Sundance Responses
-
“SHUT UP AND PLAY THE HITS” | directors, Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Sunday, January 22 Midnight –Egyptian Theatre, Park City] With this film we were presented with the opportunity to document a very specific moment in time, both musically and culturally—LCD Soundsystem’s final show ever, at Madison Square Garden. The idea of shooting the concert appealed to us as not only fans of the band, but as filmmakers. We love the classic experiential concert films of the past, such as The Last Waltz, and Stop Making Sense, and for us, the idea of documenting an event like that was something we had a very specific vision for. But we were also […]
-
“PURSUIT OF LONELINESS” | writer-director Laurence Thrush
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Sunday, January 22 Noon –Egyptian Theatre, Park City] First things first, I think it would be incredibly arrogant to suggest that I consciously chose to be a filmmaker out of all other art forms, as if I could be a musician if I wanted, or a novelist, or a painter or anything that I decided to turn my hand to. The very short answer to this question is that I probably make films because I can’t do anything else. When I think about the most satisfying moments of working on the films that I have made, it is […]
-
“CORPO CELESTE” | director, Alice Rohrwacher
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Sunday, January 22 9:00 pm –Broadway Center Cinema 6, SLC] When we see something perfectly intact in nature, like a wonderful butterfly, with its incredible composition of shape and colors, in Italian we immediately say “look, it seems fake!” On the other hand, when we contemplate an object, skillfully crafted by human hands, like a butterfly put together through hours of patient work by a talented artisan, we say “wow, it looks real!” There is a strange area where the perfectly natural and the perfectly artificial collide. This point of contact needs to be investigated: I sense something […]
-
“WE’RE NOT BROKE” | directors, Karin Hayes & Victoria Bruce
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Sunday, January 22 9:00 pm –Temple Theatre, Park City] Karin Hayes: As a young kid, I dreamed of being a theater actor (or a veterinarian). It wasn’t until I went to a screening of Robert M. Young’s film Triumph of the Spirit, that I knew I wanted to be able to tell incredibly powerful stories in this same way. I listened, engrossed, as Young, Willem Dafoe, Edward James Olmos and the story’s real-life main character, Salamo Arouch, spoke about the real events and the filmmaking process. By the rousing applause and Q&A afterwards, I could tell the entire […]
-
“AI WEIWEI: NEVER SORRY” | director, Alison Klayman
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Sunday, January 22, 11:30 am –Library Center Theatre, Park City] Working in radio journalism in college and then as a reporter in China, I fell in love with the power of aural storytelling. I always hoped to make a documentary film because I thought it would add even more layers to an audience’s experience. As a director I know my choices and authorship necessarily shape the film, but my hope is that good documentary filmmaking can come as close as possible to letting viewers encounter a story directly and decide things for themselves. Ai Weiwei is a master […]
-
“TEDDY BEAR” | co-writer-director, Mads Matthiesen
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Sunday, January 22, 2:30 pm –Prospect Square Theatre, Park City] For me filmmaking is the ultimate form for dealing with character. Dealing with people creating character and express human issues. Telling a story. I have a feeling that I in filmmaking can move very close to a sense of real. Of getting close to how life really is. As I see it. When I watch a good film no other art form will capture me like film does and it’s probably that love that’s the main reason to why I make film. In film you have the possibility […]
-
How To Survive A Plague | Director, David France
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Sunday, January 22, 3:00 pm –Temple Theatre, Park City] It’s a quirky, but not inconsequential, fact about HIV that the virus made its hideous debut in medical journals just a few months before the first camcorders hit the stores. In the long years before the Internet, before cell-phone cameras or social networks, these low-cost marvels democratized the power of moving images and built the first bridge between mass media and previously hidden worlds. Thus was born the Sex Tape, of course. But the world where AIDS first struck was also a hidden world. It’s hard to fathom now, […]
-
“MY BROTHER THE DEVIL” | director, Sally El Hosaini
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Sunday, January 22 8:30 pm –Prospector Square Theatre, Park City] I believe that going to the cinema and watching a film, on the big screen, will always hold a special place in peoples hearts. Despite technological advances in terms of how films are consumed, the physical experience of the lights dimming as you are transported into another world will always be magical. This is why it will never die. My first memory of going to the cinema was when I was six years old. I grew up in Cairo, Egypt and every summer our local sports club would […]
-
“SAVE THE DATE” | co-writer-director, Michael Mohan
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Sunday, January 22, 2:30 pm –Library Center Theatre, Park City] When I was a kid I wanted to be a magician. I watched a VHS copy of David Copperfield walking through the Great Wall of China over and over and over again. I still don’t know how he did it. Filmmaking isn’t that much different. I mean – think of it this way: movies start out as ideas. In your brain. These get spilled onto paper. People then pretend to be the characters on that paper. Which is filmed through the lens of a camera. The contents of […]
-
“ABOUT FACE” | director, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Sunday, January 22 2:30 pm –The MARC, Park City] Over thirty years ago, I graduated from AFI with a degree in film and shortly thereafter, became a photographer. I wanted the work I created to be mine and found filmmaking too collaborative. Two decades later, I returned to filmmaking with my doc, “Lou Reed: Rock and Roll Heart”, managing, somehow, to make the film with a tiny crew. It mostly felt like my work.. and I got used to relying on others to make it sing. About Face is my seventh film and counting, since the Lou doc. […]
