Category: News

January will usher in the 30th anniversary of the Sundance Film Festival, and chatting with Festival Director John Cooper and Director of Programming Trevor Groth, one can sense that things aren’t so different than they were at Robert Redford’s inaugural Festival in Park City, Utah. As independent film has evolved from its renegade-spirited roots to an “accepted form of creative expression,” the tenets of the Sundance Film Festival remain unaffected.
In deconstructing  the program for the 2014 Festival, Cooper and Groth’s sentiment is especially reflective.

Park City, UT — Sundance Institute announced today the films selected for the U.S. and World Cinema Dramatic and Documentary Competitions and the out-of-competition NEXT <=> section of the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, January 16-26 in Park City, Salt Lake City, Ogden and Sundance, Utah.

Somewhere along the line, the original tenets of Thanksgiving—you know, the “thanks” and “giving” parts—became lost in the cooking shuffle. A holiday predicated on blessing the year’s harvest became an exercise in gluttony, whether that be regarding food or even shopping. To align with the contemporary mores of autumn’s holiday, check out these 5 Sundance-supported films that train their lenses on one of America’s favorite pastimes: eating.

Film Independent announced the nominations for its 29th Annual Independent Spirit Awards this morning with actresses Octavia Spencer and Paula Patton presenting the honors. A total of 24 films supported by Sundance Institute or the Sundance Film Festival received recognition, led by three noms for Grand Jury Prize winner Fruitvale Station and a pair for Upstream Color, helmed by Shane Carruth, who garnered a Best Director nomination.
Winners will be announced at the Spirit Awards on Saturday, March 1, 2014.

Over the past eight years, Sundance Institute’s New Frontier program has been building a community of brilliant creative minds from a broad range of artistic, scientific, and technology backgrounds, who are “geeked” about playing together in the story innovation sandbox. 
Last month, the New Frontier Story Lab brought a fraction of that community to the ancient mountains of Utah to share what they’ve learned from their experiments and to help develop the visionary projects of our 2013 Fellows. 
Before the Lab, my Sundance colleagues and I felt like we were constructing some kind of convergence experiment, asking ourselves questions like 
“What if the Academy Award-nominated writer who conceived the ingenious twist to Cape Fear that iconic talents Scorsese, Nolte and DeNiro used to rivet audiences; was in the room with a former Disney Imagineer, whose transmedia campaigns brought millions of fanboy/fangirl fantasies to life? And, we added the digital artist who (from a lighthouse in Iceland) studied the inner workings of Bjork’s mind to created fluid iPad interfaces that allowed millions of her adherents to explore and interact with her imagination?” 
What would happen?

“What if the Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker who used rare footage to depict the power of rhetoric, from its darkest manifestations (i.

The official online store of the 2014 Sundance Film Festival is now open to the public and stocked with a range of apparel, Sundance collectibles, and exclusive Artist Editions from seven hand-picked Sundance alumni (check them out on Pinterest). Below, designer Todd Oldham talks about the inspiration behind some of this year’s designs for the 30th Anniversary of the Sundance Film Festival. Click here to visit the store and get a head start on your shopping.

Ticket Packages on Sale 10am GMT Wednesday 27 November online.
The O2, London, 25 November 2013 — Sundance Institute and AEG Europe today announced that the 2014 edition of the Sundance London film and music festival will take place from 25-27 April at The O2. Hosting the same number of films and events as previous years, next year’s festival will feature an expanded filmmaker development programme, including the return of the Sundance London Short Film Competition and a Shorts Workshop.

New York, NY — Sundance Institute today announced the artists and projects selected for its first Theatre Lab on Zanzibar, which concluded yesterday. The two-week exchange and development program (November 10-24) is part of the Sundance Institute East Africa initiative, now in its eleventh year, which is the only professional program on the continent that creates peer to peer mentorship and exposure opportunities between theatre artists in East Africa and the U.S.

“It has to be safer over there,” says a young boy in Juarez, Mexico, known as the murder capital of the world, looking through a fence toward El Paso, Texas, just 50 yards away and consistently ranked as one of the safest cities in the U.S. It’s the first of countless haunting, often brutal, harrowing images that fill Narco Cultura, a blistering examination of a culture that has made narcotics traffickers into iconic outlaws and the new models of fame and success.

Beginning Wednesday, December 4, we’ll be unveiling the program for the 2014 Sundance Film Festival right here on sundance.org. Films will be announced in four stages, leading off with the U.

LOS ANGELES, Calif. — Sundance Institute’s Native American and Indigenous Program announced an open call for applications for its 2014 Native Lab Fellowship, a two-stage artist development program that begins with a filmmakers lab in May 2014. Four projects are selected each year for the Fellowship program, which is open to Native American, Native Hawaiian and Alaska Native film artists.

LOS ANGELES, CA — The nonprofit Sundance Institute today announced the appointment of Tabitha Jackson to the position of Director, Documentary Film Program. In this role, Jackson will be a member of the Institute’s senior leadership team and supervise a staff of eight.  Relocating to Los Angeles, she will begin December 6, 2013, reporting directly to Executive Director Keri Putnam.