Category: News

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.

‘Running From Crazy’ makes its UK premiere at the Sundance London film and music festival this week at the O2. Click here for screening times and to purchase tickets.
Fighting in Italy on the front lines of World War II, dueling with a charging bull in Pamplona, wrangling with a marlin off the deep-sea coast of Cuba—these are larger-than-life images frequently conjured up by the mention of the name Hemingway.

Read Part 1 and Part 3 also.
The Baqa’a camp, home to 104,000 people Palestinian refugees, is about 40 minutes outside of Amman. Administered by the United Nations, it was created in 1948 and is one of 13 camps for the close to two million Palestinian refugees who live in Jordan.

While Roger Ross Williams was in Zimbabwe filming the 2010 documentary short Music by Prudence, which would make him the first African American to win an Academy Award for directing and producing a film, he was already wondering about his follow-up project.“I noticed how intensely religious and conservative Africa is,” he recalls. “There’s an evangelical religious hold on sub-Saharan Africa, and that was in the back of my mind when I was thinking of what to do next.

British documentarian Eva Weber has made short poetic docs something of a specialty. With a wide range of topics, her astute, ethereal gaze brings prominence and grace to otherwise invisible objects. Her work evokes comparisons to bite-sized symphonies and visual tapestries.

Last January, as audience members inquired about arguably the most artistically liberated film at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, director Francesca Gregorini explained, “It’s pretty dark up here. I figure I’d try to get it out, make it a little lighter, give some of my darkness to you.” A few short months later, with the UK premiere of Emanuel and the Truth About Fishes at Sundance London only days away, that sentiment holds true for Gregorini.

Read Part 1 and Part 3 also.It is Wednesday, April 17, 2013, and my first time on this trip talking to students who are not filmmakers or college age. Over the last few days I’ve had an opportunity to have in depth discussions with film students at the Royal Film Commission and at the ASE Institute (Audio Sound Engineering Studio) and with college students at the American University of Madaba.