Sundance Responses
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“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 […]
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“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 […]
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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, […]
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“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 […]
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“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 […]
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“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. […]
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“AN OVERSIMPLICATION OF HER BEAUTY” | writer-director, Terence Nance
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, January 21 9:00 pm –Egyptian Theatre, Park City] I come from a studio art background and consider myself an artist who made a film. I make music, murals and performances as well, so I hesitate to call myself a filmmaker. That said, I’ve been thinking lately that outside of the “burden of branding,” it doesn’t really matter what I call myself; my work will name me at the end of the day, and I’m interested to hear what that name will be after a few years of making work. So I guess if I am indeed named […]
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“THE COMEDY” | co-writer-director, Rick Alverson
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, January 21, 8:30 pm –Library Center Theater] I’ve always been suspicious of movies and visual media and my interest in film developed out of that suspicion. In the world that I knew as a child, in an era preceding the Internet, many of us were reared in part, at least in terms of our social behavior, by television. Much of what we understood of the adult world we learned through osmosis, through the colors and exoticism of television, through the play of bodies and the exchange of words and gestures in that very artificial space. We were […]
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“YOUNG AND WILD” | writer-director Marialy Rivas
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, January 21, 12:15 pm –Prospector Square Theatre, Park City] I didn’t have an option, when I was 7 years old I felt “the calling”, I knew since then what I wanted to do with my life: become a filmmaker. Since then, it has been pretty much like being passionately in love with somebody, why do we fall in love with some particular person and not the next? It doesn’t really have a rational explanation -at least not for me- you are just in love. During the years, I have tried to give it a sense, so here […]
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“COMPLIANCE” | writer-director, Craig Zobel
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, January 21, 11:30 pm –Library Center Theatre, Park City] My movie is closely based on a true event, though I actually stumbled upon the story years after it was a news item. (Is “Ripped from old headlines!” a saying?) To delve too much into the events might dampen some of the film’s enjoyment, but in brief, it involves some people who are essentially talked into holding a person against her will, naked, in the stockroom of a fast food restaurant for hours. I can’t say when I first discovered this story that I had a “Eureka!” moment, […]
