Category: Artist Spotlight

Sydney Freeland (left) attends a Sundance Institute lab in 2010. © 2010 Fred Hayes for Sundance Institute By Vanessa Zimmer Earlier this year, the Sundance Institute

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Dilma Rousseff, and Michel Temer appear in The Edge of Democracy. By Vanessa Zimmer Earlier this year, the Sundance Institute

Earlier this summer, the Sundance Institute marked its 40th anniversary, and to commemorate the occasion, we caught up with dozens of Institute alumni to learn more about how they brought some of their very first projects from development to debut. In our Straight Out of Sundance series, we’ll be sharing more of their stories with you. Want to learn more about the nonprofit Institute’s year-round work supporting artists around the world — and how you can help? Visit our Membership page today.

As Warsaw-based director Jakub Piątek tells it, shooting his debut feature — a thriller set in the late 1990s with the threat of Y2K looming — during the COVID-19 pandemic felt somewhat fitting. “Our story is claustrophobic, and our protagonists are locked in a TV studio for a couple of hours,” says the director. “After the lockdown, the actors and crew could easily get into that emotional space.

Loira Limbal’s documentary Through the Night is currently streaming at various festivals and online events nationwide; it will open in theaters on December 11. In the meantime, you can watch the trailer here.
Loira Limbal’s Through the Night is set at a 24-hour daycare center in Westchester, New York.

Garrett Bradley’s documentary Time premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, where Bradley took home the Directing Award in the U.S. Documentary Competition.

Latinx Heritage Month begins today,
September 15, and to celebrate, we’ll be spotlighting projects made by Latinx artists with ties
to Sundance Institute and the Sundance Film Festival. First up, watch
our interview with Venezuelan filmmaker Anabel Rodríguez Ríos, director of the 2020 Festival documentary Once Upon a Time in Venezuela.

Anabel Rodríguez Ríos’s trip to Park City this January for the world premiere of Once Upon a Time in Venezuela was a long time coming.

Shalini Kantayya is a Brooklyn-based filmmaker who was an inaugural grantee of the Science Sandbox Nonfiction Initiative in 2018. Her untitled documentary project examines the bias programmed into computer algorithms and how they affect our civil liberties.A group of scientists sits gathered around a sunlit table in a cafeteria with views of New York City, all experts in various fields of machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Theo Anthony is a 2017 Sundance Institute Art of Nonfiction Fellow and the recipient of an artist grant as part of the Science Sandbox Nonfiction Project at Sundance Institute, which aids innovative artists in creating science-focused works.
Over the last six months or so I’ve been sluicing my way through Loraine Daston and Peter Galison’s beautiful and rigorous book Objectivity. If you’ve talked to me for more than 15 minutes since then, I’ve probably told you about it.

This interview was originally published following the world premiere of “Colette” at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival.A lot has changed since the last time Wash Westmoreland attended the Sundance Film Festival. While here in 2006 with Richard Glatzer, his partner and eventual husband, to support Quinceañera, the couple were shocked to win the Audience Award, as well as the Grand Jury Prize for a movie that had begun as a personal conversation about their neighborhood’s gentrification.