Category: News

PARK CITY, UT — Sundance Institute and Mahindra today announced the winners of the 2014 Sundance Institute | Mahindra Global Filmmaking Award, in recognition and support of emerging independent filmmakers from around the world. The winning directors and projects are Hong Khaou, MONSOON from Vietnam/UK; Tobias Lindholm, A WAR from Denmark; Ashlee Page, ARCHIVE from Australia; and Neeraj Ghaywan, FLY AWAY SOLO from India.
The awards were presented at a private ceremony at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, currently underway in Park City, Utah.

Beginning today, SEPIDEH, an official selection of the 2014 World Documentary Competition section of the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, is available to purchase exclusively on iTunes: www.itunes.com/sepideh.

Sundance.org is dispatching its writers to daily screenings and events to capture the 10 days of festivities during the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. Check back each morning for roundups from the previous day’s events.

Park City, UT — Sundance Institute today announced I Origins as the winner of the Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, as well as the recipient of the Alfred P. Sloan Lab Fellowship, which is presented through the Institute’s Feature Film Program.

Park City, UT — Sundance Institute, with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, today announced a new project that will harness the power of independent film to create a global conversation about extreme hunger and poverty. The Sundance Institute Short Film Challenge will spur the production of documentary and narrative films – through a global open call for three-to-eight-minute submissions – that will celebrate imaginative solutions real people are creating to overcome the challenges of extreme hunger and poverty. The project supports Sundance Institute’s mission to empower independent storytellers and connect their work to communities around the world.

How do we quantify the power of story? In this rapid-click era of social media “likes,” video on demand, and unprecedented access to story, the ability to measure impact is more problematic than ever. On Day 3 of the Sundance Film Festival, four panelists with keen–albeit disparate–relationships with story sat on the Power of Story: Weights and Measures panel to begin parsing these questions. 
Dave Isay, founder of StoryCorps; Louie Psihoyos, director of The Cove; Jess Search, CEO of BRITDOC; and Paul J.

Sundance.org is dispatching its writers to daily screenings and events to capture the 10 days of festivities during the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. Check back each morning for roundups from the previous day’s events.

Park City, UT — Today at a gathering of filmmakers, producers and members of the film distribution industry, at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, Keri Putnam, Executive Director, Sundance Institute, and Cathy Schulman, President, Women In Film Los Angeles, announced significant growth of a collaborative initiative designed to achieve gender parity and sustainable careers for women working in filmed entertainment.
Recent expansions of the initiative, which launched two years ago, include a deepened mentorship program, new financing intensives, an expanded network of allied organizations and new and updated research, the results of which were also released today. The study was commissioned by Sundance Institute and Women In Film Los Angeles and was conducted by Stacy L.

Oh, the humanity. Over the years, New Frontier at Sundance, the Festival’s annual showcase for vanguard works of new, immersive and interactive media, has demonstrated not only how the line between our own bodies and the technologies we employ has blurred, but also how the latter, via multiplying screens and cell phones and transmedia, continues to redefine how we think of the former. But a funny thing happened on the way to this year’s “Primordial Pool”: Humanity reasserted itself.

Sundance.org is dispatching its writers to daily screenings and events to capture the 10 days of festivities during the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. Check back each morning for roundups from the previous day’s events.

Park City, UT — Innovative documentary films addressing some of the most important issues facing the world today received a boost with a $5 million grant to the Sundance Institute. Christopher Stone, president of the Open Society Foundations, announced the dollar-for-dollar matching grant at the Sundance Film Festival.
“My foundations have long supported arts and culture–especially film–as a means to build and strengthen open societies around the world,” said George Soros,
Founder and Chairman of the Open Society Foundations.

Not only is The Overnighters, Jesse Moss’s U.S. Documentary Competition entry at this year’s Festival, a powerful and complexly moving work of cinema verité filmmaking, it’s also a profoundly honest one.