Liza Johnson attended the 2008 Screenwriters and Directors Labs with Return, her first narrative feature film. With principal photography wrapping in upstate New York last November, she has just completed the 10th week of editing on Return. The film features Linda Cardellini as a soldier coming home from a tour of duty, and also stars Michael Shannon and John Slattery.

The 2011 Festival may have come and gone, but you’ve still yet to meet all eight of the Sundance Film Festival shorts programmers. Todd Luoto has worked as the Los Angeles in-house programmer since 2006. If you’ve called asking a random shorts question, you probably talked to him.

We are facing a crisis.In 1981, with a grant from the NEA, Robert Redford founded the nonprofit Sundance Institute. In the past 30 years our artist development programs and Sundance Film Festival have supported world-renowned, ground-breaking work and introduced a global audience to the best in new independent film and theater.

The 2011 Festival may have come and gone, but you’ve still yet to meet all eight of the Sundance Film Festival shorts programmers. Lisa Ogdie is our true renaissance woman on the Sundance Film Festival team. In addition to assisting Festival Director John Cooper and managing public programming, Lisa still finds time every fall to fulfill a unique, but invaluable, role on the shorts programming team.

In the week before the masses arrived in Park City for this year’s Sundance Film Festival, a more intimate gathering was held in the snowy mountains that are home to the Sundance Resort: our annual January Screenwriters Lab. Fifteen fellows came together with sixteen creative advisors to dig into their feature screenplays and explore issues of craft, storytelling, and communicating personal vision. In the process, a deep sense of creative revitalization and community was shared by all.

Two of the international films in the Festival this year, Mad Bastards, from Australia and directed by Brendan Fletcher, and Knuckle, from Ireland and directed by Ian Palmer, deal with family violence. Mad Bastards follows the angry adult TJ, his estranged 13-year-old son, the possible legacy of domestic violence, and the transformation from a young boy to a man. Although it is a fiction film, it is based on real people, places, and events and uses some of the real people as actors.

UCROSS, WY – The 2011 Sundance Institute Playwrights’ Retreat at Ucross began today and will run through February 25 in Ucross, Wyoming. This unique residency program offers playwrights and theatre composers — both emerging and established artists — peer mentorship, professional growth, and a chance to explore unpressured creativity at an idyllic 20,000 acre cattle ranch in northeastern Wyoming. The Playwrights Retreat, supported by the Sundance Institute Theatre Program, is made possible through the generosity of Ucross Foundation.

There was a reason the film industry buzz humming through Park City seemed particularly insistent during this year’s Festival. Whether it’s because two of the critical stand-outs from last year’s Festival — Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone and Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids Are All Right — fared well at the box office, or because the economy appears to be slowly recovering, nearly twice the 14 films sold to distributors during the 2010 Festival have been acquired this year, 27 as of now. Nine of 16 U.

Victoria Gan is sophomore at Princeton University majoring in politics and is on the executive board of the campus film club Subtitles Film Society. She attended the 2011 Sundance Film Festival through the Film School Pass program and wrote about her Festival experience below.In a word, Sundance is immersion.

NEW YORK, NY — Sundance Institute today announced the artists and projects selected for its 2011 Theatre Lab to be held at The Banff Centre in Alberta, Canada, from March 27-April 17. The centerpiece of Sundance Institute’s Theatre Program, the Theatre Lab is a three-week developmental retreat designed to provide a private, creative environment for playwrights, directors, composers and librettists to devise and refine new work with the support of creative advisors, full casts and rehearsal space.  This year, Sundance has 31 fellows or generative artists, including playwrights, composers, directors and creative teams.

Park City, UT-The Jury, Audience, NEXT! and other special award-winners of the 2011 Sundance Film Festival were announced tonight at the Festival’s Awards Ceremony hosted by Tim Blake Nelson (star of Flypaper which premiered in this year’s Premieres section) in Park City, Utah. Highlights from the Awards Ceremony can be seen on the Festival website, www.sundance.

Hi everyone, and welcome to the live blog for the 2011 Sundance Film Festival Awards Ceremony. I’m Eric Hynes, writer for the Sundance website, and I’ll be your eyes and ears throughout tonight’s festivities. With traditional host the Park City Racquet Club closed for renovations, this year’s closing night Awards Ceremony moves a few miles north of Park City to the Basin Recreation Fieldhouse at Kimball Junction.

It’s an aspect of filmmaking that gets very little attention, and that very few people in the film industry know how to talk about. So rather than shed just a little light on the subject, Sundance Film Festival and BMI positively flooded it. Ten directors and eleven composers crowded onto the stage at Sundance House Presented by HP on Wednesday afternoon for “Music and Film: The Creative Process,” a roundtable discussion on the process of scoring music for film.

When asked about his favorite Festival experience thus far, veteran filmmaker David Zellner is quick to respond: “Sharing our feature Goliath with an enthusiastic audience. A close second was eating hamburgers on Main Street with Magic Johnson, Gaspar Noe, and Louie Anderson.”To call the Zellner Bros (David and Nathan) “seasoned vets” doesn’t fully summarize how crazy and uncommon their run has been.

Kelly Reichardt has a long relationship with Sundance, from her first feature River of Grass (1994) through the popular Old Joy (2006) and this year’s Meek’s Cutoff, the story of Western pioneers lost on the trail. Before River, Reichardt worked in the art department on many independent films, including seminal features by Hal Hartley and Todd Haynes’s Poison; she is still close friends with Haynes. “I worked on a lot of people’s first film,” Reichardt remembers.