[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 […]
[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 […]
[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 — […]
[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 […]
[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…?)
[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 […]
[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 […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 3:00 pm — Screening Room, Sundance Resort] Film has always been affected by diverse forces; many times has its near death been foreseen before the arrival of a new media, but today, more than 100 years from the invention of the cinematographer, cinema is still very similar to how it all began: celluloid, light and emotions on the screen with moving images in a dark room. The story of Heart of Time comes from inside the life of a rural community, a simple love story that is developed within the fight and the resistance of […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 11:30 am — Holiday Village Cinema III, Park City] I think I might be one of the few filmmakers out there who still cuts on a flatbed. Or rather, if I shoot on film, I cut on film; if I shoot on video, I cut on a computer. I still cut on film for a few reasons (it’s easier on my eyes, the tables are all being given away so I don’t have to compete for an editing space, I like handling the plastic), but most important is work speed. And by speed, I don’t […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 6:00 pm — Screening Room, Sundance Resort] A lot gets tossed around these days about how new technology is changing the nature of storytelling. The ability of the audience to use technology to influence how a story unfolds is considered novel, complete with all the symptoms that characterize a fresh idea with legs. But one look at Nollywood, Nigeria’s grassroots film industry, now the third biggest in the world and the main subject of our film Nollywood Babylon, paints a different picture. Nollywood’s approach emphasizes the immediate: shoot a film in a week, sell it […]