Category: Artist Spotlight

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.

In a month dedicated to observing the achievements of black Americans, we are witnessing the emergence and successes of Sundance alum Ryan Coogler’s new film Black Panther. The Marvel film recorded the second-biggest four-day opener of all time at the domestic box office with $242 million, while grossing $427 million worldwide.
The film marks an indelible moment for an industry that fails to fully reflect on screen the vivid diversity that exists off of it.

Last November, Tisha Robinson-Daly attended the Sundance Institute Philadelphia Screenwriters Intensive, supported by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and led by filmmaker Katherine Dieckmann.

Earlier this week, director and editor Pedro Kos presented the fourth annual keynote speech during Sundance Institute and the Karen Schmeer Fellowship’s Art of Editing Reception. Below we’ve published Kos’ remarks in full.Thank you.

English actress Andrea Riseborough is having a moment. She’s featured in a whopping four films at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, including the U.S.

In 1980, a 19-year-old moves away from home to a small college in upstate New York. Upon arriving, strangers wave hello, approach him to chat, and treat him as if they already know him. The teenager soon realizes that someone who looks exactly like him attended that school the year before, and he discovers his identical brother, whom he was separated from at birth.

It’s not often that a documentary film achieves both newsworthy timeliness and long-term, long-form, longitudinal depth. But that’s exactly what Stephen Maing pulls off with Crime + Punishment, a project that’s been years in the making, following more than a dozen characters, comprising over a thousand hours of footage, and yet the issues at hand and its attendant legal proceedings, couldn’t be more active or immediate. Building off of several shorter films made earlier in the decade, Maing (whose previous feature, High Tech, Low Life premiered at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival) spent time with New York City police officers who had decided to go public with their frustrations over what they were being asked to do—effectively meet arrest quotas that target citizens of minority communities, even though such quotas have been deemed illegal.

Since her debut as an HIV-infected teen in Larry Clark’s button-pushing drama Kids in 1995, Chloe Sevigny has portrayed nearly every type of character imaginable. The versatile actress/fashion icon has depicted the Midwestern girlfriend of a trans man in 1999’s Boys Don’t Cry, the dowdiest sister-wife of a polygamist on HBO’s series Big Love, a scheming Jane Austen social climber in 2016’s Love & Friendship, and even a legless nymphomaniac in FX’s American Horror Story.
Now she’s found a starring role to really sink her teeth into.