Category: News

On May 18 in Los Angeles, the Sundance Institute Film Music Program will host the third annual ComposersLab: L.A. featuring a series of informative conversations and interactive networking opportunities with renowned composers and industry professionals.

As part of Hilton Worldwide’s support of the Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program (DFP), the winners of this year’s Hilton Worldwide LightStay Sustainability Fund & Award participated in interviews to talk about their documentary film projects. LightStay is Hilton Worldwide’s proprietary system for sustainability performance and a core foundation of the company’s global sustainability strategy. The fund and award will go towards supporting the Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program, as well as annually recognizing and awarding grants to up to five documentary film projects focusing on sustainability issues.

Los Angeles, CA — Sundance Institute today announced the 13 projects selected for its annual June Directors and Screenwriters Labs, taking place at the Sundance Resort in Utah from May 27 through June 27. Under the leadership of Michelle Satter, Founding Director of the Institute’s Feature Film Program, and the artistic direction of Gyula Gazdag, the Fellows selected for this year’s program include emerging filmmakers and projects from the United States, Europe, Mexico, Peru and Somalia.
At the Directors Lab, Fellows work with an accomplished group of Creative Advisors, professional actors and production crews to shoot and edit key scenes from their screenplays.

Event Takes Place June 5 in Los Angeles, Hosted by Tiffany & Co.
Los Angeles, CA — Sundance Institute today announced filmmaker Ryan Coogler (Fruitvale Station) will be honored with the Vanguard Award, presented by Tiffany & Co. Actress Kerry Washington will present the award to Coogler at the third annual ‘Celebrate Sundance Institute’ benefit on June 5, 2013 in Los Angeles.

Eliza Hittman’s Forever’s Gonna Start Tonight bristles with the kind of authenticity and longing that most feature films struggle to communicate. With a clarity of vision, the short details a Russian teen in Brooklyn who makes an unimaginable choice in order to protect her aging father. Hittman’s natural gifts for honing in on inner teenage struggles blossomed with her debut feature It Felt Like Love, a similarly toned character study that brings out rarely-represented NYC environments.

In FILM FORWARD’S first trip to the Arab World, Jordan proved to be a great location. Filmmakers Ligiah Villalobos (screenwriter for La Misma Luna) and Laura Nix (co-director of The Light In Her Eyes) traveled to Jordan to participate in the program by screening their films and hosting Q&A’s and discussions throughout the week.  
Team FILM FORWARD was based in Amman and held programs throughout the city and also took day trips to other rural communities within the area including Salt, Madaba and Karak.

Fellow Sundancers, as you may know, I am a two-time Sundance Grand Jury Prize–winning documentary filmmaker (best known for DIG! and We Live in Public), and my main focus for the past two years has been A Total Disruption, a portal which seeks to tell emotionally engaging stories about top entrepreneurs and innovators who are using technology to re-design the world we live in.The mission is to humanize technology and make it more accessible so that everyone can apply its wisdom to do what they envision—better, faster, and more efficiently. I realized that there are too many incredible wizards rethinking and inventing the way we live to wait to hone it down to a 90-minute film (where many of them will end up on the cutting-room floor), so I decided to use the very thing I’m obsessively following, the internet, to pull back the veil on the filmmaking process and directly share the inspiring portraits of driving innovators as I find them.

Chloé Zhao is a New York–based independent filmmaker from Beijing, China, and an alum of the 2012 Screenwriters and Directors Labs.
I was very fortunate to participate at the Sundance Institute January Screenwriters Lab in 2012 with my screenplay Lee, a modern story about three Lakota teens who live on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Their story is in the here and now and captures not only the challenges in their lives but also the unique humor, tremendous beauty, and the great sense of family that runs strong throughout the Lakota community.

Topaz Adizes is a man on a mission. An internationally award-winning filmmaker whose many shorts have screened all the over the world, he puts substance into his works. Typically, his films are shot with very basic elements and a free-form style, almost resembling low-budget documentaries.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 also.
It’s been exactly one week since we’ve been back from Jordan so I’ve had a chance to reflect back on this amazing trip.  As I was thinking about what I would write about for my last blog post, I started to remember, not just the big things that made this trip so special – the beautiful people of Jordan, my quick but unforgettable visit to The Citadel, the incredible response to our movies at all the screenings, or our magical day in Petra – but also all the random and unexpected little things that made the trip unique, hilarious, delicious…and so much fun!  So let me tell you about those things:
1) John Stewart was on the same flight as me from JFK to Amman.

*Update*: Yung Jake’s E.m-bed.de/d is nominated for an MTV O Music Award for Best Interactive Music Video.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 also.
On the 4th day of the program, our public screening in downtown Amman at the Rainbow Theater is nearly full with close to 250 people attending. After the film, the Q&A starts and immediately it feels electric, I think because so many Syrians have come.