It’s a tough thing, being a Slamdancer. One participant in this year’s 19th edition, an actor who headlines one of the dramatic competition entries, described it as the “little brother” festival, and that is clearly true. Still, Slamdance is a place for discovery each year. From Mark Ruffalo to Lena Dunham, Christopher Nolan to Josh Safdie, Slamdance offers a first taste of Park City to many significant voices whose initial works fall off of Sundance’s radar or are simply defeated by the daunting math of 12,000 submissions for 200 short and feature slots. Despite the perpetually dissatisfying screening venue of […]
They came up with a great idea. Within months, they received the highest critical acclaim. They continued to perform and planned to make a movie of it all. It took 13 years. At Sundance 2013, in the New Frontiers section, the 3D film version of the acclaimed performance piece about plane crashes, Charlie Victor Romeo, will have its premiere. A few weeks after the shoot was completed, and as an Associate Producer and behind-the-scenes documentarian of the film, I asked several of the projects principal creators to share an inside account of the transformation. First, Charlie Victor Romeo was a […]
NICHOLAS ROMBES checks in to Room 237 and the underground world of Kubrick obsessives with director RODNEY ASCHER.
HARMONY KORINE goes wild with Spring Breakers, a sun-drenched, candy-colored tale of teen queens on the run.
The world of commercial sea fishing is captured in all its stark and violent beauty in LUCIEN CASTAING-TAYLOR and VÉRÉNA PARAVEL’s Leviathan.
PABLO LARRAÍN completes his Pinochet- era trilogy with No, the compelling and unlikely tale of the ad men who unseated a dictator.
[PREMIERE SCREENING:Monday, Jan. 21, 3:00pm — Temple Theatre, Park City] Other than the sacrifices that you typically expect from an obsessive filmmaker (lack of sleep from creative insomnia, poor eating habits and coffee addiction, loss of friendships due to staying at the editing table for months on end), my biggest sacrifice was this: My privacy. Basically, I opened up my life to the world with my film. I had a hunch that my world was going to get really crazy and I wanted to catch it on film. The problem with that was I was in the film and that led to my […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Monday, Jan. 21, 9:00pm — Yarrow Hotel Theatre, Park City] I’ve encountered many challenges in making this film. First and foremost was struggling to survive on very little income, especially with law school loans I still needed to pay off. At times, it was very difficult for my family to understand why I would sacrifice financial security to make films. My mother has often asked me why I can’t use my law degree to practice law, make money, and have a house and a family like everybody else. Filming in extreme hot and humid conditions in Cambodia was […]
A Teacher, filmmaker Hannah Fidell’s feature debut, focuses on the increasingly unstable Diana (Lindsay Burge), a young teacher carrying on an affair with her underage student. But the film is not too concerned with the shocking or tawdry details of this central relationship. Instead, Fidell turns her focus inwards towards Diana’s subtly crumbling mental state, treating her gradual self-destruction as the focal point of tension. It’s a subtle and precise work, and surely one of the most unnerving selections of this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Filmmaker: Like your short The Gathering Squall, which was based on a Joyce Carol Oates […]
Writer/director Nadia Szold dubs her debut feature Joy de V. “a dark Bildungsroman,” compressing as it does into a few short days a maelstrom of yearning, confusion and ultimately acceptance. As the film opens, Joy (Josephine de la Baume) abruptly walks out on her young marriage to Roman (Evan Louison), who has been living on government mental disability payments. Roman’s got another problem too, when he learns these checks are being cut off. So, while searching for his wife, Roman decides to perform “a public act of lunacy” that will demonstrate to the world his craziness. Roman crisscrosses the five […]