Category: News

The pack of feral teenagers at the center of the 1987 cult thriller, River’s Edge inhabited a very different world, where ‘text’ had yet to become a verb and Facebook was what happened after nodding off while pulling an all-nighter cramming for finals. But in the twenty-five years since the release of director Tim Hunter’s amorality tale (which is screening in the Special Events section of Sundance London) about a group of high school students torn between self-interest and disinterest in the wake of a murder, the film’s stark portrait of suburban disaffected youth remains as resonant as it is relevant to the spate of tragedies caused by angry, affectless teens (from Columbine to last month’s Ohio school shooting) that continue to capture headlines with alarming and increasing frequency.
Still, for all its prescient insight into the dark heart of the modern teenage soul, River’s Edge ignited equal parts passion and derision among audiences and critics.

In the summer of 2009, I spent four months in Armenia directing HERE, a 35mm landscape-obsessed road movie that chronicles an impulsive relationship between an American satellite-mapping engineer (Will Shepard, played by Ben Foster), and an Armenian expatriate art photographer (Gadarine Nazarian, played by Lubna Azabal). The film was developed in part at the 2007 Sundance Institute Screenwriters and Directors Labs and premiered at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. HERE begins its U.

Doug Wright’s career has been defined by its distinct undefinability. Wright, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2004 for I Am My Own Wife, his one-man-play based on the life of a WWII-era German transvestite, has distinguished himself as chameleonic storyteller, whose work runs the gamut from emotionally-nuanced Broadway hits (Grey Gardens) to commerical sensations (The Little Mermaid), from idiosyncratic independent films (Quills) to Steven Spielberg-produced spectacles (Memoirs of a Geisha, Untitled George Gershwin Project). Wright possesses a shape-shifter’s ability to comfortably straddle multiple formats, genres, and budgets (sometimes incorporating all these elements in the same project).

As indie filmmakers, we often don’t have millions of marketing dollars (or any at all) to spend on turning our films’ titles into household names. Getting “organically” ranked highly by Google and other leading search engines is the single most cost-effective way to created a sustained marketing presence for your film.
SEO, or search engine optimization, is akin to a dark art that every savvy website owner undertakes in an effort to get their site(s) ranked highly by Google, and to a lesser extent Bing and Yahoo.

On Monday, writer-director-actor Julie Delpy anxiously walked onto the stage of the Eccles Theatre to introduce her new film 2 Days in New York. “Sequels are sometimes better than originals. Like, 2010 was better than 2001,” Delpy joked as she nervously premiered the second part of a series.

The United States has only five percent of the world’s population; but five decades into the war on drugs, it has 25 percent of the world’s prisoners—many of them convicted of nonviolent drug crimes. Despite huge numbers of drug-related incarcerations, illegal substances are cheaper, purer, and more widely available than ever. This begs the question: Why does the United States imprison so many of its citizens to so little effect?In his documentary The House I Live In, Eugene Jarecki examines the political and economical motivations behind the war on drugs.

An Oversimplification of Her Beauty plays at Sundance London beginning Apri 26. Click here for ticket information.
“I didn’t know I was making a feature until I was doing it,” says Terence Nance of his innovative third film, An Oversimplification of Her Beauty, screening in the New Frontier program.

What do Stephen Colbert, Jeopardy!, and four ground-breaking Sundance-supported documentaries have in common? Very little. Until today, that is, when they each received a Peabody Award for “outstanding achievements in electronic media, including radio, television, and cable.” For the past 72 years, the University of Georgia Grady College of Journalism and Communications has honored broadcast journalists and documentary filmmakers with an award celebrating the year’s most enterprising, edifying, enlightening (and, in Colbert’s case, uprorariously entertaining) electronic storytelling.

LONDON — Sundance Institute and The O2 announced today the programme of events and performances that will take place in the unique Cinema Café and Music Café spaces at the first-ever Sundance London film and music festival, 26-29 April at The O2.Both the Cinema Café and Music Café are elements of the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, USA, the premier independent film festival in the United States – and will take place in festival hub the Sundance London Inc Club, located on the ground floor of The O2. Events at the Cinema Café were programmed by Sundance Institute, and performances at the Music Café were produced by the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers.

Beijing, China — FILM FORWARD: Advancing Cultural Dialogue, an initiative of Sundance Institute and the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, took place in China March 14-22, 2012. In collaboration with the U.S.

Kunming, China, it turns out, is mostly cement and just as polluted as other Chinese cities, but it didn’t matter because we were staying in what is left of the original city, facing a large lake full of lotus and water lily that is surrounded by vividly planted flower beds and many flowering trees. It is eternally spring in Kunming because although the city is in southern China close to the Laotian border, it sits on the shoulders of the Tibetan plateau, so the weather is balmy, mild, and vaguely sunny (through the smog) year round. Best of all is an island in the middle of the lake, connected by walkways to the shore, where all the “senior citizens” from the surrounding province spend the day, every day, dancing, playing a wild variety of single-stringed instruments and flutes, and listening to music.

Where to start, where to start?  I have been trying to put down some thoughts about my incredible experiences screening Somewhere Between with Film Forward in India…and I finally realized why I have been struggling so much – there is a certain sense of overwhelm I still can’t shake from being in India.  I’ve been home for almost a week, and yet it is still difficult to describe.   Conveying the experience of India – and mind you, I was only in Mumbai and Delhi for several days each – is as complex as the country itself.