Authors — Filmmaker Staff
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“ME AT THE ZOO” | directors, Chris Moukarbel & Valerie Veatch
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday , January 21 9:00 pm – Temple Theatre, Park City] Our film Me @ The Zoo began in another form entirely. We were making a long form art video for the NYC-based arts organization Rhizome. The artwork was about exploring the ways that technology mediates our lives as a generation comes of age watching reality television and using social media. It seemed like what is considered to be performance has shifted and “acting” was losing ground as a popular medium. Video technology enables us to turn the content of our lives into a kind of show. If you […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 21, 2012 -
“MY BEST DAY” | Writer-director, Erin Greenwell
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, January 21 6:00 pm –Yarrow Hotel Theatre, Park City] I can trace back wanting to make movies to my father and “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” Once in grade school, I had a history presentation due. While watching the above mentioned movie with homework-is-due dread, I was struck with inspiration. I asked my dad “Is this true?”. “Yeah” he remarked. My fact checking was pretty dodgy. Pulse racing, I made my father point out the name in the Encyclopedia Britannica and then based the rest of my research off the movie. The next day at school, […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 21, 2012 -
Keep the Lights On | Co-writer/Director, Ira Sachs
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, January 20 8:30 pm –Library Center Theatre, Park City] It’s not for nothing that we watch films in dark rooms, without the lights on. It’s the most intimate of artistic mediums. When a film works, we feel a nearly physical connection to the actors we are watching, as if they are playing out our own lives on screen. I like films that are messy and imperfect, that are unable to fully contain all the life going on within them. Filmmakers like Cassavetes and Loach, Fassbinder and Pialat. The plot never rules the character. The actor might at […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 20, 2012 -
“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
