Sundance
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“ABOUT FACE” | director, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Sunday, January 22 2:30 pm –The MARC, Park City] Over thirty years ago, I graduated from AFI with a degree in film and shortly thereafter, became a photographer. I wanted the work I created to be mine and found filmmaking too collaborative. Two decades later, I returned to filmmaking with my doc, “Lou Reed: Rock and Roll Heart”, managing, somehow, to make the film with a tiny crew. It mostly felt like my work.. and I got used to relying on others to make it sing. About Face is my seventh film and counting, since the Lou doc. […]
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Five Questions with Excision Director Richard Bates Jr.
Sundance’s Midnight section always includes a fair share of genre-heavy selections, but Richard Bates Jr.’s Excision sounds like it will pack a level of blood and guts rarely seen at the festival. A twisted coming of age tale, Excision follows young Pauline (AnnaLynne McCord), a high school girl with an unabated interest in picking scabs, dissecting road kill, and fantasizing about performing surgery on strangers. Bates’ debut seems to be the sort of grotesque horror comedy sure to play well to splatter-enthusiasts in Park City and beyond. Filmmaker: You’re premiering at a festival not traditionally known for its horror selections. […]
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SUNDANCE CLIP ROUND-UP: “INDIE GAME: THE MOVIE,” “ARBITRAGE,” “THE COMEDY”
Those of us not in Park City this weeked will have to make due with the slow-trickle of “Exclusive Clips” that have begun floating around the internet. First up, Wired shares a sequence from Lisanne Pajot and James Swirsky’s Indie Game: The Movie, a documentary about video-game programmers. In the above clip, Tommy Refenes, one of the film’s main subjects, nervously shares an unfinished version of his new game at a convention in Boston. Next, Deadline.com shares this tense clip from writer-director Nicholas Jarecki’s hedge-fund psychological thriller, Arbitrage. Featuring Richard Gere and Nate Parker, the clip hints at the film’s […]
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THE CALM BEFORE THE STORM
Today is the day. I’ve been working to finish this movie since 2006. There were moments in the six years since putting pen to page during which I couldn’t make this day out in my future. Not that I considered quitting, that isn’t my style, but I did at times feel like the journey of making this film would stretch into eternity. This is not unprecedented, check out Ellison’s second book or Wendell B. Harris’ second movie. To avoid that fate I had to take an extreme measure and commit myself to working 12 hours a day 7 days a week until the movie was finished. This […]
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SUNDANCE: THE “FUTURE NORMAL” OF NEW FRONTIER
Now in its sixth year, the New Frontiers section at Sundance premiered yesterday at its new home at The Yard, in an unassuming building across from a snow-cloaked cemetery. Presenting the year’s crop of new media, transmedia and experiential video art to a room of press, Sundance programmer Shari Frilot explained her curatorial criteria, though not before a number of the pieces had to turn off their sound (a booming heart beat coming through the wall of Ho Tzu Nyen’s The Cloud of Unknowing on her left, the Wagnerian glory coming from Marco Brambilla’s Evolution (Megaplex) to her right.) “What […]
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Five Questions with Arbitrage Director Nicholas Jarecki
Currently best known for his documentary The Outsider, Nicholas Jarecki is poised for reevaluation with Arbitrage, his narrative directorial debut. Jarecki spent a long time ruminating over what kind of story he wanted to tell, ultimately deciding on a thriller set within a world he knew quite a bit about. The film has already garnered attention thanks to its A-List ensemble, but Jarecki hopes his script will force audiences to continue thinking even after the credits finish rolling. Arbitrage, which is set amidst today’s tumultuous economic terrain and considers the ethics of a hedge-fund mogul, screens today in Park City. — Filmmaker: […]
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Five Questions with For Ellen Director So Yong Kim
After winning over half a dozen festival prizes for her first two feature films, So Yong Kim has spent the last few years producing for her husband, Bradley Rust Gray (The Exploding Girl), and developing and writing her newest movie, For Ellen. Similar to her previous films, For Ellen’s narrative derives from Kim’s own experiences growing up. Brought together through the character of a young man traveling to see his daughter for the first time, Kim’s personal style of filmmaking not only forces the audience to question their own decisions, but has also allowed the filmmaker a cathartic way […]
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“AN OVERSIMPLICATION OF HER BEAUTY” | writer-director, Terence Nance
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, January 21 9:00 pm –Egyptian Theatre, Park City] I come from a studio art background and consider myself an artist who made a film. I make music, murals and performances as well, so I hesitate to call myself a filmmaker. That said, I’ve been thinking lately that outside of the “burden of branding,” it doesn’t really matter what I call myself; my work will name me at the end of the day, and I’m interested to hear what that name will be after a few years of making work. So I guess if I am indeed named […]
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“THE COMEDY” | co-writer-director, Rick Alverson
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, January 21, 8:30 pm –Library Center Theater] I’ve always been suspicious of movies and visual media and my interest in film developed out of that suspicion. In the world that I knew as a child, in an era preceding the Internet, many of us were reared in part, at least in terms of our social behavior, by television. Much of what we understood of the adult world we learned through osmosis, through the colors and exoticism of television, through the play of bodies and the exchange of words and gestures in that very artificial space. We were […]
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“YOUNG AND WILD” | writer-director Marialy Rivas
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, January 21, 12:15 pm –Prospector Square Theatre, Park City] I didn’t have an option, when I was 7 years old I felt “the calling”, I knew since then what I wanted to do with my life: become a filmmaker. Since then, it has been pretty much like being passionately in love with somebody, why do we fall in love with some particular person and not the next? It doesn’t really have a rational explanation -at least not for me- you are just in love. During the years, I have tried to give it a sense, so here […]
