Category: Artist Spotlight

Before her film debuted at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival, and before it was made available to millions of homes and devices last week via Netflix, director Kitty Green met with Sundance.org to discuss Casting JonBenet. It’s the second feature for the Australian born filmmaker, following Ukraine Is Not a Brothel, which tracked a group of topless feminist activists in Ukraine whose efforts at social change seemed undermined by the shadowy figures who had orchestrated and funded their rise.

All These Sleepless Nights opens Friday, April 7, at the Nuart Theatre in Los Angeles before expanding throughout the country. The following interview was originally published during the film’s premiere at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival. The music pounds, young people flirt and dance and mope and opine, and the camera swings all around them, doing more than just watch.

Librettist Elise Thoron and composer Frank London’s new opera “Hatuey: Memory of Fire” premieres in Havana this March. Below they retrace their journey at the Sundance Institute Theatre Program’s residency at Ucross, their recent rehearsals, and the cultural significance of opening their play in Cuba.
Sitting having a daiquiri at the Nacional Hotel, gazing at the vast sea, down the Malecon with palm trees golden in afternoon sun, words from our new Cuban nightclub opera Hatuey Memoria del Fuego float in our head: “S’z himl un vaser un shtilkayt in bloy…” (Sky and water and stillness in blue…) Our hero Oscar was a young poet who came to Havana from the frozen steppe of the Ukraine.

Before finding out that I’d been accepted into the Sundance Ignite Fellowship program, I was at a bit of a crossroads in my filmmaking career.I’d just graduated with a film degree from Northwestern University and my first foray into the work world wasn’t exactly what I’d expected. Transitional periods can be lonely.

Sundance. Since the Festival’s humble beginnings in 1978, the name has become synonymous with boundary-pushing filmmaking of all shapes and forms — to such an extent that a common goal amongst aspiring independent filmmakers is to make it there, someday. As the Festival has grown in size and scope, however, “getting into Sundance” has become an increasingly difficult proposition for that particular demographic, especially as digital filmmaking tools have given more people than ever the ability to make a movie.

It felt so strange leaving the airport in Salt Lake City and leaving the bubble I’d been caught up in for almost a week. I am sure the latitude and jetlag was behind some of it, but not all of it. I tried to grasp the feelings from what I had experienced and it was just too surreal and overwhelming to even know where I should begin.

When I was 9, I took a computer coding class. We all worked on monochromatic monitors – the instructor explained that computers would someday show us more colors. He was describing monitors with a more robust color profile, but I naively thought he meant that computers would allow us to see more colors than are in our current rainbow.

If you followed pop
culture in the late ’90s, the name JT LeRoy was inescapable and in many ways
inscrutable. Thought to be a 15 year-old, drug-abusing transgender prostitute
from rural West Virginia, LeRoy’s byline began to appear in magazines. Soon,
two novels,
Sarah and The
Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things
, were published to great acclaim and
even greater fanfare.

“As an activist, do you think you can be objective?” they asked.I was
quiet. It wasn’t the first time I’d gotten this question, but the stakes seemed
higher now.

In recognition of the crucial role of editors in the art of storytelling, the Feature Film Program has created a series of initiatives to focus on the craft. The Rough Cut Screening series is a year round initiative that supports approximately 20 feature films in post production, providing feedback to projects that are alumni of the Feature Film Program. Two other initiatives – the Sally Menke Memorial Editing Fellowship and the Editing Intensive – took place just this past month in conjunction with our annual Directors Lab.

The Asian American Fellowship recently selected Eliza Lee as its third-annual fellow. With support from the A3 Foundation, the fellowship aims to further the presence of Asian American voices in independent film by supporting a writer or writer/director on the development of their feature screenplay.
Lee, whose most recent credit includes the screenplay for A Beautiful Lie about crime novelist Patricia Highsmith, recently attended the Sundance Institute Screenwriters Intensive and spoke with us about her creative origins, inspiration culled from the Hong Kong New Wave, and how she hopes to balance the scales when it comes to women on screen.

It’s been a few years since filmmaker Jeff Orlowski premiered his viscerally jarring climate change documentary Chasing Ice, which tracks photographer James Balog’s ambitious efforts to gather visual evidence of the earth’s melting glaciers. Balog, originally a skeptic of climate change, deploys customized cameras across the Arctic to provide the first-ever depiction and most palpable example of mankind’s indelible carbon footprint.
Earlier this year, Orlowski was awarded with the first-ever Sundance Institute | Discovery Impact Fellowship for his work in elevating awareness around environmental protection.