Slamdance
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Slamdance Film Festival Announces Feature Lineup for 2023
Today, the Slamdance Film Festival announces its 2023 feature lineup, including programming for the Narrative Features Competition, Documentary Features Competition, Breakouts, Unstoppable, and Spotlight Screenings. The 29th annual edition of the festival will adhere to a hybrid model, with events taking place in Park City and Salt Lake City, Utah from January 20-26 and online via the Slamdance Channel from January 23-29. “From the streets of Seattle to the psychedelic skies of a unicorn-run dystopia, our filmmakers are transporting audiences to new dimensions with stories that explore the nuance of disability, immigration and gender,” said Festival Manager Lily Yasuda in […]
by Natalia Keogan on Dec 5, 2022 -
Trailer Watch: Slamdance-Premiering Coming-of-Age Horror Picture, Honeycomb
“Lord of the Flies meets The Breakfast Club” is how 21-year-old director Avalon Fast’s Honeycomb is described. The logline: “Five small-town girls abandon their mundane lives and move into an abandoned cabin. Growing increasingly isolated, their world becomes filled with imagined rituals and rules but the events of one summer night threaten to abruptly end their age of innocence forever.” With K.J.Relth Miller of Slamdance calling the film “a lo-fi achievement that perfectly encapsulates the Slamdance spirit,” the film will premiere at the virtual festival January 27. Check out the film’s first teaser above.
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 18, 2022 -
Ask Not What Festivals Can Do For You….
As filmmakers, we sometimes get so concerned with what film festivals can do for us and for our films that we forget about what our films can do for the festivals, and more importantly, for their local audiences. This year more than ever, I’ve seen festivals in communities around the world overcome violence, natural disasters and other communal sources of anxiety to put on amazing celebrations of cinema. They’re helping to spark conversations, rebuild damaged economies and in general just get people celebrating again with their neighbors, friends and visiting filmmakers. I’ve had a first-hand look at some of these […]
by Dan Mirvish on Jan 21, 2018 -
Cullen Hoback on Terms and Conditions May Apply
Every mouse-stroke you make, every search query you use, is being recorded, one way or another, usually by powerful and insidious entities who have no incentive not to sell this information to the highest bidder. Its exchange for copious storage on your web-based email service, and cloud-empowered music players that allow you to play Gil Scott-Heron records, long out of print, night and day, comes a cost that is pervasive and hidden. Your privacy. Oh, and a tremendous amount of monetary value that you likely never knew you created. Shucks. Cullen Hoback’s thoughtful and, in the age of Snowden, all […]
by Brandon Harris on Jul 11, 2013 -
Ron Eyal and Eleanor Burke on Stranger Things
Ron Eyal and Eleanor Burke’s elegant and evocative Stranger Things, which won Slamdance’s Narrative Competition Grand Jury Prize in 2011 is a moody and clear-eyed drama from a pair of our 25 New Faces in Independent Film, as tranquil and refreshing as an autumn afternoon along the rural British coast, where much of its story is set. A young, lonely woman named Oona (Bridget Collins), coping with the recent death of her mother (with whom she was clearly not close) and hoping to sell the house the deceased woman spent her last years making art in, returns to the home’s seaside village to […]
by Brandon Harris on Apr 5, 2013 -
Damon Russell, Snow on tha Bluff
The line separating documentary and narrative film aesthetics has never been more porous than it is now, but Damon Russell’s revelatory Snow on tha Bluff lives comfortably on that line. An incredible combination of found footage, no-budget narrative ingenuity and pulled-from-the-streets doc immediacy, it discovers in its incredibly charismatic and troubled protagonist, Curtis Snow, an American life many of us would probably rather forget about. Easy to dismiss as “Cops from the perp’s perspective,” perhaps, this startlingly authentic document of the life of a young, black, crack-dealing single parent — and of the dangers that lurk in poor and working-class black […]
by Brandon Harris on Apr 18, 2012 -
SLAMDANCE 2012: CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK #1
Every year The Slamdance Film Festival is responsible for premiering at least a half dozen films that go on to lengthy fest circuit runs (The Guatamalan Handshake, Without, The New Years Parade, Stranger Things), cult viability (Murder Party, Snow on tha Bluff) and in the case of the 2008 selection Paranormal Activity, massive box office success. This year will likely be no exception. But after surveying a third of the ten narratives and eight documentaries in the always eclectically programmed festival’s 2012 slate, no true standout has emerged, although a number of solid efforts are on display. Before its screening, buzz (at least in […]
by Brandon Harris on Jan 24, 2012 -
PARK CITY CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK #3: GEMS FROM THE OTHER FESTIVAL
While introducing a screening one afternoon this week in the Treasure Mountain Inn’s cramped banquet hall that the Slamdance Film Festival converts into its main cinema every year, Slamdance Co-Founder and expert hat-wearer Dan Mirvish remarked with a bit of awe that this was the 17th annual event, meaning that Slamdance, once referred to pejoratively as Sundance’s “parasite” by Robert Redford, had now been around for over half Sundance’s life span. Continuing, Mirvish claimed that “about a third” of the participants in Sundance’s 2011 lineup were Slamdance alumni. “The inmates have taken over the asylum,” Mirvish joked. Someone sitting behind me […]
by Brandon Harris on Jan 28, 2011 -
OPENING SLAMDANCE WITH “I SELL THE DEAD” By Alicia Van Couvering
Glenn McQuaid’s I Sell The Dead, starring Dominic Monaghan and Ron Perlman, will open Slamdance this year. Taglined “Never Trust a Corpse,” it’s a vintage-inspired horror-comedy set in the 18th or 19th-century, structured as a series of drunken recollections on the life of a career grave robber (Monaghan.) The film is produced by and co-stars horror-master Larry Fessenden (Wendigo, The Last Winter, Habit) of the New York production outfit Glass Eye Pix. The team behind ISTD – McQuaid, Fessenden and Scareflix producer Peter Phok — sat down with Filmmaker on the eve of their trip to Park City to reminisce […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 16, 2009 -
Todd Rohal, The Guatemalian Handshake
WILL OLDHAM IN TODD ROHAL’S THE GUATEMALAN HANDSHAKE. COURTESY AMALGAMATED FILMWORKS. Todd Rohal is possibly the Mumblecore director you’ve heard least about, maybe because his films don’t fit with the movement’s improvisational, talky style or focus on twentysomething relationships. A native of Columbus, Ohio, he studied film at Ohio University, where his first short film, Single Spaced (1997), was nominated for a Student Academy Award. He made two subsequent shorts in college, Slug 660 (1998) and Knuckleface Jones (1999), and resisted the lure of Hollywood after graduating, instead choosing to take a more unconventional road. He made his fourth short, […]
by Nick Dawson on Jun 8, 2007
