Creative Capital, the non-profit funding organization that has supported such recent films as Laura Poitras’s The Oath, Marshall Curry’s If a Tree Falls, and Braden King’s HERE, has announced its new film/video funding cycle. The deadline for letters of inquiry is March 1. From the press release: Creative Capital provides integrated financial and advisory support to artists pursuing innovative and adventurous projects. We support artists whose work is provocative, timely and relevant; who are deeply engaged with their forms, yet also boldly original; who create work that carries the potential to reshape the cultural landscape. To be eligible to apply, […]
Here’s one of the most beautiful end title sequences you’ll ever see, one that extends the film’s themes of love found and lost until the final moments the lights come up. It’s for Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine.
Here we highlight the stills Jamie Stuart took while shooting interviews for the site. Check out his videos from Sundance here.
At the 30th Sundance Awards Ceremony last night, I walked around the hall and asked filmmakers a simple question, and requested a short response. My question was: “What does Sundance mean to you?” Their answers were incredibly diverse — in fact none were identical. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Out of varied thoughts are born unique visions that can become great films. Of course not great films for everyone, but great for someone, or for a group of someones. For an audience taken on a journey where they have never been, or have not been for a long time, films […]
The Sundance Film Festival announced its jury prize winners this evening with Drake Doremus‘ examination of a long-distance relationship, Like Crazy, taking home the Grand Jury Prize. The film’s lead actress, Felicity Jones, also won a Special Jury acting prize. Other top winners include Peter D. Richardson‘s documentary, How to Die in Oregon for Grand Jury doc prize; Circumstance won the dramatic Audience Award while Buck won the audience award for documentary. Sean Durkin won the narrative best directing prize for Martha Marcy May Marlene and best doc directing went to Jon Foy for Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the […]
Remember the Earth Liberation Front? In the 1990s a collection of separate anonymous cells without any central leadership that carried out acts of sabotage and arson — burning lumber companies, torching a parking lot of SUVs, destroying a research laboratory. The clandestine group’s goal was to halt the destruction of our environment. If A Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front gives us the larger context of the environmental movement and the more radical Earth Liberation Front, and then focuses on one cell in Oregon and on the activist Daniel McGowan. It is an intriguing and important film […]
I stopped by Sundance’s New Frontiers building yesterday and visited Pandemic 1.0 with its creator, Lance Weiler. Here’s a short, casual Flip video with Weiler showing me the two rooms of the installation. For more info on this piece, read Weiler’s column in this issue of Filmmaker. And here’s Jamie Stuart’s piece on Weiler shot this week in Park City at our Main Street lounge.
With two movies — Sean Durkin’s Martha Marcy May Marlene, which sold to Fox Searchlight; and the one-shot horror picture Silent House — Elizabeth Olsen was one of Sundance 2011’s breakout stars. And while at the festival, Durkin’s fellow lead John Hawkes was nominated for an Academy Award for his role in last year’s festival Grand Jury Prize-winner Winter’s Bone. Here, from Jamie Stuart, are both actors discussing their roles as, respectively, cult follower and cult leader in Martha Marcy May Marlene. Look for Durkin to appear in our mammoth wrap-up video next week.
Here’s the last of our profiles of volunteers at the Sundance Film Festival. Today, Utah local Christine Ioannides. Visit this spot next week for an interview between Robert Redford and Kenneth Cole discussing the relationship between volunteerism and film festivals.
While introducing a screening one afternoon this week in the Treasure Mountain Inn’s cramped banquet hall that the Slamdance Film Festival converts into its main cinema every year, Slamdance Co-Founder and expert hat-wearer Dan Mirvish remarked with a bit of awe that this was the 17th annual event, meaning that Slamdance, once referred to pejoratively as Sundance’s “parasite” by Robert Redford, had now been around for over half Sundance’s life span. Continuing, Mirvish claimed that “about a third” of the participants in Sundance’s 2011 lineup were Slamdance alumni. “The inmates have taken over the asylum,” Mirvish joked. Someone sitting behind me […]