Sundance Responses
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Valentine Road | Director Marta Cunningham
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, Jan. 19, Noon — Temple Theatre, Park City] In the spring of 2008, I read about the murder of Lawrence “Larry” King, a multiracial 15-year-old student who was reported as being gay. It was a story I just couldn’t get out of my mind. I first imagined exploring the issues in a fictional film, but once I attended a pretrial hearing for Larry’s accused murderer, Brandon McInerney, just 14-years-old, I immediately realized that a bigger story was just developing. It needed to be a documentary. So began my education as a first-time director, flying by the seat […]
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What They Don’t Talk About When They Talk About Love | Director Mouly Surya
[PREMIERE SCREENING; Saturday, Jan. 19, 11:30am — Prospector Square Theatre, Park City] Aside from the usual sacrifices of time and energy, in making this film I’ve lost friends. That’s the weirdest thing about producing or directing. When you make a film, it is different than when you write or paint. You surround yourself with a lot of people, but it still feels lonely. But at the end of the day, everything is for the film. Instead of the usual “art imitates life” maybe “art defeats life” is more befitting. Thinking back, when you do fall in love with a film […]
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Inequality for All | Director Jacob Kornbluth
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, Jan. 19, 2:30pm — Prospector Square Theatre, Park City] As I was growing up, I was always told that anything worth doing would take sacrifice. As an independent narrative filmmaker, which was my background before making this documentary, I was accustomed to working from a script and shooting over an intense but short period. It’s an exhausting and unsustainable month or two where you sacrifice your life, but then it ends, and you sort of remake yourself from the rubble… go for a walk, read a book, and begin to feel like some version of yourself after […]
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Jiseul | Director Muel O
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, Jan. 19, 3:00 — Sundance Resort Screening Room, Sundance Resort] Since the tragedy of the Jeju 4.3 Uprising, more than 60 years have been passed without any opportunity to reconsider due to the ignorance from Korea and the world. To bring the terrible memories up into the film caused huge pressure in regards to many things. As well as getting the financial support, the biggest pressure was that I had a duty to make a great enough film to satisfy the local residents in Jeju Island. This tragedy is still ineffaceable pain to them and the period […]
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Mud | Director Jeff Nichols
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, Jan. 19, 8:30pm — The MARC, Park City] When I first read this question I was immediately struck by how different my answers would be for each of the three films I’ve made. Each answer really shows where I was at in my life during these productions. For Mud, the biggest sacrifice I made was being away from my family. At the time, our son was one, and I missed roughly four months of his life. Despite a few occasional visits during production, I mostly had to block out the fact that I wasn’t getting to be […]
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Stories We Tell | Director Sarah Polley
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 18, 9:00pm — Salt Lake City Library Theatre, Salt Lake City] To make Stories We Tell, I think I sacrificed any semblance of an equilibrium for five years. It was terrifying to make a film about the people closest to me. The potential consequences of damaged or severed relationships hung over me and haunted me, the weighing of truth versus fiction in my family’s lives and how the exposure of that balance would surely effect us all, was at times almost too much to bear. Spending hours on end in an editing room reliving some of […]
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Shopping | Directors Mark Albiston and Louis Sutherland
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 18, 3:00pm — Egyptian Theatre] Our biggest personal sacrifice would be our time. Both having large families, this is a limited commodity. Fortunately for us, our marriages are still intact. From the writing to shooting, we worked beyond expectation beginning “our own” pre-production months before money was on hand and going well beyond after we were told the budget was broke to ensure we had a solid level of preparation. This cost us personally financially yet has been one of the main contributing factors allowing for the quality we now see in the frame. Basically it’s […]
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The Spectacular Now | Director James Ponsoldt
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 18, 8:30pm — Library Center Theatre, Park City] This past summer, I traveled to my hometown of Athens, Georgia, and shot a movie in the neighborhoods and streets of my childhood. Our film’s production office was the recently vacated office of Athens’ local heroes, R.E.M. On weekends the cast and crew partied in local bars and rock clubs (the Manhattan, the 40 Watt Club, the Georgia Theatre). I saw my parents all the time. It was a dream — a second childhood, balmy and green, somehow better than the first. I was so, so lucky. But […]
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The Stuart Hall Project | Director John Akomfrah
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 18, 3:00pm — Yarrow Hotel Theatre, Park City] In making this film, I sacrificed time and plenty of sleep! The organizational nightmare that comes with working almost exclusively with archive has provided its own set of challenges. Creating a whole new working practice for myself and the team these past few films – and by that I mean the migration away from what we all as filmmakers would understand to be the daily routine, the broadly known elements of documentary making – has been tough. Watching thousands of hours or archive and selecting the material was […]
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Soldate Jeannette | Director Daniel Hoesl
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 18, 9:00pm — Egyptian Theatre, Park City] It’s independent thinking that makes filmmaking independent. Let me tell you a story. In the village there’s one inn. And the owner’s name is Jim. Jim’s surprised when someone comes in. ‘Cause usually no one comes in. But that day Ava came in, drank some gin, and asked Jim for a room to sleep in. “What does it cost?” Ava asked. “50 bucks,” Jim said, and she gave it to him. And Jim stared at the note which he hadn’t seen for a while at the inn. He went […]
