Sundance Film Festival 2012
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“WE’RE NOT BROKE” | directors, Karin Hayes & Victoria Bruce
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Sunday, January 22 9:00 pm –Temple Theatre, Park City] Karin Hayes: As a young kid, I dreamed of being a theater actor (or a veterinarian). It wasn’t until I went to a screening of Robert M. Young’s film Triumph of the Spirit, that I knew I wanted to be able to tell incredibly powerful stories in this same way. I listened, engrossed, as Young, Willem Dafoe, Edward James Olmos and the story’s real-life main character, Salamo Arouch, spoke about the real events and the filmmaking process. By the rousing applause and Q&A afterwards, I could tell the entire […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 22, 2012 -
“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 […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 22, 2012 -
“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 […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 22, 2012 -
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, […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 22, 2012 -
“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 […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 22, 2012 -
Five Questions with Excision Director Richard Bates Jr.
Sundance’s Midnight section always includes a fair share of genre-heavy selections, but Richard Bates Jr.’s Excision sounds like it will pack a level of blood and guts rarely seen at the festival. A twisted coming of age tale, Excision follows young Pauline (AnnaLynne McCord), a high school girl with an unabated interest in picking scabs, dissecting road kill, and fantasizing about performing surgery on strangers. Bates’ debut seems to be the sort of grotesque horror comedy sure to play well to splatter-enthusiasts in Park City and beyond. Filmmaker: You’re premiering at a festival not traditionally known for its horror selections. […]
by Jane Schoenbrun on Jan 22, 2012 -
SUNDANCE CLIP ROUND-UP: “INDIE GAME: THE MOVIE,” “ARBITRAGE,” “THE COMEDY”
Those of us not in Park City this weeked will have to make due with the slow-trickle of “Exclusive Clips” that have begun floating around the internet. First up, Wired shares a sequence from Lisanne Pajot and James Swirsky’s Indie Game: The Movie, a documentary about video-game programmers. In the above clip, Tommy Refenes, one of the film’s main subjects, nervously shares an unfinished version of his new game at a convention in Boston. Next, Deadline.com shares this tense clip from writer-director Nicholas Jarecki’s hedge-fund psychological thriller, Arbitrage. Featuring Richard Gere and Nate Parker, the clip hints at the film’s […]
by Jane Schoenbrun on Jan 22, 2012 -
SUNDANCE: THE “FUTURE NORMAL” OF NEW FRONTIER
Now in its sixth year, the New Frontiers section at Sundance premiered yesterday at its new home at The Yard, in an unassuming building across from a snow-cloaked cemetery. Presenting the year’s crop of new media, transmedia and experiential video art to a room of press, Sundance programmer Shari Frilot explained her curatorial criteria, though not before a number of the pieces had to turn off their sound (a booming heart beat coming through the wall of Ho Tzu Nyen’s The Cloud of Unknowing on her left, the Wagnerian glory coming from Marco Brambilla’s Evolution (Megaplex) to her right.) “What […]
by Alicia Van Couvering on Jan 21, 2012 -
Five Questions with Arbitrage Director Nicholas Jarecki
Currently best known for his documentary The Outsider, Nicholas Jarecki is poised for reevaluation with Arbitrage, his narrative directorial debut. Jarecki spent a long time ruminating over what kind of story he wanted to tell, ultimately deciding on a thriller set within a world he knew quite a bit about. The film has already garnered attention thanks to its A-List ensemble, but Jarecki hopes his script will force audiences to continue thinking even after the credits finish rolling. Arbitrage, which is set amidst today’s tumultuous economic terrain and considers the ethics of a hedge-fund mogul, screens today in Park City. — Filmmaker: […]
by Alexandra Byer on Jan 21, 2012 -
Five Questions with For Ellen Director So Yong Kim
After winning over half a dozen festival prizes for her first two feature films, So Yong Kim has spent the last few years producing for her husband, Bradley Rust Gray (The Exploding Girl), and developing and writing her newest movie, For Ellen. Similar to her previous films, For Ellen’s narrative derives from Kim’s own experiences growing up. Brought together through the character of a young man traveling to see his daughter for the first time, Kim’s personal style of filmmaking not only forces the audience to question their own decisions, but has also allowed the filmmaker a cathartic way […]
by Alexandra Byer on Jan 21, 2012
