Sundance Features
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PROGRAMMER INTERVIEW: NEW LANDSCAPE FOR NEW FRONTIERS
Sundance programmer Shari Frilot watches all kinds of films for the festival each year, but she spends much of the her time smoking out the best, strangest, most relevant work for the New Frontiers section. Call it new media or transmedia or video-internet-3D film art; the best work in the section is indescribable. Until this year, New Frontiers was packed into a cavernous space inside the lower level of a shopping mall on Main Street. This year, they’re moving to the Miners Hospital, across from the Library. “Every year people would say, ‘Wait, where was New Frontiers?’ I missed that!’ […]
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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?” […]
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“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 […]
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“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 […]
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“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 […]
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SUNDANCE PREVIEW: INTERVIEW WITH SENIOR PROGRAMMER DAVID COURIER
For the independent film industry, January isn’t just the start of a New Year, it’s also exam season. At this very moment, documentary filmmakers around the world are in edit rooms deep into the night, hoping to ace the Sundance finals. The reward for those late night cram sessions is certainly worth it: the most gifted alumni of previous festival’s have been awarded the best graduation gift of all — a career as a working filmmaker. To find out more about this year’s class, I spoke to David Courier, Senior Film Programmer at the Sundance Institute. Filmmaker: I noticed a lot […]
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CULTURE HACKER: A STORYTELLING PANDEMIC
Originally printed in our Winter 2011 issue, grab a free issue of Filmmaker at Sundance to be a part of Pandemic 1.o. When the phone rings I’m feeling a bit nervous. The voice on the other end is slow and calculated. “We can do 30,000 but it will take 10 weeks. In order to get it in time for Sundance we need to order 500,000 and ship from China… We’re going to have to find another way.” Not quite your normal Sundance prep conversation, especially when the items in question are bottles of water. But these are not regular bottles […]
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“THE RED CHAPEL”‘S MADS BRUGGER | By Alicia Van Couvering
When Danish Zentropa director Mads Brugger decided to take himself and two Korean-Danish comedians to North Korea under the guise of a fake comedy project, he employed what he thought might be the magic word for repressive regimes seeking international image burnishing: “cultural exchange.” The film opens with a shot of Brugger, lying on a hotel bed, calmly reading Kim Jong-Il’s official Instruction Manual for Film Directing. The secret police who watched this footage every night apparently had no objection. What they somehow did not expect or anticipate was that Brugger would one day turn this footage into a feature […]
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“DADDY LONGLEGS”‘ JOSH AND BENNY SAFDIE | By Scott Macaulay
When I was asked by The Huffington Post to comment on New York movies premiering in Sundance, the first film that popped into my mind was Josh and Bennie Safdie’s Daddy Longlegs. Now, as you may know, I’m a big fan of the Safdie brothers, selecting Josh for our 25 New Faces for the film he directed, The Pleasure of Being Robbed in 2008. That picture is a delightfully freewheeling romance of sorts involving a young woman, played with depth and originality by Eleonore Hendricks, who casually steals, not out of maliciousness or for greed but simply because of a […]
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Banksy Revealed? Parsing a Sundance Mystery
Sundance documentaries have developed a strong track record. Hits out of recent festivals include Man on Wire, The Cove and We Live in Public, each of which captures an element of society and finds the human connection within. This year, however, the human connection in some of the more talked about nonfiction entries is highly suspect. At the center it all: Banksy. Exit Through the Gift Shop, the alleged directorial debut of the anonymous street British street artist, wound up with a surprise slot in the Spectrum section of the festival. Banksy’s enigmatic career and life beyond the film world […]
