Dear Friends,When I arrived at Sundance Institute in 1996, I was surprised that many American artists seemed woefully disconnected from theatre-making outside our country’s borders. I set out to change that. After all, if we artists do not model a borderless life, who will? I knew I had to shift our lens, our perspective.
We take the color white for granted—the brilliant white of Styrofoam cups, sunscreen, skimmed milk, and the lines on tennis courts. To produce it, manufacturers use titanium dioxide as a pigment, found in its most common natural form in a mineral called rutile. Around a third of the world’s rutile is in Sierra Leone, which sits on 259 million metric tons of the stuff (currently valued at around $1000 per ton).
I didn’t do film school. I was a dancer and started making raw stop-motion shorts when touring with David Byrne. After 150 shows, I came to realize that dance enabled people to understand the music.
A worldwide movement towards gender parity in film is gaining momentum. Not only have at least 15 new digital platforms, production companies, artist collectives, and committees devoted solely to women-driven content cropped up in the last year, but a host of television showrunners and directors have committed to diversifying their teams. Ava DuVernay staffed all women directors on her OWN drama Queen Sugar, and Melissa Rosenberg did the same for Marvel’s second season of Jessica Jones.
To coincide with Indigenous People’s Day, we’re opening submissions to the Time Warner Native Producers Fellowship to support U.S.-based Native producers in their professional development and the advancement of their projects.
Kevin Brooks was one of five winners of the 2015 “What’s Next?” Short Film Challenge, in partnership with Adobe Project 1324, and a Sundance Ignite Fellow who received year-round mentorship and networking opportunities, including a trip to the 2016 Sundance Film Festival. Below he shares insights gained from his past year as an Ignite Fellow and calls on filmmakers between the ages of 18 and 24 to submit their projects by September 26 for a chance to be one of the winners of the 2016 “What’s Next?” Short Film Challenge. Click here to learn more.
Sundance Institute’s commitment to uplifting the voices of Native artists is woven throughout the organization’s history, as the Native American and Indigenous Program has built and sustained an Indigenous film circle throughout the 22 years of its formal existence within the Institute. Through sustained and continuous support of filmmakers with grants, Labs, mentorships, public programs and the platform of the Sundance Film Festival, great strides have been made in nurturing an Indigenous-created body of cinema while supporting the growth of Native American and Indigenous participation in the film industry. In the spirit of supporting Indigenous filmmakers, we’re highlighting the Program’s alumni that were recently invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
As 2016 rolls on, Women at Sundance fellows past and present continue to pursue new creative endeavors and make headlines.Pamela Romanowsky’s award-winning film The Adderall Diaries was released this past March by A24, the company that brought you The Witch, Room and Ex Machina.Gabrielle Nadig recently returned from producing a short documentary in Alaska for Tribeca Digital Studios and Allergan’s #ActuallySheCan campaign.
Today, with the groundswell of press coverage and industry buzz about the paucity of women working in film, there is no question Hollywood is aware we’ve got a problem. But while the momentum is great, zeitgeist moments can be dangerously fleeting. In an effort to ensure gender parity is more than just a hashtag, a multitude of web platforms are greenlighting and financing content directed by women.
I thought this was one of the most well-structured, choreographed, and executed events of its kind I’ve attended. Very little fat, lots of practical advice, and a real earnest sense of wanting to establish mentorships.”
Our groundbreaking Women at Sundance research revealed that the most frequent barrier facing independent women filmmakers was lack of access to film financing due to male dominated networks.
Arriving in Oxford this year with the Sundance Institute delegation had the feeling of a homecoming. I have been lucky to have participated in the Skoll World Forum through their Stories of Change partnership four times, since Maren Grainger-Monsen and I brought the social change makers and stars of our documentary film The Revolutionary Optimists to participate in a panel on youth leadership. Experiencing their meaningful interactions with the Stories of Change community was exciting, and I have been lucky enough to work on film projects now with several Skoll Awardees—GoodWeave, Healthcare Without Harm, and Health Leads among them.
At this year’s Skoll World Forum, I spoke on a panel about Empathetic Storytelling and the Moral Imagination and referenced Bruegel’s “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” and the Auden poem “Musee des Beaux Arts’ that is now its companion.
The tiny white legs of Icarus disappearing into the sea are the subject of the work but, off to one side and barely visible, they will pass into the depths unnoticed unless someone calls attention to them. That act of drawing the eye to the urgent unwitnessed is an essential work of many documentary filmmakers.