Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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2014 Slamdance Award Winners
Yesterday, Slamdance announced its jury, audience and special award winners for its 20th anniversary festival. The jury award for Best Narrative Feature went to Rezeta, the story of a Kosovan model’s trip to Mexico City, while Elliot, which follows the eponymous Elliot “White Lightning” Scott, intent on becoming Canada’s first action hero, scooped up the Best Documentary Feature prize. The winners, perhaps suggestively, received $5,000 in film from Kodak, in addition to $3,500 in legal services. The audience awards went to Copenhagen for Narrative Feature, and Kidnapped for Christ for Documentary Feature. See the full list of winners below. AUDIENCE AWARDS Audience Award for Documentary Feature: Kidnapped […]
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Co-Present Film Festival Connects Solitary Viewers through Twitter
Held once a month on a Saturday and lasting the whole day, CPFF is an online film festival with both public and private viewing capabilities. Conceived by Sherri Wasserman, “a citizen of the realm of timezone independence,” the idea is that viewers watching solo from their homes or private spaces can connect with other viewers watching the same film at the same time. The theme of the festival, born out of this concept of the solitary viewer, is “Prisons Real & Imagined.” Wasserman explains the ideas behind the festival: We, as a group of watchers, are (mostly) in physical isolation. […]
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Director Sydney Freeland Discusses Drunktown’s Finest
I’ve been hearing the praises of Drunktown’s Finest director Sydney Freeland being sung for some time now. The 2004 Fulbright scholar and Sundance alum – whose long list of awards includes a Sundance Institute Screenwriting Fellowship and a Sundance Institute Directing Fellowship in 2010, and a 2009 Sundance Institute Native American Lab Fellowship – has also long been a fixture on the cozy New Mexico filmmaking scene. (Since I programmed the Santa Fe Independent Film Festival 2012 it’s not surprising the Gallup native and I even share mutual friends.) That said, as a jaded critic it’s second nature for me […]
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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 […]
