Films are made of and from places: the locations they are filmed in, the settings they are meant to evoke, the geographies where they are imagined and worked on. What place tells its own story about your film, whether a particularly challenging location that required production ingenuity or a map reference that inspired you personally, politically or creatively? Our film, Agent of Happiness, is a road movie about a happiness agent who travels door to door to measure the happiness index of the society. It’s a physical journey through the meandering roads of the Bhutanese Himalayas where he meets people from […]
Winner of Sundance’s Grand Jury Prize in 2004, Ondi Timoner’s DIG! used the developing careers of indie rock bands The Dandy Warhols and The Brian Jonestown Massacre to examine the complex, often incompatible relationship between art and commerce, as well as the one between the bands’ frontmen. Now, Dig! XX revisits the story, digitally remastered and enhanced and complete with an additional 35 minutes of footage. Below, Editor David Timoner, Ondi Timoner’s brother and frequent collaborator, discusses revisiting his first major project and how he sought to improve it for its twentieth anniversary. See all responses to our annual Sundance […]
Joseph Krings (Galveston, Captain Fantastic) is the credited editor on two films at Sundance this year: the sci-fi animated Love Me, starring Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun, and Winner, a biopic about Reality Winner, the imprisoned whistleblower who leaked NSA documents related to Russian interference in the 2016 election. Below, Krings discusses both films at length, touching on the challenges of editing a film that is going to be heavily reworked in animation, finding the right balance between tragedy and gallows humor, and the peculiar VFX challenges of both films. See all responses to our annual Sundance editor interviews here. Filmmaker: […]
Films are made of and from places: the locations they are filmed in, the settings they are meant to evoke, the geographies where they are imagined and worked on. What place tells its own story about your film, whether a particularly challenging location that required production ingenuity or a map reference that inspired you personally, politically or creatively? There was a practical aspect to choosing our locations and sets for Out of My Mind that is not usually at the forefront of filmmakers’ minds: Can someone who uses a wheelchair access this location and every aspect of this location? Our […]
Amidst diminishing film coverage and uncertainty about the future of arthouse theatrical distribution, Sundance offers movies arriving with distribution a near-guarantee of concentrated response while also implicitly making the case for elevating those works from the content mill and going to see them in a theater if/when general audiences get a crack at them. With three features apiece, NEON and A24 are tied for most features premiering here this year, a step down from last year’s six [!] last year in the latter’s case. The first NEON title to screen is writer/director/co-editor/co-star/composer Theda Hammel’s Stress Positions, a debut feature that […]
Music videos have been good to Cristina Dunlap. As a photography-obsessed high schooler, a chance meeting landed the L.A. native a gig shooting stills on a music video. It happened to be for Death Cab for Cutie, leading to a run of jobs with influential directors like Hiro Murai and Ace Norton. After working her way up to the role of cinematographer, a Coldplay video collaboration with Dakota Johnson led to Dunlap shooting a pair of features starring the actress, Am I OK? and Cha Cha Real Smooth, both of which premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. A music […]
With its 2024 edition kicking off today, Sundance turns 40. In the words of festival director Eugene Hernandez and director of programming Kim Yutani, this anniversary edition will be a mixture of the old and new—with the heaviest emphasis, of course, on the new. “We sincerely thought it would best honor and celebrate the history and the legacy of the festival by nodding to it and certainly digging into it in a few key spots, but really it’s the looking ahead and discovery that is what Sundance is all about,” said Sundance Festival Director Eugene Hernandez to Filmmaker in an […]
Suburban teen loner Owen (Justice Smith) is introduced to a late-night TV show shrouded in mystery by a fellow classmate (Brigette Lundy-Paine) in I Saw the TV Glow, the latest genre offering from writer-director Jane Schoenbrun. Dubbed an “emo horror” flick by Sundance programmers, Schoenbrun’s sophomore feature is having its world premiere in Park City this year, where the filmmaker’s buzzy feature debut, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, similarly premiered in 2021. Editor Sofi Marshall discusses how she became involved in Schoenbrun’s latest project, how the “independent” section of her local Blockbuster catalyzed her filmic career path and […]
In Caroline Lindy’s debut feature, an actress’s life quickly bottoms out, only to be rebuilt with the help of a monster living in her closet. Premiering in Sundance’s Midnight section, Your Monster, an adaptation of Lindy’s own 2020 short, nevertheless finds itself frequently in the vein of a rom-com. Below, editors Dashya Broadway and Jon Higgins talk about finding the right tone for a story that has a little bit of everything and making sure they didn’t leave the audience waiting for too long. See all responses to our annual Sundance editor questionnaire here. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up […]
In Kneecap, Rich Peppiatt depicts the rise of the eponymous Belfast-based rap trio, who have become unlikely leaders of a movement to save the Irish language. The 2024 Sundance premiere is the festival’s first ever Irish language film, as well as the first film from outside the United States to screen in the NEXT section. Below, cinematographer Rich Kernaghan explains how he found a visual language for the film and how the crew managed such an ambitious location shoot on such a tight schedule. See all responses to our annual Sundance cinematographer interviews here. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind […]