[PREMIERE SCREENING: Monday, January 23, 9:00 pm –Temple Theatre, Park City] In these days of 140 characters or less, filmmaking, and particularly documentary filmmaking, allows us the space and the time to explore a character or an issue with breadth and depth.  Our goal with The Atomic States of America was to take the intimidating topic of nuclear power, and to make it accessible and personal by telling the individual stories of people living in reactor communities, working as Nuclear Regulatory Commission inspectors, and advocating on both sides of the issue. When you begin the journey of making a documentary, […]

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Sunday, January 22 12:15 pm –Eccles Theatre, Park City] When I was a teenager I would wear sexy clothes to school that didn’t fit me.  My mother would see me before I left the house and was horrified that her awkward, fourteen year old daughter was planning to walk the New York City streets in a tight pink baby tee shirt and red denim miniskirt. She said I looked like a hooker clown and she was probably right. But at the time, I was just beginning to understand that my body could communicate something sexual and powerful to […]

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Sunday, January 22 9:00 pm — Egyptian Theatre] Being a filmmaker just feels right to me. It flows without forcing it. It feels like the tool I was born to use to express myself. I once explained it as feeling like that first pair of Puma shoes, you know, like they were meant especially for you to sport around town. There’s so much about film that I respect. It’s a medium that demands the talents of others and I love collaborating. Film requires patience, persistence, and passion. These are all qualities I have developed through my experiences as […]

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Sunday, January 22, 6:00 pm –Yarrow Hotel Theatre, Park City] 1.  Why are you a filmmaker?  Why did you choose this profession? I love movies.  Ever since I was a kid and my dad would set up his super-8 projector in the basement and rent black-and-white movies from the library, I have loved movies.  Movies are visceral.  They are cathartic.  They are spiritual.  I love the experience of going to watch movies in a dark theatre with a full audience.  I love being emotionally moved, to be shaken alive, to feel a sense of the wider world and […]

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Sunday, January 22 5:30 pm –Library Center Theatre, Park City] First of all, thanks for referring to me as an artist. It made me feel good. With Safety Not Guaranteed, Derek Connolly and I had the goals you might associate with art—to make something soulful, something that breaks rules, engages the heart. But beneath it all was a sincere want to entertain in a way that only movies can. There’s an element of showmanship in cinema that most other mediums don’t share. Yes, the characters in our film are honest and the emotions are true—good entertainment doesn’t have to […]

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Sunday, January 22 6:00 pm –Temple Theatre, Park City] Kristi Jacobson: 49 million people in the U.S.—one in four children—don’t know where their next meal is coming from.  It’s a shocking statistic, but how do you turn a stat into a story?  My answer is deceivingly simple: you make a movie. No art form can truly make us feel another person’s pain, or joy, or hunger.  It’s our own emotions and imaginations that bring any art form to life. But film, in my experience, is the most powerful conduit between one person’s experience and an audience.  As a […]

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Sunday, January 22 Midnight –Egyptian Theatre, Park City] With this film we were presented with the opportunity to document a very specific moment in time, both musically and culturally—LCD Soundsystem’s final show ever, at Madison Square Garden. The idea of shooting the concert appealed to us as not only fans of the band, but as filmmakers. We love the classic experiential concert films of the past, such as The Last Waltz, and Stop Making Sense, and for us, the idea of documenting an event like that was something we had a very specific vision for.  But we were also […]

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Sunday, January 22 9:00 pm –Broadway Center Cinema 6, SLC] When we see something perfectly intact in nature, like a wonderful butterfly, with its incredible composition of shape and colors, in Italian we immediately say “look, it seems fake!” On the other hand, when we contemplate an object, skillfully crafted by human hands, like a butterfly put together through hours of patient work by a talented artisan, we say “wow, it looks real!” There is a strange area where the perfectly natural and the perfectly artificial collide. This point of contact needs to be investigated: I sense something […]

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Sunday, January 22 9:00 pm –Temple Theatre, Park City] Karin Hayes: As a young kid, I dreamed of being a theater actor (or a veterinarian).  It wasn’t until I went to a screening of Robert M. Young’s film Triumph of the Spirit, that I knew I wanted to be able to tell incredibly powerful stories in this same way. I listened, engrossed, as Young, Willem Dafoe, Edward James Olmos and the story’s real-life main character, Salamo Arouch, spoke about the real events and the filmmaking process.  By the rousing applause and Q&A afterwards, I could tell the entire […]

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Sunday, January 22, 11:30 am –Library Center Theatre, Park City] Working in radio journalism in college and then as a reporter in China, I fell in love with the power of aural storytelling. I always hoped to make a documentary film because I thought it would add even more layers to an audience’s experience. As a director I know my choices and authorship necessarily shape the film, but my hope is that good documentary filmmaking can come as close as possible to letting viewers encounter a story directly and decide things for themselves. Ai Weiwei is a master […]