[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 […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, January 20, Noon –Egyptian Theatre, Park City] As a boy, as a little dreamer imagining what fantastic job he might one day have as a grown man, I always saw myself filling the roles of the hero/villain archetypes we see in the movies. A cowboy, a detective, an archeologist adventurer, a robber even, sometimes Robin Hood and other times James Cagney. Older, increasingly more in touch with reality, and with my dawning awareness of film as a created world imagined and rendered by artists and crews, I arrived at a new aspiration (still just as fanciful as […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, January 20 9:00 pm –Yarrow Hotel Theatre, Park City] How can you express thought in film? How can we specifically show thoughts in a character? As a director, in my view, the most personal is how you see things. My co-writer Eskil Vogt and I wanted to explore how to create a story that focuses on the emotional, and almost physical, experience of an existential crisis. “I’m lost. How do I move forward?” So Oslo, August 31st is about the state of being lost and that particular loneliness that accompanies it. Cinema is a wonderful art form […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, January 20 3:00 pm –Temple Theatre, Park City] The Invisible War is a film about the epidemic of rape within the U.S. military and the institutions that perpetuate and cover up its existence. When I first came upon the story several years ago, I was very surprised that a documentary hadn’t been made on the subject. As I investigated further, I realized this was one of the most underreported stories of the last 50 years, with well over half a million soldiers sexually assaulted since World War II. Why wasn’t a film made about this issue ten, […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, January 20 5:30 pm –Prospector Square Theatre, Park City] Since I was a kid, I wanted to put on shows. I would make my little sister do skits with me that I had written, and I even started my own theater company in my neighborhood when I was 12, directing all the neighborhood kids in our front yards. I was dead serious about my make believe. When I was acting, I would disappear and get lost in someone else’s skin, yet at the same time, I never felt more present in my own. That’s the same way […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, January 20 6:00 pm –Screening Room, Sundance Resort] As a storyteller, I suppose I have that spark that makes me think that I might touch people, and the power of film is exponential in that regard. It is not just ideas, images, words and sound. It is all of these things simultaneously, and therefore the sum is much greater than the parts. I also happen to love production. Yes, it’s too rare. It’s chaotic and things go wrong. But it is exciting as hell to solve problems if you work with good people like I do. It […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, January 20, 3:00 pm –Screening Room, Sundance Resort] My new film, The Law in These Parts chronicles the legal mechanism created around Israel’s 44-year military occupation of the Palestinian people. It is a film which explores something theoretically there for people to see, but that is completely hidden from society’s eye. The film’s raw materials are laws, verdicts, appeals – some of the driest and least appealing materials that exist. The effort to bring this material to life and create cinema around it was the most complicated task I have ever taken upon myself. When I discussed […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, January 20 8:30 am –Library Center Theatre, Park City] In 2005, on the set of We Go Way Back (my first feature film as writer/director), I remember having the distinct feeling that I’d finally found what I was always meant to do. It was an electrifying and completely transformative revelation. As far back as I can remember I always knew I wanted to be an artist. Finding myself smitten with nearly every creative medium in existence probably made the fact that I ended up deeply exploring a variety of them before settling on narrative filmmaking unavoidable. I […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, January 20, 11:30 am –Library Center Theatre, Park City] I believe that documentary film has the ability to motivate, to inspire, and to help bring clarity to complicated issues in a way that other media cannot. Much of the traditional media attention on healthcare has focused on the partisan politics in our nation’s Capitol—from the contentious passage of the Affordable Care Act to the ongoing polarized debate about its impact. There have been countless articles, news stories, blog posts, and tweets about this topic. And everybody in America, whether they like it or not, has been affected […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, January 20 3:00 pm –Egyptian Theatre, Park City] 1. Why are you a filmmaker? I was working on a TV show in Japan and was busy working insane hours everyday, when one night Akira Kurosawa came to me in a dream. He said, “Is there a reason for that particular shot? You need to watch my films more!” The next day, I turned on the TV and they were announcing Kurosawa’s death. I thought it must be a sign from heaven. Since then, I’ve been storing up all the strength, will and energy I need to make films. And now that […]