Category: News

RECORD-BREAKING 14,259 SUBMISSIONS FROM 152 COUNTRIES

Pahokee, photo by Patrick Bresnan
Park City, UT — The nonprofit Sundance Institute announced today the showcase of new independent
feature films selected across all categories for the
2019 Sundance Film Festival. The Festival hosts
screenings in Park City, Salt Lake City and at Sundance Mountain Resort, from January 24 – February 3, 2019.
The Festival is the Institute’s public program flagship alongside Festivals in London and Hong Kong and other
screenings and events elsewhere throughout the year.

Reimagined Program Expands Former Women at Sundance Fellowship to Include Artists from Underrepresented Communities; Alexandria Bombach (On Her Shoulders) and Yance Ford (Strong Island) Among Artists Supported

Los Angeles — Sundance Institute announced today the eight members of the inaugural class of the Momentum Fellowship, a full-year program of deep, customized creative and professional support for writers, directors, and producers from underrepresented communities working across documentary and feature filmmaking, episodic content, and virtual reality, who are poised to take the next step in their careers.

The Momentum Fellowship evolved from the former Women at Sundance Fellowship, a highly successful model that merited evolution and expansion for impact across a greater cohort of underrepresented communities. Those eligible for this larger, more intersectional program now include artists identifying as women, non-binary, and/or transgender, artists of color, and artists with disabilities.

Park City, Utah — With less than two weeks until the program is announced, and less than three
months until Day One, Sundance Institute today announces new hires on its programming team and new initiatives to
deepen support for independent storytellers and broaden access to the Festival. The 2019 Festival will showcase work
drawn from over 14,200 submissions, a record high.
Kim Yutani, the Festival’s recently-named Director of Programming, said: “This
year’s record-breaking number of submissions are phenomenally strong: we’re invigorated and inspired by
the work we’ve been seeing.

ReFrame and IMDbPro Recognize Gender-Balanced TV Programs including “GLOW,” “Insecure,” “Jane the Virgin,” “The Handmaid’s Tale,” “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” and “This Is Us”
Los Angeles, CA — ReFrame™ (ReFrameProject.org), a coalition of industry professionals and partner companies founded by Women In Film and Sundance Institute—whose mission is to increase the number of women of all backgrounds working in film, TV and media—and IMDbPro (imdbpro.

Fifteen Filmmakers Ages 18 to 24 Selected from Short Film Competition to Receive Year of Creative and Professional Mentorship, All-Expenses-Paid Trip to 2019 Sundance Film Festival

Los Angeles, CA — Sundance Institute and Adobe announced the class of 2019 Sundance Ignite Fellows today, chosen from a broad global pool of more than 1,200 applicants. The fifteen 18-to-24-year-old filmmakers selected for this one-year fellowship hail from three continents, with creative groundings spanning from personal documentaries to commercial content to narrative shorts.
“This year’s Sundance Ignite fellows are an immensely talented group of emerging artists, creating stories that are at the forefront of what’s next in our culture.

The Sundance ShortsCast is now live on Soundcloud, where you can listen to upcoming filmmakers discuss the unique and crazy backstories behind their short films that played the Sundance Film Festival. These bite-sized podcasts were recorded during the Festival and go up every Monday and Wednesday. To kick off the series, we checked in with ShortCast host and Sundance Film Festival senior programmer Mike Plante.

Independent Vision and Voice Recognized Across All Stages of Production

LOS ANGELES — Thirty-three nonfiction works from seventeen countries comprise the latest Sundance Institute Documentary Fund and Stories of Change Grantees, announced today. 81% of the supported projects have at least one woman producer or director; 48% originate from outside the US.

“From renowned Argentinian director Lucrecia Martel addressing the legacy of 500 years of colonial history in her first feature documentary, to first-time Chinese director Runze Yu exploring a profoundly intimate domestic space, these are the vivid individual threads that form the narrative tapestry of our culture and we are proud to support them.

From Unrestricted Grants to Custom-Tailored Support, Documentary Film Program Celebrates Innovative Approaches to Nonfiction Filmmaking
Los Angeles — Ten independent filmmakers working at the vanguard of inventive artistic practice in story, craft and form will receive distinctive opportunities from Sundance Institute’s Art of Nonfiction Fellowship and Fund.
“This year’s cohort reflects our continuing desire to explore the space in between,” said Tabitha Jackson, Director of the Documentary Film Program. “The space between art and film, between photography and moving image, between poetry and social justice, between artist and audience.

In an age when streaming corporations are creating and exhibiting great films and challenging the idea of what independent film is, when traditional borders between television, film, and art are liquefying, and when the act of creating art is under new consideration thanks to developments in artificial intelligence—what does it mean to be a programmer or curator? I sat down with some of my favorite programmers and curators for a series of face-to-face interviews to discuss working in a time of great change and innovation. It feels like we programmers are on shifting grounds. The usual parameters that lend meaning to our society and to our work are changing and I wanted to hear how these developments were affecting the world’s best practitioners.

Sundance Institute and Science Sandbox Celebrate
Innovative, Nonfiction Storytelling With Tailored Financial and Creative Support
Park City — Sundance Institute, in collaboration with Science Sandbox, an initiative of the Simons
Foundation, announced the inaugural five filmmakers and projects being supported by the Science Sandbox Nonfiction
Initiative, a new program aiding innovative artists in creating science-focused works and in connecting those
projects with audiences. The program aims to elevate the voices of independent artists who are working at the
intersection of science and nonfiction storytelling, encourage critical thinking, promote educated discourse and
highlight the overlap of science and art.
The five selected artists will receive non-recoupable grants and access to Sundance Institute’s year round
continuum of support, which can help address creative, financial and production issues.

We lost Audrey Wells, one of the greats this past week. Audrey was a beautiful, fierce, brilliant and spirited mother, wife, friend, writer, and devoted creative advisor at the Sundance Institute Screenwriters Lab.
I first met Audrey in 1999 at our Sundance Film Festival when we premiered her feature directorial debut Gueniviere, which won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award.

Tonight, for the first time I can remember, I feel out of place in the country I was born into and the citizenship I’ve loved my whole life. For weeks I’ve watched with sadness as our civil servants have failed us, turning toward bigotry, mean-spiritedness, and mockery as the now-normal tools of the trade.How can we expect the next generation to step up and serve, to be interested in public life, and to aspire to get involved when all we show them is how to spar, attack, and destroy each other?It’s hard to blame young people for calling us out, and pointing to our conflicts between the values we declare, and those we stand behind only when it’s convenient to partisanship.