Authors — Filmmaker Staff
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“½ REVOLUTION” directors, Karim El Hakim & Omar Shargawi
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, January 20 9:00 am –Egyptian Theatre, Park City] Co-director Karim El Hakim: The challenge of capturing the spontaneity of life in all its hidden moments and glancing magic is why I am a filmmaker. What turns me on is exploring the time and space around me, following the individual threads of emotional energy in each of the characters I become invested in. The more intense and stressful a situation is, the more emotional the characters become. How will these emotional strings play out? How will they intertwine and conflict? How do they reflect the situation? What will […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 20, 2012 -
Middle of Nowhere | Writer/Director Ava DuVernay
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, January 20, 2:30 pm –Library Center Theatre, Park City] First film I ever loved was West Side Story. My aunt Denise forced me to watch it one rainy afternoon. I had to be about 9-years-old. I was spellbound. The dancing. The romance. The brown people. I grew up in Compton, right where the city limits hug Lynwood. And for as long as I can remember, my school, my block, was predominately Latino. I remember watching that film and it changing the way I saw my schoolmates and neighbors. Seriously, I recall feeling something very specific about the […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 20, 2012 -
Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present | Director Matthew Akers
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, January 20, 9:00 pm –Temple Theatre, Park City] I began making work as a painter and sculptor. It was not until I graduated from art school that I ventured into filmmaking. Though I’m glad I did, I sometimes lament that it has dominated most of my life for the past 12 years, as I have not been painting or sculpting much. On the other hand, it has taken me all over the world and been an expansive exercise which has broadened my mind and led me down paths I could have never imagined. I have found that […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 20, 2012 -
“PAYBACK” | director, Jennifer Baichwal
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, January 20 6:00 pm –Yarrow Hotel Theatre, Park City] I was on my way to a doctorate in philosophy/comparative religion when I realized that the academic approach was too narrow a form of enquiry for me. So I turned to documentary to explore the same issues that were interesting— identity, epistemology, ethics, etc.– in a more lateral medium. Our films are about questions I don’t have an answer to, and they are all in some way about why there is no simple answer. Film has a unique capacity to convey contingency and complexity, because it is able […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 20, 2012 -
“THE AMBASSADOR” | director, Mads Brügger
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, January 20 9:00 pm –Screening Room, Sundance Resort] Well, first of all I don’t think of myself as an artist. I am a journalist, who happens to make films. I make these films because they allow me to connect with an audience which is much larger than the five million Danes who live in Denmark. If I had written my latest film The Ambassador as a book, and published it in Denmark, I would not be answering this question in English, because nobody would know about The Ambassador outside of Denmark.
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 20, 2012 -
“TIM AND ERIC’S BILLION DOLLAR MOVIE” | directors, Eric Wareheim & Tim Heidecker
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, January 20, 11:45 pm –Library Center Theater] Eric Wareheim: I am Eric Wareheim the number one filmmaker/artist along with my friend Tim Heidecker who is number two and I prefer the look and compression of an internet viral video but my Mom would be more proud of me if I showed my feature length video in a movie theater so that’s what I did and I’m proud of what I’ve done and please enjoy my expression on the big screen or DVD because that’s my vision as a modern day pioneer thank you.
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 20, 2012 -
“INDIE GAME: THE MOVIE” | directors, Lisanne Pajot and James Swirsky
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, January 20, 3:00 pm –Yarrow Hotel Theatre] There’s something deeply powerful about watching someone in the moment going through a life-changing experience. Film, the documentary genre specifically, was a strong way for us to tell the surprisingly dramatic story of making video games, in Indie Game: The Movie. Until recently, video games haven’t widely been considered an art form. The technical part of game-making (the coding and software part) sometimes hides the fact that game development can be very personal and creative. One of goals for the film was to show what these developers go through is […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 20, 2012 -
“THE PERCEPTION OF MOVING TARGETS”| director, Weston Currie
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, January 20, Noon –Egyptian Theatre, Park City] As a boy, as a little dreamer imagining what fantastic job he might one day have as a grown man, I always saw myself filling the roles of the hero/villain archetypes we see in the movies. A cowboy, a detective, an archeologist adventurer, a robber even, sometimes Robin Hood and other times James Cagney. Older, increasingly more in touch with reality, and with my dawning awareness of film as a created world imagined and rendered by artists and crews, I arrived at a new aspiration (still just as fanciful as […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 20, 2012 -
“THAT’S WHAT SHE SAID” | director, Carrie Preston
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, January 20 5:30 pm –Prospector Square Theatre, Park City] Since I was a kid, I wanted to put on shows. I would make my little sister do skits with me that I had written, and I even started my own theater company in my neighborhood when I was 12, directing all the neighborhood kids in our front yards. I was dead serious about my make believe. When I was acting, I would disappear and get lost in someone else’s skin, yet at the same time, I never felt more present in my own. That’s the same way […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 20, 2012 -
“THE D WORD: UNDERSTANDING DYSLEXIA” | director, James Redford
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, January 20 6:00 pm –Screening Room, Sundance Resort] As a storyteller, I suppose I have that spark that makes me think that I might touch people, and the power of film is exponential in that regard. It is not just ideas, images, words and sound. It is all of these things simultaneously, and therefore the sum is much greater than the parts. I also happen to love production. Yes, it’s too rare. It’s chaotic and things go wrong. But it is exciting as hell to solve problems if you work with good people like I do. It […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 20, 2012
