Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady directed the 2012 Sundance Film Festival Official Selection “Detropia,” a documentary exploring the rise and fall of Detroit. They are using Kickstarter to raise funds for an independent release of their film. Click here to help bring “Detropia to theaters.

Take one cursory glance at the annals of the Sundance Film Festival and you’ll notice a persistent and invariable trend: first-time directors. The theme is as astounding as it is inspiring. In 2012 alone, 44 of the 112 feature-film selections were crafted by first-time directors, and a handful of others had made their debuts at Sundance in years past.

Park City, UT — Sundance Institute announced today that Paris is Burning, by director Jennie Livingston, has been added to The Sundance Collection at UCLA, 21 years after its premiere at the 1991 Sundance Film Festival. The negative and other key film elements from the film are now safely archived and will undergo critical preservation work.
Paris is Burning documents “The Children” – black and Latino, part of the New York under class and homosexual.

Most people who identify as LGBTQ+ can vividly recall the first time they identified with a character on screen. It lets us know that we’re not alone, and in a way, it validates us or even changes how we think about ourselves. And long before every Hollywood romantic comedy had a snarky gay best friend (I happen to love Rupert Everett’s character in My Best Friend’s Wedding, by the way), independent films were home to some of the first fully dimensional LGBTQ+ characters and stories.

Cheers to 15 years of the Sundance Institute’s Summer Film Series!
Wednesday night we launched our 2012 Summer Film Series with Joe Berlinger’s Under African Skies. It was a brisk summer evening at Red Butte Garden, but over 700 people attended. Prior to the screening we had a lively dance and drum performance by Best of Africa.

You’d be hard-pressed to find any socially minded documentarian whose highest goal isn’t to make a film that becomes a catalyst for direct and positive social change. But meaningful transformation, social or otherwise, is often so stubbornly resistant to even the most compelling storytelling that any shift is slow in coming and often undetectable until years after the relevant film has left theaters.But documentary filmmakers Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering seem to have beat those steep odds in spectacular fashion with this week’s news that the Pentagon is revamping its rules on reporting and prosecuting military sex crimes.

It’s easy to draw parallels between photographer Hank Willis Thomas’ foray into transmedia storytelling and the blossoming New Frontier programs at Sundance Institute. Thomas has expanded his craft to include sculpture, painting, video, and other mediums, seemingly in harmony with the introduction of New Frontier at the Sundance Film Festival and the subsequent New Frontier Story Lab. Appropriately, he is an alumni of last year’s inaugural New Frontier Story Lab and most recently premiered his transmedia megalogue project Question Bridge: Black Males at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival.

Los Angeles, CA — Sundance Institute today announced the selection of 24 Documentary Film Fellows representing nine film projects to participate in the 2012 Documentary Edit and Story Labs, June 22-30 and July 6-14 at Sundance Resort in Sundance, Utah. This year’s addition of a second Lab doubles the amount of documentary films and filmmakers the Institute is supporting in the post-production phase.
The Documentary Edit and Story Labs support the creative development of Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program and Fund (DFP) filmmaker teams in critical moments of the postproduction process.

Parenting is an inexact science. In fact, it’s probably not a science at all. There is no hard-and-fast guideline, no determinate order of operations to raising a happy and successful child, and the work generally outweighs the leisure.

Welcome to “Short Order,” a new bi-weekly feature, where we’ll serve up recomendations for the most interesting and innovative short films available on the web every other week. Many of our selections will be timed to a news or cultural event. But we are most interested in providing an entertaining and edifying cinematic diversion on alternate Friday afternoons, often delivered with a dose of context about the filmmaker and information about what’s going on in the short filmmaking community.

Los Angeles, CA — Filmmaker Benh Zeitlin and philanthropist George Gund will be the first-ever recipients of the Sundance Institute Vanguard Awards, presented by Tiffany & Co. The awards will be given at the second annual ‘Celebrate Sundance Institute’ benefit, June 6 in Los Angeles.
The Vanguard Awards were founded last year to mark the 30th anniversary of the Sundance Institute Feature Film Program  and its founding director, Michelle Satter.

Los Angeles, CA — Sundance Institute and Cinereach today announced the 15 projects that will receive a combined $200,000 in grants this year as part of the Cinereach Project at Sundance Institute. In addition to grant awards, selected artists receive creative support at a Sundance Institute Lab, the Sundance Institute Creative Producing Summit or the Sundance Film Festival. Each project was identified by the Institute’s Documentary Film Program or Feature Film Program.

“This is the sound of the world changing,” observed a grinning Cara Mertes, Director of Sundance Institute’s Documentary Film Program and Fund, as she took the stage amid deafening applause. The audience in front of her had gathered for the first ever Stories of Change Impact Lab, where teams of innovators and artists had spent the better part of the past week huddled together at the intersection of documentary storytelling, new media and social justice. 
To say the crowd was diverse would be a wild understatement.

It’s hard to truly comprehend how much the short film world has taken us by storm. “Viral video” is a dictionary term and news item. You can get a college degree by making shorts.