Category: Festival

Our time on the mountain during the 2020 Sundance Film Festival was split between the premieres of 118 features, 74 shorts, 8 episodic works, and 9 special events, not to mention countless parties, panels, and live music. (Oh, and snorkeling around the pool at Festival HQ for Spaced Out, a New Frontier project.)
We also celebrated our longtime Festival director, John Cooper, who closed out his tenure in style with a choreographed “Last Dance” routine (complete with backup dancers) at our Awards Ceremony; we welcomed our new Festival director, Tabitha Jackson, previously director of our Documentary Film Program; and we gathered around a bonfire at dusk to kick off a new decade and imagine a brighter future.

Updated 9:19 P.M. MT
U.

Max Richter isn’t your average composer. Sure, he’s written plenty of dreamy film scores, but he’s also undertaken something a bit more complicated: an eight-hour composition meant to be listened to during a full night’s sleep.
Aptly titled Sleep, the album is quite a commitment to listen to—and even bigger of a commitment to perform live.

I think it’s safe to say that a lot of us have tried VR at least once at this point—I know I’ve played my fair share of beat saber. But New Frontier, the Festival’s category for cutting-edge media technology, offers VR technology and experiences that I’m sure you haven’t experienced before. I quite literally wandered with my mouth hanging open; from live performances to headset VR, there was something thrilling around every corner.

“For myself as a young queer person growing up in Miami, seeing Walter on TV living his life so valiantly, so unabashedly himself, gave me hope,” said Mucho Mucho Amor co-director Kareem Tabsch at a Sundance Film Festival screening of his new documentary. “I saw in him a sense of otherness and difference that I recognized in myself. And it was incredibly powerful.

In her third feature-length documentary, Kirsten Johnson films her father, Dick Johnson, dying over and over again in ridiculously comical setups. The truth is, he is dying … eventually. Although her father is suffering from dementia and could be gone any day, he is—spoiler alert!—still among the living.

Shalini Kantayya’s documentary Coded Bias premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January as part of the U.S. Documentary Competition.

Patricia Vidal Delgado’s first feature film follows senior Aleteia (Monica Betancourt), who’s just transferred to Compton High School. She’s more interested in continuing her underground activism than making friends, although she’s careful not to jeopardize her all-important scholarship to UCLA.
When she’s paired up with the popular Rosarito (Kailei Lopez) for a school assignment, she’s surprised to be taken under the other girl’s wing.

The first thing you’ll experience in The Mountains Are a Dream That Call to Me is the single gong of a bell. In Buddhist tradition, bells are often used to begin meditation sessions, to ward off negativity, and to bring listeners back to the present moment. And that’s precisely what this bell sound does for the viewers—invites them into a new space.

“I really love this film not [only] because it is funny, not [only] because it gave us a breath of fresh air, but it’s also a really smart film,” said senior programmer John Nein at the Wednesday screening of Save Yourselves! “It’s a very, very clever satirical idea of urban culture, of social connectedness, of narcissism. It made us think; it made us laugh.”
The story begins with young Brooklyn couple Jack and Su coming to the realization that they need to disconnect from the technology they’ve become overly dependent on.

Growing up in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, 24-year-old filmmaker Lance Oppenheim and his sister/producer, Melissa, were surrounded by retirement homes. “It’s impossible to not hear about The Villages when you’re growing up in Florida,” he said at the premiere of his debut feature-length documentary, Some Kind of Heaven.
He’s not kidding: The Villages, the nation’s largest retirement community, stretches out over 30 square miles, comprised of identical little houses arranged in perfectly arranged little rows, occasionally punctuated by a community swimming pool or a golf course.

In the chilling documentary The Dissident, director Bryan Fogel explores the events leading up to the brutal murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. Fogel’s previous film, Icarus, won an Academy Award and a 2017 Sundance Film Festival Special Jury Prize.
During a Q&A at this year’s Fest, he told the audience why he decided to make a film about Khashoggi.