Category: News

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The Great Communicators: Documentary Filmmakers Take Over the Sundance Film Festival

If you tell one tiny story well, it becomes universal.—Amir Bar-Lev, director of The Tillman SoryPeople, rather than politics or polemics, were what mattered to the directors behind three of the most topical and socially vital films in this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Veteran broadcaster Lynne Kirby moderated “The New War Stories” panel at the Filmmaker Lodge on Monday, which brought together documentarians Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger (Restrepo), Amir Bar-Lev (The Tillman Story), and dramatic filmmaker Mohamed Al-Daradji (Son of Babylon) to discuss their different approaches to making films about contemporary war and conflict.

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Scientists and Filmmakers Meet to Discuss Obsolescence and Sustainability at the Sundance Film Festival

The group of scientists and filmmakers speaking at the Discovery Panel at Filmmaker Lodge seemed to want to discuss nothing but dinosaurs. Metaphorically speaking, and otherwise.Moderator Joe Palca of NPR led the discussion with Harvard physics professor Peter Galison, paleontologist Paul Sereno, filmmaker Braden King, neuroscientist Darcy Kelley, and filmmaker Diane Bell, whose film Obselidia was the winner of the Alfred P.

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Four Takeaways from the 2010 Sundance Film Festival

As the madness winds down at tonight’s awards ceremony, the 2010 Sundance Film Festival will have been chewed over in a thousand conversations. Yet each topic has an expiration date. Whether it be DIY’s direction, breakout filmmakers, or undiscovered gems, Sundance changes the chatter every year.

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Riding the Next Wave: Talking Queer Cinema at the Sundance Film Festival

“We’re all going to become straight,” HOWL co-director Rob Epstein blurted out near the end of the Queer Cinema’s Next Wave panel earlier this week. He was joking, of course, as he answered an audience member’s question about “where the community is moving as far as the stories that are going to be told” in the future. The panel, which was organized by Sundance Institute Associate GLAAD (Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) and held at the Filmmaker Lodge on Tuesday, featured Epstein and his longtime co-director, Jeffrey Friedman; their HOWL producer Christine Walker; and New Frontier performance artist Kalup Linzy, who screened a clip from his alternately funny and trippy video series Sweet, Sampled, and LeftOva.

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Listening to the Story: A Peek Inside Sundance Institute’s Composers Lab

Regardless of the size and type of a film, music plays a crucial role in setting its tone. Whatever plays over the speakers alongside the image, actors, and script, is going to alter how the audience perceives the movie.The trick is enhancing the goals of the film, accompanying what the other aspects of the film are doing, while leaving room for the movie itself.

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Q&A: Kick In Iran

Part intimate profile of two determined women, part revealing glimpse into life in Iran, and part pulse-pounding sports film, Kick In Iran follows 20-year-old Taekwondo sensation Sara Khoshjamal-Fekri and her trainer Maryam Azarmehr as they train and fight for Olympic gold. Documentarian Fatima Geza Abdollahyan shoots these two fascinating women in their homes, in gender-segregated gyms, at prayer and play, and finally to the Olympic games in Beijing. Even though Iranian women are still discouraged from high-impact athletics, Sara’s success becomes its own agent for change.

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A Chat with Russell Banks, the Screenwriter Behind ‘Affliction’ and ‘The Sweet Hereafter’

Novelist Russell Banks has been publishing books for nearly 40 years, but in terms of film he’s still something of a newcomer. In 1997, when he was well into his 50s and long suspicious of the business of movies, two of cinema’s most renowned auteurs, Paul Schrader and Atom Egoyan, involved him in the process of adapting his novels Affliction and The Sweet Hereafter, respectively. Both films were critically acclaimed, and Banks has remained active within the world of independent film ever since.

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