Sundance

“YOU WONT MISS ME'”S RY RUSSO-YOUNG By Alicia Van Couvering

You Wont Miss Me is Ry Russo-Young’s second feature, and her first in Sundance. Orphans, which premiered at SXSW last year, was a Bergman-esque tale of two sisters, now separated, who come together in their parents’ sprawling, snow-bound house to hack emotional pieces out of one another. You Wont Miss Me is very different in style and tone. It uses experimental film techniques – disjointed narrative, a salad of film and video formats – to paint a portrait of one desperate, uncensored, sexy wreck of a young woman named Shelly Brown. Russo-Young invented the character with the film’s star, Stella […]

By Scott Macaulay on Jan 16, 2009 Sundance Features
OPENING SLAMDANCE WITH “I SELL THE DEAD” By Alicia Van Couvering

Glenn McQuaid’s I Sell The Dead, starring Dominic Monaghan and Ron Perlman, will open Slamdance this year. Taglined “Never Trust a Corpse,” it’s a vintage-inspired horror-comedy set in the 18th or 19th-century, structured as a series of drunken recollections on the life of a career grave robber (Monaghan.) The film is produced by and co-stars horror-master Larry Fessenden (Wendigo, The Last Winter, Habit) of the New York production outfit Glass Eye Pix. The team behind ISTD – McQuaid, Fessenden and Scareflix producer Peter Phok — sat down with Filmmaker on the eve of their trip to Park City to reminisce […]

By Scott Macaulay on Jan 16, 2009 Sundance Features
CROSSING OVER AT SUNDANCE: MELISSA AUF DER MAUR By Alicia Van Couvering

“I’m not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.” — Mark Rothko Doesn’t it make sense that every professional artist would have ideas in between mediums, would collaborate across categorical boundaries and make new and different work as their vision expands over their lifetime? It would seem to make perfect sense, but it doesn’t happen as often as it could. This year at Sundance, though, there are several artists who wouldn’t necessarily call themselves “filmmakers” on their tax returns, and who are […]

By Scott Macaulay on Jan 16, 2009 Sundance Features
“WILLIAM KUNSTLER: DISTURBING THE UNIVERSE” directors, Sarah Kunstler and Emily Kunstler

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 12:00 pm — Temple Theatre, Park City] Our film is the story of a man born in 1919 as told by his daughters, who were born in the late 1970s. William Kunstler was a radical civil rights lawyer who took part in many of the major activist and social movements from 1960 to 1994. But we didn’t make this film for the people who lived through that history with him. We made it for younger generations. This is a film about legacy, about looking at your parents’ lives and deciding what to take from their […]

By Jason Guerrasio on Jan 16, 2009 Sundance Responses
“TAKING CHANCE” co-writer-director, Ross Katz

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 5:15 pm — Racquet Club, Park City] I went to school for two years at Temple University, studying story and structure with professors David Parry and Allen Barber. I was completely impatient (which has never gone away) and always wanted to go shoot, shoot, shoot. But David’s and Allen’s message, understood through studying all kinds of films, was always about story. No matter how ready I thought I was, they would always come back to “who is your audience,” “why are you telling this story,” and “the script isn’t ready.” They were right. Though I […]

By Jason Guerrasio on Jan 16, 2009 Sundance Responses
“DADA’S DANCE” director, Zhang Yuan

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 6:00 pm — Tower Theatre, Salt Lake City] A year of significance for China is 1989 — a significant year for many Chinese of my age. It is the year when the Tiananmen Square incident shook the world. In that same year, I concluded my four years of study at Beijing Film Academy and made my debut film Mama. The making of Mama ended up not only holding significant meaning for me but for Chinese cinema in the broader context. Prior to 1989, Chinese film rigidly followed the ways of the Soviet big brother — […]

By Jason Guerrasio on Jan 16, 2009 Sundance Responses
“THE GLASS HOUSE” writer-producer, Melissa Hibbard

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 12:15 pm — Holiday Village Cinema IV, Park City] The idea for making The Glass House came organically when the director, Hamid Rahmanian, and I were invited to the Omid e Mehr Center in Tehran during a short visit to Iran (for what should have been a couple of weeks and turned into two years). At first we weren’t interested in covering a women’s crisis center in Iran — it had been done a few times already. Our biggest hesitation was the difficulty in penetrating the thick façade of pretenses that dominate Iranian culture; intimacy […]

By Jason Guerrasio on Jan 16, 2009 Sundance Responses
“ART & COPY” director, Doug Pray

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 5:30 pm — Prospector Square Theatre, Park City] Art & Copy is a movie about advertising, creativity, and the innate human urge we have to communicate – whether it’s painting on cave walls or selling canned spaghetti. What makes this documentary a reflection of its times may be simply that people are finding my characters to be inspirational, at a time when many documentaries– for a lot of very good reasons– are depressing, and losing their audiences a result. Maybe times are changing, and people are ready to be less cynical. (Even about advertising…?)

By Jason Guerrasio on Jan 16, 2009 Sundance Responses
“THE MISSING PERSON” writer-director, Noah Buschell

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 6:00 pm — Library Center Theatre, Park City] For me, “story” is the most overused word in the film world these days. I hear actors saying, “I just wanna tell good stories.” I hear producers saying, “I have an intense passion for storytelling.” Jerry Bruckheimer is in some commercial calling himself a storyteller. Maybe he is. I don’t understand when indie movies became synonymous with storytelling. When did this extreme emphasis on narrative take place? As if a movie doesn’t lend itself equally well to being a poem or a painting. But we don’t hear […]

By Jason Guerrasio on Jan 16, 2009 Sundance Responses
“THE ONLY GOOD INDIAN” director-producer, Kevin Willmott

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 5:30 pm — Holiday Village Cinema III, Park City] We made a conscious effort to fight against the issues of Internet and nonarthouse distribution. All those avenues are exciting and interesting in many ways, however, no one seems to be writing any checks for them. I still believe that most filmmakers make a film to be shown in a theater. We felt our story was cinematic in scale and because of the importance of the history involved, we needed to try to reach as large an audience as possible. I still think that is through […]

By Jason Guerrasio on Jan 16, 2009 Sundance Responses

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