Sunday, 15 April 2012
Orthodox Easter Sunday, Addis Ababa — “And what is that?” I ask, pointing to a bowl of what appears to be a red gritty substance. “Oh? That ? That is baked blood — from the lamb we slaughtered this morning. Please – take some.

Addis Ababa, Ethiopia — Sundance Institute today announced the eight artists currently participating in the 2012 Theatre Stage Directors Workshop in Addis Ababa. The one-week exchange and development program, taking place through Sunday, is part of the Sundance Institute East Africa (SIEA) initiative, which supports the work of theatre artists in East Africa by creating exchange and exposure opportunities between U.S.

On Sunday afternoon, when writer-director Josh Radnor debuted his second feature film, Liberal Arts, to a liberally enthusiastic audience at the Sundance Film Festival, the Eccles erupted with a sustained explosion of applause, laughter, and full-on whistles that lasted throughout the entire screening, culminating in a standing ovation.
Radnor’s first film happythankyoumoreplease premiered in the Dramatic Competition at the 2010 Festival and took home the Audience Award. And judging by last night’s screening, his follow-up appears poised to follow a similarly crowd-pleasing trajectory.

The American Dream took a real beating in 2011, leaving the national ethos bruised and battered beyond recognition. The Occupy Movement dealt the most sustained and visible blows to the consumerist ideals that have created vast economic inequality, with its nationwide demonstrations of mass discontent with the entrenched systems of power and corruption. While protesters were camped out in cities across the country, several social justice-minded filmmakers were putting the finishing touches on their hard-hitting non-fiction features, each of which questions the tenets most central to our national identity and fundamental beliefs – notions of hard work, success, generational leveling up, the centrality of home ownership, and overall national prosperity and success.

Los Angeles, CA — Keri Putnam, Executive Director of Sundance Institute, today announced that the Institute’s Artist Services program has expanded to include four additional platforms and storefronts on which Institute-supported artists can make their work available to the public. New agreements with Microsoft Xbox, SnagFilms, Sony Entertainment Network’s Video Unlimited service and VUDU complement existing relationships with iTunes, Amazon Instant Video, Hulu, Netflix, SundanceNOW and YouTube. Films will be available this summer on the platforms and storefronts announced today.

London, 12 April 2012 — Sundance Institute and The O2 announced today that BRIT Award-nominated psychedelic pop band Guillemots and Academy Award-winning musician/actor Glen Hansard will join the Opening Night Event An Evening with Robert Redford and T Bone Burnett at the first-ever Sundance London film and music festival on 26 April at The O2. Guillemots and Glen Hansard will perform separately during the event.
These performances will enhance the conversation between filmmaker, actor and Sundance founder Robert Redford and 12-time Grammy Award winning  musician, songwriter, and soundtrack and record producer T Bone Burnett about the relationship between film and music.

The pack of feral teenagers at the center of the 1987 cult thriller, River’s Edge inhabited a very different world, where ‘text’ had yet to become a verb and Facebook was what happened after nodding off while pulling an all-nighter cramming for finals. But in the twenty-five years since the release of director Tim Hunter’s amorality tale (which is screening in the Special Events section of Sundance London) about a group of high school students torn between self-interest and disinterest in the wake of a murder, the film’s stark portrait of suburban disaffected youth remains as resonant as it is relevant to the spate of tragedies caused by angry, affectless teens (from Columbine to last month’s Ohio school shooting) that continue to capture headlines with alarming and increasing frequency.
Still, for all its prescient insight into the dark heart of the modern teenage soul, River’s Edge ignited equal parts passion and derision among audiences and critics.

In the summer of 2009, I spent four months in Armenia directing HERE, a 35mm landscape-obsessed road movie that chronicles an impulsive relationship between an American satellite-mapping engineer (Will Shepard, played by Ben Foster), and an Armenian expatriate art photographer (Gadarine Nazarian, played by Lubna Azabal). 
The film was developed in part at the 2007 Sundance Institute Screenwriters and Directors Labs and premiered at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. HERE begins its U.

In the summer of 2009, I spent four months in Armenia directing HERE, a 35mm landscape-obsessed road movie that chronicles an impulsive relationship between an American satellite-mapping engineer (Will Shepard, played by Ben Foster), and an Armenian expatriate art photographer (Gadarine Nazarian, played by Lubna Azabal). The film was developed in part at the 2007 Sundance Institute Screenwriters and Directors Labs and premiered at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. HERE begins its U.

Doug Wright’s career has been defined by its distinct undefinability. Wright, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2004 for I Am My Own Wife, his one-man-play based on the life of a WWII-era German transvestite, has distinguished himself as chameleonic storyteller, whose work runs the gamut from emotionally-nuanced Broadway hits (Grey Gardens) to commerical sensations (The Little Mermaid), from idiosyncratic independent films (Quills) to Steven Spielberg-produced spectacles (Memoirs of a Geisha, Untitled George Gershwin Project). Wright possesses a shape-shifter’s ability to comfortably straddle multiple formats, genres, and budgets (sometimes incorporating all these elements in the same project).

As indie filmmakers, we often don’t have millions of marketing dollars (or any at all) to spend on turning our films’ titles into household names. Getting “organically” ranked highly by Google and other leading search engines is the single most cost-effective way to created a sustained marketing presence for your film.
SEO, or search engine optimization, is akin to a dark art that every savvy website owner undertakes in an effort to get their site(s) ranked highly by Google, and to a lesser extent Bing and Yahoo.

The United States has only five percent of the world’s population; but five decades into the war on drugs, it has 25 percent of the world’s prisoners—many of them convicted of nonviolent drug crimes. Despite huge numbers of drug-related incarcerations, illegal substances are cheaper, purer, and more widely available than ever. This begs the question: Why does the United States imprison so many of its citizens to so little effect?In his documentary The House I Live In, Eugene Jarecki examines the political and economical motivations behind the war on drugs.

An Oversimplification of Her Beauty plays at Sundance London beginning Apri 26. Click here for ticket information.
“I didn’t know I was making a feature until I was doing it,” says Terence Nance of his innovative third film, An Oversimplification of Her Beauty, screening in the New Frontier program.

On Monday, writer-director-actor Julie Delpy anxiously walked onto the stage of the Eccles Theatre to introduce her new film 2 Days in New York. “Sequels are sometimes better than originals. Like, 2010 was better than 2001,” Delpy joked as she nervously premiered the second part of a series.

What do Stephen Colbert, Jeopardy!, and four ground-breaking Sundance-supported documentaries have in common? Very little. Until today, that is, when they each received a Peabody Award for “outstanding achievements in electronic media, including radio, television, and cable.” For the past 72 years, the University of Georgia Grady College of Journalism and Communications has honored broadcast journalists and documentary filmmakers with an award celebrating the year’s most enterprising, edifying, enlightening (and, in Colbert’s case, uprorariously entertaining) electronic storytelling.