Category: News

Eight Independent Projects Aim to Spark Change
Park City, UT — The non-profit Sundance Institute, in collaboration with Luminate, the global philanthropic organization, today announced six new projects, joining two which had been previously announced, which are being supported by the Sundance Institute | Luminate Fund. The fund provides non-recoupable grants to independent artists working across documentary, narrative, episodic and emerging media whose work display a strong potential for social and cultural impact.
The six new recipients of the grants are And She Could Be Next, directed by Grace Lee and Marjan Safinia; A Cop Movie, directed by Alonso Ruizpalacios; The Fourth Man, directed by Alberto Arnaut; The Forgotten Margins, directed by Mark Grieco; Influence, directed by Diana Neille and Richard Poplak, which will premiere at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival; and La Vocera, directed by Luciana Kaplan.

Filmmaker Tamara Kotevska had never made a feature before arriving in Bekirlija, Macedonia, to shoot Honeyland. As she recounted to Filmmaker magazine, she and her co-director, Ljubomir Stefanov, spent the next three years living and working in the remote village without running water or electricity, dealing with extreme temperatures as well as swarms of bees. “It all seems like a fairytale,” Kotevska and Stefanov said of their incredible journey, after Honeyland premiered to great buzz and acclaim at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival.

From the tiny Harlem apartment housing a 40-year-old playwright turned rapper to a bustling newsroom in the Philippines to the haunted Vermont abode of novelist Shirley Jackson, the women-directed films premiering at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival later this month will take you on a far-reaching journey. This year, of the 56 competition films, 46% are directed by women—an especially significant statistic when you consider that just 4.2% of the 100 top-grossing American films are made by female directors every year (a number that thankfully jumped higher to 10.

Welcome to our comprehensive list of all the major panels, events, and gatherings hosted at official Sundance Film Festival venues that center and celebrate voices from traditionally marginalized communities. Hosted by Sundance Institute, allied organizations, regional collaborators, artists collectives and more, these events raise discourse on equity, representation, and inclusion in the broader media landscape.
Join these artists and industry leaders that are changing the narrative of the future.

Following founder and President Robert Redford’s original vision, Sundance Institute has remained committed to supporting Indigenous artists throughout the Institute’s history. This has established a rich legacy of work and has supported more than 350 filmmakers through labs, grants, mentorships, public programs, and the platform of the Sundance Film Festival. The Institute’s Indigenous Program has a global focus and through its work strengthens Indigenous cinema.

Twenty-five percent of Americans live with disabilities, yet when disability is portrayed on-screen, Hollywood often misses the mark. “I loathe ‘overcoming disability’ storylines,” visual artist and filmmaker Alison O’Daniel, who is also hard of hearing, told us at Sundance Institute’s recent Impact Intensive, underscoring the importance of empowering artists with disabilities to tell their own stories.
With the launch of our Outreach & Inclusion and Impact, Engagement and Advocacy programs at Sundance Institute, we’ve collaborated in the field to convene and support artists with disabilities whose creative practice and work explores access, justice, neurodiversity, sound, and vision.

It’s official—we’re only three weeks away from the start of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. And while you’ve probably glanced at the program, booked your lodging, started looking at your outerwear options, and cleared out your biggest suitcase in anticipation of your flight to Park City, we know from experience that there are plenty of things people tend to overlook in the lead-up. For that reason, we’ve enlisted our veteran staffers and volunteers to provide tips and tricks for making the most of your time on the mountain.

Our 2019 Knight Alumni grantees are not easy to fit into a box—this year’s awardees include a Detroit-based harpist, a multidisciplinary artist with a PhD in mythological studies, and a filmmaker who sponsors Indigenous delegations to come speak at the United Nations forum in New York. We knew their projects would span genres and topics, and that they would use their grants in innovative ways—and we weren’t disappointed.
Knight Alumni Grants, a new avenue of support from our partnership with the John S.

For a second year, the Press Inclusion Initiative, our effort to cultivate a more representative press corps at the Sundance Film Festival, returns by providing top tier access to freelance critics from underrepresented communities. With returning support from partners Critical Minded, Netflix, Open Society Foundations, and Rotten Tomatoes, the initiative again additionally made available a pool of 51 unrestricted cash stipends to support Festival attendance for critics, freelancers, and journalists from backgrounds underrepresented in the critical mainstream, with an emphasis on people of color, women, and people with disabilities. Selection criteria included the strength of each applicant’s submissions, prior work, and their coverage plans for the 2020 Festival.

LOS ANGELES — Fifteen screenwriters will convene to advance their independent projects at Sundance Institute’s January Screenwriters Lab, taking place at the Sundance Mountain Resort in Utah from January 17–22, 2020. At the Lab, the screenwriters will immerse themselves in a rigorous and holistic creative process, working to further develop their scripts with the mentorship of accomplished creative advisors.
The January Screenwriters Lab has been created and organized under the leadership of Sundance Institute’s Feature Film Program Founding Director Michelle Satter and Deputy Director Ilyse McKimmie.