Sundance
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Sundance 2025: Editor Interviews
Each year, Filmmaker sends all Sundance feature film or series editors a questionnaire to complete ahead of their film’s festival screening. We also send out a single question for feature directors to answer as well as questionnaires for cinematographers and first-time Sundance feature producers. Below, find links to individual editor responses, which will be updated daily during the festival. “Paring the Story Down to Its Bare Essentials”: Editor Joshua L. Pearson on Sly Lives “What Paul Was Saying Was Very Reflective of Who He Was”: Editor Damian Rodriguez on Pee-wee as Himself “It Was an Ambitious Project From the Get-go”: Editor Bryan […]
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Sundance 2025 Interviews: First-Time Producers
This year, Filmmaker sent all first-time Sundance feature film producers a questionnaire to complete ahead of their film’s festival screening. We also sent out a single question for feature directors to answer as well as questionnaires for editors and cinematographers. Below, find links to individual first-time Sundance feature producer responses, which will be updated daily during the festival. “Budget a Worst-Case Scenario and Then Do Better”: Producers Ivan Unkovski and Ivana Shekutkoska on DJ Ahmet “Don’t Be Afraid to Speak Up and Set the Tone”: Producer Pierre M. Coleman on Ricky “It Came Down to Me Not Wanting to Miss […]
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The 2025 Sundance Question: What Was Your Film’s Most Memorable Day?
Each year, Filmmaker asks all the incoming feature directors at Sundance one question. (To see last year’s question and responses, click here.) We also send out cinematographer, editor and first-time producer questionnaires. This year’s question: Films are made over many days, but some days are more memorable, and important, than others. Imagine yourself in ten years looking back on this production. What day from your film’s development, production or post do you think you’ll view as the most significant and why? Below, find links to each director’s individual response to the prompt. Keep checking back here during the festival, as […]
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Sundance 2025: Cinematographer Interviews
Each year, Filmmaker sends all Sundance feature film or series cinematographers a questionnaire to complete ahead of their film’s festival screening. We also send out a single question for feature directors to answer as well as questionnaires for editors and first-time Sundance feature producers. Below, find links to individual cinematographer responses, which will be updated daily during the festival. “We Wanted a Visual Language That Was Both Filmic and Intimate”: DP Guy Mossman on Speak. “A Feeling of Endless Night”: DP Arseni Khachaturan on April “With Each Location We Embraced Its Essence”: DP Matthew Chuang on Jimpa “It Was the Movie I’d […]
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“Ninety Percent of Our Film Takes Place In One Location” | Greg Jardin, It’s What’s Inside
Films are made of and from places: the locations they are filmed in, the settings they are meant to evoke, the geographies where they are imagined and worked on. What place tells its own story about your film, whether a particularly challenging location that required production ingenuity or a map reference that inspired you personally, politically or creatively? Ninety percent of our film takes place in one location, which makes that the default answer – a giant house in the middle of nowhere. The whole impetus behind the film’s premise was coming up with something that could unfold in a single […]
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In Full Frame: Director Rose Troche and Sundance Institute’s John Nein on Restoring the Lesbian Classic Go Fish
“It’s very much like having a kid out there in the world doing its own thing,” said writer/director Rose Troche last month as she was finishing the restoration of her debut feature Go Fish, which screened as part of Sundance’s 40th Edition programming this week, three decades after its original premiere at the festival. “It’s one of those films that has never gone out of the conversation, this funky movie made for $17,000 that launched these careers.” Troche is right —while many films from Sundance in the ’90s never made the leap to digital distribution, the lesbian drama Go Fish […]
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Sundance Film Festival 2024 Announces Awards
The Sundance Film Festival has announced the awards for this year’s edition. The list follows below, with links to our coverage of the films in question as available: GRAND JURY PRIZES The U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic was presented to In The Summers / U.S.A. (Director and Screenwriter: Alessandra Lacorazza, Producers: Alexander Dinelaris, Rob Quadrino, Fernando Rodriguez-Vila, Lynette Coll, Sergio Lira, Cristóbal Güell) — On a journey that spans the formative years of their lives, two sisters navigate their loving but volatile father during their yearly summer visits to his home in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Cast: René Pérez Joglar, […]
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Sundance 2024: Devo, War Game, Girls State
First you get radicalized, then you get professionalized—a familiar trajectory Chris Smith’s Devo retells in a familiar idiom. After sitting down with dour conspiracy theorist Michael Ruppert for 2009’s Collapse, the American Movie director didn’t make a feature for eight years. He returned to begin his populist doc era with 2017’s Jim & Andy, which made generous use of previously unseen videos of Jim Carrey acting like a maniac “in character” as Andy Kaufman on the set of 1999’s Man on the Moon. In present-day interviews, Carrey described his dilemma: having given a performance at a relatively young age that confirmed […]
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“A Departure From Narratives of Division” | Iliana Sosa, God Save Texas: La Frontera
Films are made of and from places: the locations they are filmed in, the settings they are meant to evoke, the geographies where they are imagined and worked on. What place tells its own story about your film, whether a particularly challenging location that required production ingenuity or a map reference that inspired you personally, politically or creatively? God Save Texas: La Frontera unfolds its narrative amidst the backdrop of El Paso, Texas—a sister city to Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua. Within the embrace of the Border, a realm pulsating with political fervor, two cultures harmonize, forging the unique tapestry that defines this […]
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“This is the Story of Environmental Racism”: Editor Rosella Tursi on God Save Texas: The Price of Oil
Inspired by God Save Texas: A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Lawrence Wright’s examination of the contradictions and history of Texas, God Save Texas is an anthology series in which three Texan directors offer their own perspective on the state. The second of these, God Save Texas: The Price of Oil, is Corman’s World director Alex Stapleton’s examination of the history of the country’s energy sector and its relationship to her own family history, who arrived as enslaved people in the 1830s. Below, God Save Texas: The Price of Oil editor Rosella Tursi discusses editing the […]
