Sundance Features
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Minari, Boys State Win Top Prizes at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival
Minari, Lee Isaac-Chung’s fourth feature, an autobiographical portrait of his Korean-American family’s life in the 1980s as he was growing up in a small Arkansas town, won two top prizes — the U.S. Dramatic Grand Jury Prize and U.S. Dramatic Audience Award — tonight at 2020 Sundance Film Festival Awards Ceremony. Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine’s Boys State, a documentary about a contentious kind of civic summer camp for Texas teens, won the U.S. Documentary Grand Jury Prize. A24 will release both films, the latter in partnership with Apple TV+. The World Cinema Dramatic Grand Jury Prize was awarded to […]
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Sundance Institute Announces Tabitha Jackson as New Festival Director
During the festival’s 2020 awards ceremony tonight, the Sundance Institute announced Tabitha Jackson, the Director since 2013 of the Institute’s Documentary Film Program, to be the new Director of the Sundance Film Festival. Jackson will succeed John Cooper, who, after 11 years as Director of the Festival, will move into a newly created Emeritus Director role. Said the Sundance Institute’s Executive Director, Keri Putnam, in a press release, “Tabitha is fiercely devoted to independent artists, has been a visionary member of the Sundance Institute’s leadership team for the last six years. Her authenticity, experience and perspective will serve her well […]
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“What If This is the Goal? This is Everything?”: Writer/Director Edson Oda on His Sundance Hit, Nine Days
Ever so often you’ll have a film at Sundance that hits at the right time, place and with the right crowd — so that you feel the theater buzz. The last moment of the film, before it cuts to black, rings out over silence (aside from the sniffling of a handful audience members.) For me this year that film was Nine Days on Monday night at the Eccles theater. A feature debut from director Edson Oda, the expansive piece is equal parts grounded sci-fi, drama and a delicate exploration of emotion and existence. Let’s just say you don’t want to […]
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Sundance (and Slamdance) 2020 Dispatch #7: Dick Johnson is Dead, Kajillionaire The Glorias, Boy’s State and More
For the last several years, the very first film I’ve seen in Park City has been among the festival’s best, launching my Sundance with a bang. The lucky title this year is Dick Johnson is Dead, a documentary—whatever that label means in this case—directed and photographed by Dick’s daughter, cinematographer Kirsten Johnson (Cameraperson), whose cinematic imagination couldn’t be more alive and kicking. The imminent death, or what’s worse, the gradual ravaging by Alzheimer’s, of an aging parent is a personal and emotional minefield few are ever equipped to traverse, no less understand, when the time comes. Alzheimer’s is also a […]
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“You Might Think it’s a Fun Work About Pizza, But It’s Really a Meditation on Mortality and Gentrification”: Director David Shapiro on his Sundance Premiering Doc Series, Untitled Pizza Movie
Before there was the no-budget Best Buy scam (scoring equipment by cycling through 30-day return policies) there was the Crazy Eddy scam — same deal, except that instead of the corporate anonymity of Best Buy’s Death Star big box there was a scrappy local circuit embodied by a screaming man feigning mental illness on late-night television. (“These prices are insane!!!!”) And before there was Eater, Grub Street and Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown there was Eat to Win, a kind of punk foodie travelogue in which friends David Shapiro and Leeds Atkinson tooled around New York City with their Crazy Eddie […]
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Impact Partners Executive Director Jenny Raskin on Financing, Fellowships, and Following the Filmmakers’ Lead
From 2018’s feature doc Oscar winner Icarus, to 2019’s Independent Spirit Award for Best Documentary recipient Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, to the Sundance Grand Jury Prize nabbing Of Fathers and Sons and Dina (in 2018 and 2017, respectively), Impact Partners has been behind some of the most critically acclaimed nonfiction work of recent years. The company’s winning streak, however, actually goes back a decade, all the way to 2010’s Academy Award for Documentary Feature recipient The Cove. And Impact Partners itself goes back even further. Founded in 2007 by Dan Cogan and Geralyn Dreyfous with a mission to bring […]
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14 Films Not to Miss at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival
Always a bellweather for the health — artistic as well as business — of the American independent film scene, the Sundance Film Festival began yesterday in Park City, Utah, preceded by more than the usual amount of pre-fest news and drama. On the positive front, Sundance 2020 is something of a launch party for a new documentary financing and production company, Concordia, formed by filmmaker Davis Guggenheim and former Participant Media production president Jonathan King, in partnership with Laurene Powell Jobs’s Emerson Collective. One quarter of the Documentary Competition slate boasts the Concordia logo. And then distressingly there’s Oprah Winfrey’s withdrawal as […]
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Clemency, One Child Nation Top a Packed 2019 Sundance Film Festival Awards
Clemency, Chinonye Chukwo’s somber and bracing examination of the corrosive effects of capital punishment — on a woman, a marriage, and a society — won the U.S. Dramatic Competition Grand Jury Prize tonight at the Sundance Film Festival’s Closing Night Ceremony in Park City Utah. One Child Nation, Nanfu Wang and Jialing Zhangze’s disturbing 36-year chronicle of the effects of China’s “one-child policy,” took the top prize in the U.S. Documentary Competition. And then there was great diversity among the remainder of the awards, with many of the most well-received films at the festival scooping up recognition. These included Joe […]
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Dispatches from Park City — Saturday, Feb 2nd: Sundance Plans Ahead, Cold Case Hammarskjöld, Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool, The Great Hack, and More
Sundance’s second weekend—the awards ceremony is tonight—provides a first opportunity to reflect on the impact of the 2019 festival. On the question of a breakout film at this edition of Sundance, the consensus (based on many conversations) seems to be “meh.” Which is not to say that a success story won’t emerge, since at least four films sold for between $13-15 million, which is encouraging. Also encouraging are signs of the Sundance Institute’s investment in the festival’s future. Last year Sundance inaugurated a new 500-seat theater with Dolby Atmos sound, The Ray, which had been converted from a former Sports […]
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Sundance Interview: Gabriel Mascaro on His Near-Future Drama Divine Love, the Seductive Tactics of Religion, and Body Politics
Eroticism in service of faith is the thematic dogma fueling Gabriel Mascaro’s new intellectual affair Divine Love, a near-future drama with measured science fiction elements.Trading the carnal sensuality of 2015’s Neon Bull for extreme religious devotion, the Brazilian auteur continues to captivate with visually seductive frames laced with eye-catching colors and ethereal lighting. Futuristically restrained, the director’s vision of Brazil in 2027, just a few years from our current battlefield of a world, is selective in its use of technology, focusing on inventions or machines that directly speak to the protagonist agenda: doors with pregnancy detectors in public spaces and […]
