Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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Jonathan Harris Peeks Inside the Lesbian Porn Industry in I Love Your Work
A three-time Webby Award winner and a 2009 World Economic Forum “Young Global Leader,” who has exhibited at MoMA and built the world’s largest time capsule with Yahoo!, Jonathan Harris can now add the firestarters IDFA DocLab Award for Digital Storytelling – for his latest interactive project I Love Your Work – to his esteemed CV. In it Harris invites us on an online journey not to the Arctic Ocean with Alaskan Eskimos – as he did in his previous piece, The Whale Hunt – but into the lives of nine women residing in a much hotter climate, that of the […]
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Slamdance’s Distribution Arm, Slamdance Studios, To Release Bible Quiz
Providing exposure for its entries is simply not enough for the Slamdance Film Festival, Sundance’s alterna-sister. In January 2010, Slamdance announced a distribution partnership with Xbox and Zune, thus realizing Slamdance Studios. Last year, they partnered with Cinedigm to release four titles on VOD, and today, they announced the acquisition of their 2013 Grand Jury Prize Winner, Nicole Teeny’s Bible Quiz, for a limited theatrical release. In partnership with Virgil Films, Slamdance Studios will release the documentary about the world of competitive Bible verse memorization in New York and Los Angeles, before moving to Houston, Kalamazoo, Lubbock and Austin in cooperation […]
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Park City Critic’s Notes #4: European Road Trips, Higher Learning, Black Iconoclasts and More
It thins out, Park City, usually starting on Monday, but dramatically so by Tuesday. The big premiere parties have come and gone. The agents and sales reps and industry professionals are mostly headed to whatever coast they call home. So too is the sponsored corporate food; if you’re looking for a free Morning Star veggie burger at what is usually a quaint restaurant called The Eating Establishment, you’re out of luck by Day 7 of the Sundance Film Festival. As the sales continue to trickle down, terms almost never disclosed anymore, all that continues is the movies, of course, the […]
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New Husker Cinema beyond Alexander Payne: The Secret Nebraska Connection Behind Slamdance’s 20 Years
As the Slamdance Film Festival celebrates its 20th year in Utah, it’s worth noting the festival’s unique connection to a state one time zone to the east: Nebraska. Founded largely by two teams of filmmakers who’d shot their first movies in the Cornhusker state — paving the way for filmmakers like Oscar-nominee Alexander Payne — Slamdance has had a long history intertwined with the film movement known as “New Husker Cinema.” As a Nebraska native doing my USC thesis in late 1993, I teamed up with Omaha-based producer Dana Altman, grandson of Robert Altman, to make Omaha (the movie) — […]
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Sterlin Harjo on This May Be the Last Time
Though Sterlin Harjo is a familiar name in Park City – having premiered his narrative features Four Sheets to the Wind and Barking Water at Sundance in 2007 and 2008, and his short Goodnight, Irene in 2005 – this year’s visit marks the director’s documentary feature debut. This May Be the Last Time traces the events behind the never fully explained disappearance of the filmmaker’s grandfather in 1962, alongside the history of the Muscogee (Creek) hymns the Seminole community sang as it set out to find him. Filmmaker spoke with the Sundance vet about his very personal take on ethnomusicology […]
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Sundance Announces Short Film Challenge, Premieres Five Shorts on Global Poverty
At a private event featuring film screenings and a panel discussion, the Sundance Institute today announced the Sundance Institute Short Film Challenge, supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The Challenge intends to spur the production of documentary and narrative short films (three to eight minutes long) depicting the creativity of real people seeking solutions to the challenges of extreme hunger and poverty in their communities. Said Sundance Institute Executive Director Keri Putnam in a statement, “With the support of the Gates Foundation, we are proud to launch this short film challenge and support filmmakers around the world in […]
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Infographic of Sundance Sales from 2011 to 2013
The Sundance sale. The turning point of the festival for more than just the expected filmmakers and distributors can, at times, be an inscrutable transaction. Is X the best fit for Y? Is X really worth Z amount? Does X’s release in W mean Y’s jockeying for awards season? And so on and so forth. In honor of the inaugural issue of their magazine, Bright Ideas, Seed&Spark teamed with Accurat to present a data visualization of Sundance sales from 2011 to 2013. The exhaustive infographic demonstrates, above all, that there are no guarantees in translating Sundance buzz to the box […]
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Park City Critic’s Notes #3: On Happiness, Web Junkie, Love Child and the Peril of Electronic Screens
A couple nights before the Sundance Film Festival commenced this year, I came home one evening hoping to squeeze in at least a couple of pre-fest screeners before I went to bed, knowing I had a full day of hack journalist duties awaiting me the next morning. While taking the train back from the Filmmaker offices and walking through a dreary Bedford-Stuyvesant evening, I dreaded what I thought I would discover upon returning home: a subletter — a young aspirant sportswriter whose presence in our home had only been announced by one of my more regular roommates the day before […]
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Park City Critic’s Notes #2: How Should a Family Be?
Everybody has dreams at Sundance. Some dream of distribution deals, others of the respect and recognition that may come with them. The most exuberant dreamers conjure the high seven-figure sales of yesteryear, but the ranks of such folks are dying away, the reality of the new normal having long set in. Some just want to get laid or go skiing and dream accordingly. Lucky them. Still others can’t navigate Sundance without complaining about this or that. A lot of folks are upset by the shuttles this year, claiming they aren’t as efficient as years past. More pressing, some observers have […]
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Park City Critic’s Notes #1: Jungle Violence and Prairie Reckonings
Generally speaking, the documentary competitions sections of major market film festivals are not places to go and find uplift. Wanna feel good in, say, the James Brown sense of the phrase? The Premieres or Spotlight sections at a festival such as Sundance are usually better bets, programs that tend to provide, with some notable exceptions, a bevy of of biopics, inspiring tales and quirky comedies packaged to appeal to vain movie stars and whatever audience still remains for mid-to-lowbrow, adult-centered specialty films. Any world where the people are all as attractive as, say, Keira Knightley, Chloë Grace Moretz and Mark […]
