Sundance Responses
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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 […]
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Fire in the Blood | Director Dylan Mohan Gray
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 18, 3:00pm — Sundance Resort Screening Room, Sundance Resort] Metaphysically-speaking, there were many times during the more than five years it took to make this film when I felt like I had sacrificed my sanity and freedom… I suppose every documentary filmmaker experiences similar despondency at some point or other, but there were certainly long periods when it seemed like I was desperately trying to find my way through a labyrinth in the fog, and because I had no documentary community to look to for support and guidance here in Mumbai, it was often very lonely. […]
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Pussy Riot – A Punk Prayer | Co-Director Mike Lerner
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 18, 8:30pm — Prospector Square Theatre, Park City] I am the co-director of Pussy Riot – A Punk Prayer and an executive producer on Jehane Noujaim’s The Square. The concept of sacrifice is at the heart of both movies. It would be hard to exaggerate the sacrifices made by the thousands of young people who have spent two years battling for freedom and justice in Egypt. Many have died, been tortured, beaten and arrested and their sacrifice and that of their families will be recognised as one of the most significant in Egypt’s long history. What the protestors […]
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The Gatekeepers | Director Dror Moreh
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 18, Noon — Temple Theatre, Park City] Telling the story of a country in the last 45 years, especially when the storytellers are the heads of the secret service, required a lot of sacrifices to be made; especially in depth and length of content. We spent a long time in the editing room, and our first cut was 3.5 hours. The biggest challenge is to understand where the heart of the film lies. One hard decision, for example, was the personal childhood stories of The Gatekeepers, especially the story of Avraham Shalom, who was born in […]
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The Crash Reel | Director Lucy Walker
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 18, 6:30pm — Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center, Salt Lake City] A good film takes great sacrifice. A great film takes an almost unbearable amount. Malcolm Gladwell says it takes 10,000 hours to get good at something. That’s nothing compared to making good documentary. A good film is like an iceberg, for every bit you can see there’s at least 10 times more work invisibly undergirding it. The scenes and characters that didn’t make the cut, the cuts that were recut, the time you invested researching, the time you spend waiting for the right shot, going […]
