Sundance Responses
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“THE AMBASSADOR” | director, Mads Brügger
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, January 20 9:00 pm –Screening Room, Sundance Resort] Well, first of all I don’t think of myself as an artist. I am a journalist, who happens to make films. I make these films because they allow me to connect with an audience which is much larger than the five million Danes who live in Denmark. If I had written my latest film The Ambassador as a book, and published it in Denmark, I would not be answering this question in English, because nobody would know about The Ambassador outside of Denmark.
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“THE RAID” | writer-director, Gareth Evans
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, January 20, 11:15 pm –The MARC, Park City] I’m the guy that makes stunt performers take multiple kicks to the head for the pleasure of what I hope is a captivated audience. I ask a lot of people. I deal in blood and mayhem. As a kid I was obsessed, and still am to this day with the incredible work done by my childhood heroes. My friends and I would re-enact everything we’d seen, doing remakes of our favorite films in my back garden. 8 year old kids running around swinging punches and kicks, diving across the […]
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“TIM AND ERIC’S BILLION DOLLAR MOVIE” | directors, Eric Wareheim & Tim Heidecker
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, January 20, 11:45 pm –Library Center Theater] Eric Wareheim: I am Eric Wareheim the number one filmmaker/artist along with my friend Tim Heidecker who is number two and I prefer the look and compression of an internet viral video but my Mom would be more proud of me if I showed my feature length video in a movie theater so that’s what I did and I’m proud of what I’ve done and please enjoy my expression on the big screen or DVD because that’s my vision as a modern day pioneer thank you.
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“INDIE GAME: THE MOVIE” | directors, Lisanne Pajot and James Swirsky
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, January 20, 3:00 pm –Yarrow Hotel Theatre] There’s something deeply powerful about watching someone in the moment going through a life-changing experience. Film, the documentary genre specifically, was a strong way for us to tell the surprisingly dramatic story of making video games, in Indie Game: The Movie. Until recently, video games haven’t widely been considered an art form. The technical part of game-making (the coding and software part) sometimes hides the fact that game development can be very personal and creative. One of goals for the film was to show what these developers go through is […]
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“THE PERCEPTION OF MOVING TARGETS”| director, Weston Currie
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, January 20, Noon –Egyptian Theatre, Park City] As a boy, as a little dreamer imagining what fantastic job he might one day have as a grown man, I always saw myself filling the roles of the hero/villain archetypes we see in the movies. A cowboy, a detective, an archeologist adventurer, a robber even, sometimes Robin Hood and other times James Cagney. Older, increasingly more in touch with reality, and with my dawning awareness of film as a created world imagined and rendered by artists and crews, I arrived at a new aspiration (still just as fanciful as […]
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“THE INVISIBLE WAR” | director, Kirby Dick
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, January 20 3:00 pm –Temple Theatre, Park City] The Invisible War is a film about the epidemic of rape within the U.S. military and the institutions that perpetuate and cover up its existence. When I first came upon the story several years ago, I was very surprised that a documentary hadn’t been made on the subject. As I investigated further, I realized this was one of the most underreported stories of the last 50 years, with well over half a million soldiers sexually assaulted since World War II. Why wasn’t a film made about this issue ten, […]
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“OLSO, AUGUST 31st ” | writer-director Joachim Trier
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, January 20 9:00 pm –Yarrow Hotel Theatre, Park City] How can you express thought in film? How can we specifically show thoughts in a character? As a director, in my view, the most personal is how you see things. My co-writer Eskil Vogt and I wanted to explore how to create a story that focuses on the emotional, and almost physical, experience of an existential crisis. “I’m lost. How do I move forward?” So Oslo, August 31st is about the state of being lost and that particular loneliness that accompanies it. Cinema is a wonderful art form […]
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“THAT’S WHAT SHE SAID” | director, Carrie Preston
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, January 20 5:30 pm –Prospector Square Theatre, Park City] Since I was a kid, I wanted to put on shows. I would make my little sister do skits with me that I had written, and I even started my own theater company in my neighborhood when I was 12, directing all the neighborhood kids in our front yards. I was dead serious about my make believe. When I was acting, I would disappear and get lost in someone else’s skin, yet at the same time, I never felt more present in my own. That’s the same way […]
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“THE LAW IN THESE PARTS” | director, Ra’anan Alexandrowicz
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, January 20, 3:00 pm –Screening Room, Sundance Resort] My new film, The Law in These Parts chronicles the legal mechanism created around Israel’s 44-year military occupation of the Palestinian people. It is a film which explores something theoretically there for people to see, but that is completely hidden from society’s eye. The film’s raw materials are laws, verdicts, appeals – some of the driest and least appealing materials that exist. The effort to bring this material to life and create cinema around it was the most complicated task I have ever taken upon myself. When I discussed […]
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“THE D WORD: UNDERSTANDING DYSLEXIA” | director, James Redford
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, January 20 6:00 pm –Screening Room, Sundance Resort] As a storyteller, I suppose I have that spark that makes me think that I might touch people, and the power of film is exponential in that regard. It is not just ideas, images, words and sound. It is all of these things simultaneously, and therefore the sum is much greater than the parts. I also happen to love production. Yes, it’s too rare. It’s chaotic and things go wrong. But it is exciting as hell to solve problems if you work with good people like I do. It […]
