Category: Special Edition

A classic ’90s rom-com starring none other than Hugh Grant? Check. A lush period piece that harkens back to the Technicolor melodramas of Old Hollywood? Check. An arty European affair with a satisfyingly ambiguous ending? Check.

At the Sundance Institute, we have stood with independent storytellers for nearly four decades, amplifying the voices of artists from a wide range of experiences and backgrounds. As leaders in the industry, we have a responsibility to amplify and support transgender voices and stories, to follow the lead of transgender advocates, and to create opportunities for transgender people.
Today, as we observe the 21st annual Transgender Day of Remembrance—and celebrate the resilience and importance of trans people in our communities every day—we want to underline that trans artists and trans stories will always have a place in the Sundance community: a place to cultivate their artistic craft, community, and most importantly, their joy.

The Sundance Film Festival has the horror genre built into its DNA. From the very beginning—in fact, looking all the way back to the modern-day Festival’s late-’70s origins as the Utah/U.S.

For most of us, 2020 has been a difficult year—one that has reminded us over and over again just how important it is that we stay actively engaged in our communities and in our political system at large. And, of course, while there’s more than one way to do your civic duty wherever you live, with Election Day less than a week away here in the United States, we hope voting is top of mind for you right now. It’s time to let your voice be heard.

Shari Frilot, Ana Souza, and Dilcia Barrera are programmers at the Sundance Film Festival.
Latinx Heritage Month has arrived in the United States in time for us to shine a light on our Latinx community, which has always shown itself to be unapologetically diverse, creative, and resilient, with a richness of stories that traverse cultural, generational, and language barriers. Never has it felt more urgent or pressing for us to understand the Latinx experience and celebrate it than now, in a year of tumultuous change and unprecedented dangers to the community.

It is by no means an indicator that the work is close to—or ever—finished, but with each passing year there are signs of an incremental growth in our approach to mental health, both clinically and in personal circles.
Maybe it’s in the renewed public relations efforts around Mental Health Month, which is recognized in May of each year, or in the desperately overdue conversations in the wake of tragedies surrounding icons and idols whom we deem impervious to the scars and stigmas of mental illness.
Maybe it’s more subtle and subconscious, propelled by a younger and more dauntless generation’s memes and hashtags that pervade social media and point to a very important truth: that we are alike in our stories of struggle, if only we could release those stories so tightly bound to our shame.

So far, 2018 has already brought us TIME’S UP, the Dora Milaje, and Chloe Kim. When it comes to celebrating women, we don’t necessarily need a designated month. But it doesn’t hurt.

An hour and a half into Taylor Mac’s A 24-Decade History of Popular Music, the audience members orchestrated the removal of about half the chairs we were sitting on. Blindfolds were passed out by the “dandy minions” and we found our way to various seating positions ranging from sitting cross-legged on the floor to holding tight to a chair that was now claimed. Next, came the grapes.

One would hope that on International Women’s Day in the year 2016 gender inequality, whether societal, economical, or within the arts, would have become a cultural pestilence of generations past. And while progress and parity are not entirely absent, there are still disturbing trends that indicate we (or our systems) remain fettered to a collective primeval intellect. The work of our Women at Sundance program and Female Filmmakers’ Initiative is conceived as a corrective to a dearth of opportunities presented to women in the film industry, but we are still nowhere near where we should be.

It’s not a charge lobbed at filmmakers as frequently as musicians, but the former are far from impervious to the hackneyed accusation of “selling out.” Let’s just get this out of the way: Don Hertzfeldt is the antithesis of a sellout. This is a filmmaker who inhabits and galvanizes perhaps the most obscure, unheralded expanse of independent filmmaking – animated shorts.

Passionate, mercurial, prodigiously talented. They’re adjectives that could characterize any number of entertainers, but maybe none more than the utterly compelling, endlessly perplexing Nina Simone. In January at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, director Liz Garbus—a first-class artist in her own right—premiered her sweeping portrait of the complicated singer and pianist whose classically trained skills were paired with an undeniable fervor for activism.

I will spare you the humblebrag. It’s too easy here: “I’m so honored to have had a film at the Sundance Film Festival.” True? Of course.