Category: News

Matthew Paul Olmos is currently in Wyoming attending the Sundance Institute Playwrights Retreat at Ucross Foundation, an 18-day writing colony where five playwrights and two theatre composers convene each year to workshop their written projects. Below is Olmos’s recent dispatch from Ucross.As a handful of playwrights and Wyoming locals make our way into the very close quarters inside the tiny, propeller’d plane, several people make comments at how tiny an aircraft this really is.

What better way to perpetuate the quixotic romantic desires that reside in our partners’ minds than by watching films that validate those delusions of love? This Valentine’s Day, we’re offering a short list of Sundance-supported love stories as a remedial to such lofty figments—unfortunately, the reality is not quite as attractive. From an idyllic summer love that concludes with an acerbic breakup in 500 Days of Summer to a lingering (albeit passionate) romance that traverses drug abuse and other pitfalls in Keep the Lights On, these six stories of (not always mutual) affection will jolt even the most deluded lover from their reverie.
SYLVIE’S LOVE
“The sumptuously photographed [Sylvie’s Love] feels like something Douglas Sirk—director of such classics as Magnificent Obsession and Imitation of Life—might have shot decades ago,” Sharon Knolle reported for Sundance.

Starting in this month, the Sundance Film Festival will be programming short films on YouTube’s Screening Room channel, adding two new films every Friday not currently available on the website. Already a vast world for exciting short films, from intense fiction and documentary to risk-taking experimental works (and of course the wild world of cats), Sundance will be pulling Festival favorites already on YouTube into a single page alongside the new films. With millions of videos online, having a curated page provides a history of the Festival and a single go-to portal for great short films.

Kirby Dick’s 2012 Sundance Film Festival Audience Award winner confronts one of the most disturbing and underpublicized injustices in America today: an epidemic of rape in the U.S. armed forces.

In 2005, Palestinian farmer Emad Burnat purchased a video camera to capture the birth of his youngest son, Gibreel. That camera, along with four others that would see destruction, created the foundation for a coursing documentary that bravely chronicles the denizens of Bi’lin—a small Palestinian farming town—as they form a peaceful resistance against the Israeli army’s attempt to encroach upon their land.
Progressing over five years, 5 Broken Cameras invokes the personal evolution of Burnat’s family in its sobering depiction of the persistent upheaval in Bi’lin, with Gibreel’s tainted youth set as the film’s emotional backdrop.

Leading up to the 85th edition of the Academy Awards on Sunday, February 24, we’re profiling all 13 of this year’s Sundance-supported Oscar nominees. Click here for the full list of nominees.
Ben Lewin’s 2012 Sundance Film Festival selection The Sessions (fka The Surrogate) yielded a pair of glowing performances from John Hawkes and Helen Hunt, but—to the dismay of some—only one Oscar nomination.

Filmmakers Stacy Peralta (Bones Brigade: An Autobiography) and Jerry Rothwell (Town of Runners) to Lead Discussions and Workshops
Los Angeles, CA — Sundance Institute and the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities announced today that FILM FORWARD: Advancing Cultural Dialogue will return for a second year to host eight free film screenings, workshops and artist roundtables in Imperial Valley, California, and Mexicali, Mexico, February 26 through March 1. For a full schedule of events visit www.sundance.

Los Angeles, CA — Tiffany Shlain’s award-winning documentary Connected: An Autoblogography About Love, Death & Technology makes its digital premiere today through the Sundance Institute Artist Services access to distribution program, which provides Institute artists with exclusive opportunities for creative self-distribution, marketing and financing solutions for their work. The film premiered in competition at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, was released theatrically in 11 U.S.

Radha Blank | Joy Harjo | Michael John LaChiusa Justin Levine | Matthew Paul Olmos | Stephen Wadsworth
New York, NY — The Sundance Institute Theatre Program has begun the 2013 Playwrights Retreat at Ucross Foundation. The 13th annual writing colony at the 20,000-acre working cattle ranch outside of Sheridan, Wyo. takes place through February 22 and provides a supportive environment for artists to create new work and receive guidance and reactions to it at an early stage.

Read the live updates from the Awards Ceremony below or click here to jump to the full list of winners.
Hi everyone, and welcome to the live blog for the 2013 Sundance Film Festival Awards Ceremony. We’re Eric Hynes and Jeremy Kinser, and we’ll be your eyes and ears for tonight’s festivities.

Park City, UT — Sundance Institute this evening announced the Jury, Audience, NEXT <=> and other special awards of the 2013 Sundance Film Festival at the feature film Awards Ceremony, hosted by Joseph Gordon-Levitt in Park City, Utah. An archived video of the ceremony in its entirety is available at www.sundance.

Many are the filmmakers who’ve made return trips to the Sundance Film Festival. You think of Alex Gibney, the Cal Ripken Jr. of Park City who never seems to miss a year, and Richard Linklater, who’s debuted new films as Sundance for over 20 years.