Category: News

When Hollywood makes movies about the war in Iraq, location shooting often takes place in Jordan or the deserts of the American Southwest, which provide a safe, if not always convincing, substitute for the real thing. But when Iraqi filmmaker Mohamed Al-Daradji‏ embarked on his latest feature film Son of Babylon, he decided that only authentic locations would suffice. The movie, which is playing in the Festival’s World Cinema Dramatic Competition lineup, was filmed over 65 days in seven different cities in Iraq – including war-torn Baghdad and Basra.

As two films in the Festival diabolically illustrate, claustrophobia has more than one instigator. Both Rodrigo Cortés’s Buried and Adam Green’s Frozen prey on the primal fear of confinement, and each film follows through on the blunt threat of their titles. In Buried, a man (Ryan Reynolds) awakens to find himself buried alive, with only a cell phone and Zippo lighter to battle darkness, panic, and death.

Three documentaries in this year’s Festival approach America’s overseas conflicts from very different angles, yet at heart they are all stories about the human costs of war. For all their differences, these three films—Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington’s Restrepo, Amir Bar-Lev’s The Tillman Story and Laura Poitras’s The Oath—represent an evolution of the contemporary war documentary. Eight years after the beginning of the conflict in Afghanistan and nearly seven years after the invasion of Iraq, none of these films concern themselves with questions over the wisdom or justifications for these missions, and instead focus on the complex realities of what’s happened since.

If it’s true that the most prolific trash talkers in sports are the ones who consistently back it up with stellar play, former NBA superstar Reggie Miller might just be the best trash talker ever. With a relentlessly disconcerting gift for on-court chatter coupled with a deadly jump shot that plagued the New York Knicks and its fans (most notably Brooklyn’s own Spike Lee, with whom Miller shared a celebrated personal rivalry) for most of the 1990s, Miller was an unsuspecting but deadly thorn in the side of a franchise destined for but never achieving championship greatness. Award-winning director Dan Klores (Crazy Love; Ring of Fire: The Emile Griffith Story) expertly catches the sights, and most notably the sounds, of this rivalry in Winning Time: Reggie Miller vs.

A son of Nobel Prize–winning magical realist Gabriel García Márquez, Rodrigo García is an artist in his own right. His credits as writer and director include Things you can tell just by looking at her, which won the Best Film Prize in Un Certain Regard at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival; Nine Lives, which won the 2005 Locarno Film Festival, was nominated for several Independent Spirit Awards; and Ten Tiny Love Stories and Fathers and Sons. His pilot credits include Carnivale, Big Love, Six Degrees, and In Treatment, on which he has also served as executive producer.

Park City, UT—The 2010 Sundance Film Festival this evening announced the jury prizes in shorts filmmaking and gave honorable mentions based on outstanding achievement and merit. The awards were presented at a ceremony held in Park City, Utah. These award recipients will also be honored at the Festival’s Awards Ceremony hosted by David Hyde Pierce on Saturday, January 30.

“Everything has a tragedy. You think your tragedy is the only tragedy? Everyone has one.”
These opening lines of Amy Grappell’s short documentary Quadrangle are spoken by her mother.

“We see nothing,” says Yael Hersonski, the director of the powerful documentary A Film Unfinished, which will have its world premiere in the World Cinema Documentary Competition. “Every day we are bombarded by images of atrocity, but we cannot really see them. We simply look, and say, ‘Oh dear.

It can be easy to assume that the world’s refugees are the unfortunate and senseless collateral damage of political, military, and racial repression. But what of the countless millions of souls who fall victim to the devastating effects of climate change and are forced to move from their homelands to other parts of the world where they may not be so welcome? Veteran filmmaker Michael Nash circled the globe to put a very real and poignant face on the migratory effects of environmental change in Climate Refugees, which premiered Saturday night at the Festival. After the screening, Nash took part in a Q&A along with producer Justin Hogan, and environmental migration expert Koko Warner.

The Runaways is a love letter to the era and place it portrays—the rock scene in L.A. during the mid to late ’70s—but it’s also a glitzy ode to the sneering little punks who made up The Runaways.

“Do you really think I’m flat-chested?””You look really good, and that’s all that’s important. You don’t want to overdo it.”The last lines of Metropolitan, Whit Stillman’s seminal tale of Upper East Side class and love returned to the Egyptian Theatre in Park City yesterday after 20 years.

Anna Deavere Smith casts a wide net. An award-winning playwright, chameleonic actress, published author, and university professor, Smith’s range belies not only brilliance, but an inexhaustible curiosity. Her art is born of a conviction that there’s always more to know, always assumptions to upend, always more to life and people than we’re willing to acknowledge.