of the Institute’s year-round continuum of support for emerging television writers.

Greatness is rarely birthed in places of comfort. As the saying goes, “No risk, no reward.”
Whereas comfort is often born, bred, and laid to rest in one place, risk is an expedition into infinity.