Sundance Features
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Is Sundance Worth It for Film Crew Members? Veteran Festival Goers Offer their Advice
Over the next ten days, the Sundance Film Festival will screen 113 feature films, and tens of thousands of people descend on the small town of Park City, Utah. Included in those crowds are the crewmembers from all over the world that made those 113 movies possible. While directors with projects premiering at Sundance are flown out to Utah by distributors or financiers, many crewmembers who worked tirelessly and often for very little money wind up paying their own way to the festival in order to support their own films. It’s an expensive trip, and they may wind up without […]
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Sundance: Are Trump Think Pieces Helpful?
I write this a few hours before I’ll be hopping on a plane and heading to quaint and quiet Park City, Utah, where I’ll be covering the 2017 Sundance Film Festival for Filmmaker Magazine and surviving on a diet of tuna sandwiches I buy from 7/11 in-between screenings while, it goes without saying, hating myself. I’m lucky to not have a specific beat or set of overt marching orders for what to cover during the festivals. Sweet freedom. I don’t plan to just review films, nor do I plan to spend too much energy covering the “business of the festival” […]
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Sundance 2017: Five Questions with Landline Director Gillian Robespierre
Everything changed for Gillian Robespierre after Sundance. In 2014 she arrived at the festival with her debut feature, Obvious Child, a personal, provocative, NYC-set comedy starring Jenny Slate. Before the festival even wrapped, she had found an enviable distributor for the film in A24. Obvious Child would go on to play on 200 screens nationwide, earn more than $3 million and garner Robespierre a directing award from the National Board of Review. She returns to the festival three years later with Landline, an observant family comedy set in ’90s New York. Filmmaker spoke with Robespierre ahead of the film’s world premiere about her love […]
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Five Questions for Newtown Director Kim A. Snyder
Kim A. Snyder’s Newtown examines the current spate of gun violence by presenting the families who have been most affected by it. Three years removed from the horrific school shooting at Newtown Elementary School that took twenty-six casualties in Connecticut, Snyder’s film gives a much-needed face to the community. As discussions revolving around the accessibility of firearms seem to get obscured and buried by politicians with a not-so-secret agenda, Newtown seeks to make the political personal. Filmmaker: Your previous film, Welcome to Shelbyville, was also about the residents of a small town reacting to a major event in their community. What brings you to a location? Are you first […]
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Five Questions for How to Tell You’re a Douchebag Writer/Director Tahir Jetter
Having made his Sundance debut with the short film Close. in 2011, filmmaker Tahir Jetter returned with his debut feature, How To Tell You’re A Douchebag — a film that, as he discusses below, he wasn’t sure would bring him back to Park City. After his web series Hard Times was picked up for distribution by Issa Rae Productions in 2014, Jetter set his sights on a feature film about dating in the modern world. To raise awareness of the project, Jetter published a blog, Occasionally Dating Black Women, written in a voice that would turn out to be his fictional main character. Inspired by films that handle […]
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Five Questions for Jim: The James Foley Story Director Brian Oakes
Developing a documentary about the murder of an innocent photojournalist at the hands of ISIS would be an emotional experience for any first-time feature filmmaker. Now imagine that the slain journalist in question, Jim Foley, is someone you’ve been friends with since childhood. This is the situation filmmaker Brian Oakes found himself in when making Jim: The James Foley Story, a film that looks at his friend’s death as well as the chilling aftermath the Foley family had to endure stateside. An intensely personal experience, Jim will air on HBO next month following its world premiere in the U.S. Documentary Completion section of […]
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Five Questions for NUTS! Director Penny Lane
A medical doctor in name only, John R. Brinkley became famous in the ’20s and ’30s for claiming to have found an unusual cure for male impotence: all it would take was the transplantation of goat testicles into his human subjects. A hundred years removed from “discovery,” documentarian Penny Lane (whose Our Nixon was about another very larger-than-life public figure) dives into the life and times of Brinkley, a man whose entire history was based on lies and false acclaim. Filmmaker: Your first feature documentary Our Nixon is compiled from archival footage clearly relevant to American history and politics. Did you set out for your follow-up to be a […]
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Jim Cummings’ Thunder Road Video Diary, Part Three
In part three of Jim Cummings and team’s video diary documenting their time at Sundance, Thunder Road wins a jury prize! But before that, there’s more anxiety about networking to get through, both before and after the awards. Part one is here, part two is here.
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Sundance Dispatch 5: Weiner and Holy Hell
I watch the local news a lot. It’s a fun, seemingly randomized mash-up of crimes caught on security cameras, traffic and weather updates, forced banter, cooking segments, deep concerns about marijuana use and “reporting” that’s thinly-veiled support for the NYPD, etc. Sometimes you see a story and wonder whether it’ll remain tristate fodder or leap to the national agenda: e.g., I wondered that when the stairwell shooting of Akai Gurley was first reported, and I was equally uncertain when Anthony Weiner’s 2013 run for NYC mayor was derailed by the “Carlos Danger” sexting “scandal.” It seemed like an OK joke but not much […]
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Five Questions for Life, Animated Director Roger Ross Williams
Chances are you’ve experienced one or two-dozen animated films from Walt Disney Studios. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, The Little Mermaid, The Lion King: the studio famous for introducing the world to Mickey Mouse has produced some of the most identifiable films (and, subsequently, images) of the twentieth century. One of the studio’s most ardent fans is Owen Suskind, a young man diagnosed as autistic at the age of three and the subject of a memoir, Life, Animated: A Story of Sidekicks, Heroes, and Autism, written by his father Ron Suskind. Using Disney films as a guide to communicate and express himself to […]
