Sundance Film Festival
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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 […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 20, 2012 -
“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 […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 20, 2012 -
“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 […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 20, 2012 -
“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 […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 20, 2012 -
Your Sister’s Sister | Writer/Director Lynn Shelton
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, January 20 8:30 am –Library Center Theatre, Park City] In 2005, on the set of We Go Way Back (my first feature film as writer/director), I remember having the distinct feeling that I’d finally found what I was always meant to do. It was an electrifying and completely transformative revelation. As far back as I can remember I always knew I wanted to be an artist. Finding myself smitten with nearly every creative medium in existence probably made the fact that I ended up deeply exploring a variety of them before settling on narrative filmmaking unavoidable. I […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 20, 2012 -
“ABOUT THE PINK SKY” | writer-director, Keiichi Kobayashi
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, January 20 3:00 pm –Egyptian Theatre, Park City] 1. Why are you a filmmaker? I was working on a TV show in Japan and was busy working insane hours everyday, when one night Akira Kurosawa came to me in a dream. He said, “Is there a reason for that particular shot? You need to watch my films more!” The next day, I turned on the TV and they were announcing Kurosawa’s death. I thought it must be a sign from heaven. Since then, I’ve been storing up all the strength, will and energy I need to make films. And now that […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 20, 2012 -
“ROBOT AND FRANK” | director, Jake Schreier
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, January 20 6:30 pm –Rose Wagner Performing Arts center, SLC] I got into film because I was spectacularly mediocre at everything else. I loved art and performance, but wasn’t much of an actor, was a pretty bad keyboard player and couldn’t draw at all. When I got to try out filmmaking at an NYU summer high school program, it was the first time where the things I made vaguely resembled the ideas I had in my head. That doesn’t really explain why Robot & Frank had to be a film, except that in my hands it would […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 20, 2012 -
TEN MINUTES. DOESN’T SEEM LIKE MUCH RIGHT?
Written in collaboration with Clay McLeod Chapman Our short film—Henley—had been back-burning in our brains for over five years. Clay had published a novel back in 2003 called Miss Corpus. Craig, it turns out, was the only person who read it. There’s a chapter in the book, The Henley Road Motel, which is all about a boy growing up in a family-run roach motel. Think lil’ Normie Bates before donning mom’s summer dress. When business begins to dwindle, our 9-year-old hero cracks a pretty devious scheme to bring customers back to the family business—and poof: A short film is born. […]
by Craig Macneill on Jan 17, 2012 -
PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST (ENTREPRENEUR): CORY McABEE
As 2012 dawns and the conversation in the film (and greater artistic) community shifts from ‘DIY’ to the advent of the ‘artist-entrepreneur’, I find myself pondering the meaning of all this in my own career and life, while thinking about one of my most enduring inspirations to go it my own way, my friend Cory McAbee. The bulk of this post was originally drafted in the fall of 2009 right after the release of Cory McAbee’s film, Stingray Sam, and was written simply as a fan of Cory’s work and aesthetic. I was first introduced to Cory’s work when The American Astronaut garnered some […]
by Gregorybayne on Dec 31, 2011 -
IFP LABS: A BRIEF GUIDE TO PLANNING YOUR FESTIVAL PREMIERE
There was an elephant in the room during day one of IFP’s annual Marketing and Distribution Labs, and that elephant’s name was Sundance. The majority of the Lab’s 21 attending filmmakers submitted applications earlier this year, each one hoping and secretly sort of expecting an acceptance letter. What they all received instead was a courteous but crushing rejection. Today’s afternoon session started out as something of a venting session. As the lab leaders tried to reassure these first-time filmmakers that their careers were not over, that they had many options still on the table, the mood in the room only […]
by Jane Schoenbrun on Dec 9, 2011
