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Sundance and other Park City Festivals news, past and future. 
Los Angeles, CA – Robert Redford, Founder and President of Sundance Institute, and Wally Weisman, Chairman of the Board, today announced the appointment of Keri Putnam as the Institute’s new Executive Director. “In the spirit of moving forward with new ideas and a fresh approach in the environment that surrounds us, Keri’s appointment reflects the new direction in which Sundance Institute is headed,” Redford said.
Putnam, who recently served as President of...
Along with new festival directors, this year the Sundance Film Festival had an entirely new vision.
Main Street was crowded, people dined and socialized well into the early morning and Sundance just felt more "alive" than it was last year. This could be partly due to the slight rise claimed in the American economy or it could simply be the better selection of films.
As proof that the festival is doing it's job, many of the films are moving on to be featured in o...
Sad, but true - there will be no CineVegas this year. When I ran into Trevor Groth during the Sundance Film Festival, (after complementing him on upgrading the films selected for Sundance in 2010), he stated that CineVegas will not be happening this year. Besides being one of two Festival Directors for the Sundance Film Festival, Mr. Groth is also the Artistic Director for CineVegas - a presitigous festival held in Las Vegas, NV. The sponsors for the CineVegas Festival pulled out due to ...
Besides watching the many brilliant films the new Directors of Sundance boasted this year, the next best place to be during the Sundance Film Festival is the Village at the Yard.
This year, VAY played host to several popular companies demonstrating their newest lines for celebrities and festival goers.
Aveeno gave full-sized samples of their newest "Active Naturals" body wash, scrub, shampoo, conditioner and various hair products just to die for. Sephora offered free ...
James Cameron may not be playing a film at Sundance, but that didn't stop his smash-hit Avatar from stealing the spotlight. At a private party hosted by Film Utah Magazine, Ubisoft and XBox revealed a sneak peek of the world's first game to be played in 3D.
The game allows you to travel through the make-believe world of Pandora as you fight off enemies in your Avatar. You have to wear 3D glasses, but the experience is very cool:
http://www.youtube.com/wat...
Maybe it is the altitude or its location high in the Wasatch Mountains of Utah, but Sundance Film Festival jurors seem to gravitate towards films that can be both chilly (and chilling) in tone and execution. Two years ago, it was FROZEN RIVER, a film about border smuggling in the frozen tundra of upstate New York that put one in the mood for an overcoat and a teeming cup of Ovaltine. Last year’s winner PRECIOUS, which just secured an impressive five Oscar nominations this morni...
In a somewhat strange convergence, European documentaries were the overall winners in all categories at the Sundance Film Festival, which announced its awards Saturday evening. While this is certainly a boon for European non-fiction makers, the European dramatic films in the World Cinema competition were uniformly snubbed. .
However, there was much love for European docs, which is certainly something to celebrate. Winner of the Grand Jury Prize in the World Cinema Documentary section...
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Thirty-four films were awarded prizes in 29 categories, honoring both veteran and first-time filmmakers from the U.S. to Spain, Cambodia, and beyond.
First-year Festival Director John Cooper had branded the 2010 Festival a reboot, calling for a return to the Festival's rebellious roots, and the diversity of tonight's winners would seem to move toward satisfying that mission and complicate received notions of the homogenous "Sundance film." As he did throughout the week, Cooper broug...
Twelve is about a coterie of superrich teens in Manhattan whose ambition is blunted by their vanity and overweening social climbing. They go around the city saying things like, “My dad told me if I don’t get into Harvard, I have to go to Dartmouth” and “Dad’s so pissed I totaled the Porsche.” Among this crew of largely non-likable little twerps are Molly (Emma Roberts), Chris (Rory Culkin), and White Mike (Chace Crawford); White Mike is the protagonist, a onc...
It's hard to deny that higher education gets a bad wrap sometimes. Lackluster student events, hollow campus causes, (occasionally) crappy college radio, even school food – they all go hand-in-hand with some people's perception of student films. Beyond the food part – because, c'mon, that sneeze guard hardly does the trick – no one here on the Festival staff would agree with the assumption that collegiate-made film is in any way inferior to professional filmmakers’ ...
Thirty-four films were awarded prizes in 29 categories, honoring both veteran and first-time filmmakers from the U.S. to Spain, Cambodia, and beyond.From a spare, gothic-realist thriller (Winter’s Bone, Grand Jury Prize Winner: Dramatic) to a stylized Australian crime thriller (Animal Kingdom, World Cinema Jury Prize: Drama), and from a visceral, soldier’s-eye-view of war (Restrepo, Grand Jury Prize: Documentary) to a gonzo non-fiction satire (The Red Chapel, World Cinema Jury Priz...
Director Sam Taylor-Wood’s Nowhere Boy intimately portrays a slice of John Lennon’s life, just before he leaps into that explosion known as The Beatles. We meet John (Aaron Johnson) as a rebellious yet sensitive teen, who bunks school authorities and bumps heads with his cultured and forcibly subdued aunt Mimi (Kristen Scott Thomas), with whom he lives. John reunites with his mother, Julia (Ann-Marie Duff) and heartbreakingly and thrillingly enters the world of music as he wre...
The Sundance Film Festival is an event full of unusual stories....but Hasidic drug dealers? That has to be a first. The film, appropriately called HOLY ROLLERS, was produced and stars Danny A. Abeckaser, who is best known as a rock impressario and club promoter.
The film, set in New York in the 1990s, is about a pair of Hasidic Jews who become part of an ecstasy smuggling ring. The film is the feature directorial debut of Kevin Asch with a screenplay by actor/scenarist Antonio Masc...
Twenty years have passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall and filmmakers in the former Eastern Bloc are still orbiting the wreckage of collapsed Communism, searching for stories to extract from the rubble. Even dead regimes exert an irresistible gravitational pull. This year's Festival includes several films made in countries that once resided behind the Iron Curtain. Diverse as they are, they each portray worlds in the midst of chaotic change – Poland of the early 80's; a dream-l...
You hear something often enough, and it starts to seem true. And as the directors of Russian Lessons have known for at least as long as the Putin administration has been in power, when you're part of the government-allied Russian media, people believe what you say even if it is rather strange.
As becomes immediately clear in Russian Lessons, investigative filmmakers Andrei Nekrasov and Olga Konskaya, the husband-and-wife directors ofthe hard-charging documentary, are not part of the mainstream ...
To cap off Sundance Film Festival U.S.A., which saw eight filmmakers present eight Sundance Film Festival films at eight cities through the country on Thursday, the Festival mothership in Park City hosted the U.S. premiere of the political documentary The Shock Doctrine, followed by a special panel discussion. The film was also simultaneously made available via VOD, extending the Sundance Film Festival radius even further. Based on the best-selling book by Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine explor...
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. A comedy doesn’t just need a funny score – the music could work against what is happening with the characters and ...
As the Sundance Film Festival shifts into its final weekend, with awards being announced on Saturday evening, several distribution deals have been announced. While the horde of film executives left the Festival in the past 48 hours, a rash of deals have been announced, with more expected in the days and weeks ahead.
The heyday of when films were bought in the opening hours of the Festival are long gone, due to the difficult distribution landscape and the smaller number o...
Joan Rivers, the queen of comedy who has been perfecting her craft in a career that spans over five decades, is as unlikely a personality as one would expect to find in the uber-indie surroundings of Park City. However, the comedienne, who is as well known for her addiction to plastic surgery as she is for her classic comedy ("can we talk?" being her signature catchphrase) is here at the Sundance Film Festival for the world premiere of the documentary JOAN RIVERS: A PIECE OF...
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