Sundance

“CONNECTED: AN AUTOBLOGOGRAPHY ABOUT LOVE, DEATH & TECHNOLOGY” | co-writer-director, Tiffany Shlain

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 21, 12:00 pm — Temple Theatre] When I set out to make Connected, the original tagline was A Declaration of Interdependence. I set out to make an insightful/funny/provocative film that looks at what it means to be connected in the 21st century by exploring the history of interdependence and how it has changed over time. That was my pitch, that was our focus, that’s the film I thought I was going to make. At one point, we had an 80-minute rough cut and I watched it in one sitting (one rarely gets to do that on […]

By Filmmaker Staff on Jan 20, 2011 Sundance Responses
Here Producers Jay Van Hoy and Lars Knudsen

Originally printed in our Fall 2010 issue, we asked a number of leading independent producers about their producing models and how they’re finding everything from financing to material to office space. Jay Van Hoy & Lars Knudsen’s latest film, Braden King’s Here, premieres at Sundance on Friday. For Parts and Labor’s Jay Van Hoy and Lars Knudsen, independent film success is all about work. Very hard work. Midway through our conversation about their recent producing successes, Jay Van Hoy and Lars Knudsen realized that they hadn’t had a day off in 18 months. “You did seven-day weeks for a year-and-a-half?” […]

By Scott Macaulay on Jan 20, 2011 Interviews
“PROJECT NIM” DIRECTOR JAMES MARSH

During the past decade, some of the movies’ most crowd-pleasing moments can be found not in ballyhooed Hollywood blockbusters but in documentaries. Doc like Spellbound, Anvil: The Story of Anvil, and The King of Kong: A Fist Full of Quarters are best seen with an audience ready to cheer. The most dazzling example of this trend just might be James Marsh’s Man on Wire, the exhilarating story of Phillipe Petit, a small Frenchman with big dreams. Marsh recounts how the daredevil Petit strung a wire between New York’s Twin Towers and then proceeded to dance between the two skyscrapers — perhaps the […]

By Mary Anderson Casavant on Jan 20, 2011 Sundance Features
“POSITION AMONG THE STARS” | co-writer-director, Leonard Retel Helmrich

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 21, 12:00 pm — Screening Room Sundance Resort, Sundance] As a filmmaker you often hear the term “Kill your darlings” in order to make the story line of your film clear. The darling scenes are often scenes that reveal a poetic feeling, more than facts. Often I saw rough material of colleagues’ potentially beautiful poetic documentaries. But in the editing many of these films were demolished because too many darlings were killed. The story lines became clear but the poetry was gone. In other words, the facts were clear but the feelings were gone. For Position […]

By Filmmaker Staff on Jan 19, 2011 Sundance Responses
“REBIRTH” | director, Jim Whitaker

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 21, 8:30 am — Prospect Square Theatre] The biggest surprise was how the scope of the film continued to evolve. When I had the idea to put the time-lapse cameras up it was in part to record the history of the site moving forward, and in part to create a time-lapse installation at a future museum at Ground Zero. However, after spending more time at Ground Zero and seeing first-hand the emotional and human toll, I decided I needed to capture the human dimension of the event through the subjects. As time went on, we realized that the […]

By Filmmaker Staff on Jan 19, 2011 Sundance Responses
“INCENDIES” | co-writer-director, Denis Villeneuve

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 21, 2:15 pm — Prospector Square Theatre] Each film experience brings is own demon. Time was something I couldn’t afford on Incendies. I had the strong impression to destroy the script each shooting day. I was so angry one morning that I began to sabotage a sequence. Suddenly, on that precise moment, I realized, astonished, that I was making a film about how to stop anger’s cycles while being angry like a grizzly. I remember then, laughing a lot about myself, alone, on the Abu Zaytoun Hills, finding myself so childish. And I reshot the sequence. About filmmaking, […]

By Filmmaker Staff on Jan 19, 2011 Sundance Responses
“TERRI” DIRECTOR AZAZEL JACOBS

Azazel Jacobs’ profile has grown steadily since he made his striking, black-and-white debut feature, Nobody Needs to Know, in 2003. He followed it in 2005 with the delightfully quirky and inventive The GoodTimesKid, a film which found a devoted audience on the film festival circuit and was eventually released theatrically in 2007. Jacobs’ third feature, Momma’s Man, a poignant tale of adult regression into childhood, had its world premiere at Sundance. It became one of the hits of the 2008 festival, and played in theaters later that year to universal acclaim. Jacobs, the son of experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs, grew […]

By Nick Dawson on Jan 18, 2011 Sundance Features
“HOT COFFEE” DIRECTOR SUSAN SALADOFF

No political season is complete without politicians taking up the case of tort reform. Greedy litigants are blamed for everything from clogging up our justice system to running up our medical bills as tort reform advocates take advantage of the fact that everyone hates a lawyer until they need one. With so much misinformation out there, what’s a lawyer to do? Well, if you’re Susan Saladoff, longtime lawyer, first-time filmmaker, you pick up a camera. Using the infamous “McDonald’s coffee case” as her prime example, her debut feature, Hot Coffee, investigates how and why corporations spend millions of dollars drumming […]

By Mary Anderson Casavant on Jan 18, 2011 Sundance Features
“THE GUARD” | writer-director, John Michael McDonagh

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Thursday, Jan. 20, 6:30 pm — Egyptian Theatre] The biggest surprise for me occurred during preproduction. There was a scene in the screenplay where the three villains rendezvous at an amusement park and discuss the day’s events while waiting to ride on a rollercoaster. The scene with the screwball nature of the film was set in an actual amusement park in a seaside town in County Galway, Ireland, our location for the shoot. However little did I know that when the rollercoaster is out of use (during the non-summer months) it is packed up and shipped off to […]

By Filmmaker Staff on Jan 18, 2011 Sundance Responses
“PROJECT NIM” | director, James Marsh

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Thursday, Jan. 20, 9:30 pm — Egyptian Theatre] When you embark on any historical documentary or film about events that have already run their course, the biggest prize you’re after is visual images and archive [materials] showing elements of your story. On Project Nim, which is the life story of a chimpanzee who was brought up like a human child, we knew from various contributors that there was going to be sufficient archive of the chimp to embark on the film but we didn’t know the extent of it. Often the biggest surprise on a film project is […]

By Filmmaker Staff on Jan 18, 2011 Sundance Responses

Cookie	Duration	Description
cookielawinfo-checkbox-analytics	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-functional	11 months	The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-necessary	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-others	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other.
cookielawinfo-checkbox-performance	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance".
viewed_cookie_policy	11 months	The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. It does not store any personal data.

Cookie	Duration	Description
cfmrk_cic		Used by Cloudflare to route user traffic for this Site.
sparrow_id		Installed by Cloudflare. Used to identify individual clients behind a shared IP address and apply security settings on a per-client basis. It does not store any personal identifiable information.

Cookie	Duration	Description
OAGEO		Installed by the Revive Ad Server. Used to cache geolocation (session, deleted when closing the browser)
OAID		Installed by the Revive Ad Server to distinguish users.