Sundance Film Festival

SUNDANCE DIRECTOR/SCREENWRITING LABS ANNOUNCED

Today the Sundance Institute announced the 13 projects selected for this year’s Director and Screenwriting Labs. Talking place in Park City, Utah June 1-25, the Labs will be filled with many familiar names to Filmmaker readers. 2008 25 New Faces alum Myna Joseph will be attending; as will Ondi Timoner, whose doc We Live In Public won the doc Grand Prize at Sundance in 2009; Ry Russo-Young, who was awarded our Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You award for You Wont Miss Me at last year’s Gothams, will be attending with her latest screenplay; and ’09 25 […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Apr 26, 2010
KERI PUTNAM NAMED NEW EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF SUNDANCE INSTITUTE

Big news out of Sundance tonight: Keri Putnam, former President of Production at Miramax Films and Executive Vice President at HBO Films, has been named the new Executive Director of the Sundance Institute. The position was previously held by Ken Brecher, who left Sundance last April. Keri is well known to many of us in the independent community for her leadership at Miramax and HBO, where she opened the door to both new directors as well as established veterans looking to explore new ideas that wouldn’t fly in the mainstream studio system. Among the films she has been involved with […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 25, 2010
“THE RED CHAPEL”‘S MADS BRUGGER | By Alicia Van Couvering

When Danish Zentropa director Mads Brugger decided to take himself and two Korean-Danish comedians to North Korea under the guise of a fake comedy project, he employed what he thought might be the magic word for repressive regimes seeking international image burnishing: “cultural exchange.” The film opens with a shot of Brugger, lying on a hotel bed, calmly reading Kim Jong-Il’s official Instruction Manual for Film Directing. The secret police who watched this footage every night apparently had no objection. What they somehow did not expect or anticipate was that Brugger would one day turn this footage into a feature […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 1, 2010
“HIS AND HERS”‘ KEN WALDROP | By Alicia Van Couvering

Ken Waldrop’s His & Hers is a documentary focusing on 70 women from the Irish Midlands, arranged chronologically from age 0 to 90, telling small stories about their lives. Irish Midlands women, being funny, sarcastic, charming and warm, are good subjects; Waldrop knew that because he grew up the son of one of very funny and sarcastic Irish Midlands mother. He constructed the film to mirror his own mother’s life; the women speak of their marriages in their twenties, their sons, and, finally, their husbands and these men’s deaths. Some of the interviews are about tiny things (who controls the […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 27, 2010
“THE ROMANTICS”‘ GALT NIEDERHOFFER | By Alicia Van Couvering

Galt Niederhoffer is no stranger to Sundance, having produced films that won awards there beginning in 1997, when Morgan J. Freeman’s Hurricane Streets won the Audience Award. As a founding member of Plum Pictures, one of New York’s most active independent film production companies, she has produced over a dozen films, including Grace is Gone, Dedication, Prozac Nation, Lonesome Jim, The Winning Season, The Baxter and After.Life. Niederhoffer grew up in New York, one of six daughters of a squash champion-turned-hedge fund maverick, in a rambling, eccentrically decorated house. In her first novel, A Taxonomy of Barnacles, Niederhoffer may have […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 27, 2010
“RUSSIAN LESSONS” | co-director, Andrei Nekrasov

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Tuesday, Jan. 26, 9:00 pm — Temple Theatre, Park City] The most difficult decision was the one to expose the mistakes of fellow film and TV program makers. The related question is why I decided to do it. There were two reasons for that. Firstly those mistakes were instrumental to the justification of an unjust war; secondly in many instances there were grounds to doubt that those mistakes were innocent. In other words, those mistakes were probably lies. To me personally they were shocking because I’d seen with my own eyes what havoc Russian bombs wrecked in the […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 26, 2010
“ODDSAC” | director, Daniel Perez

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Tuesday, Jan. 26, 8:30 pm — Prospector Square Theatre, Park City] Deciding not to do a tour documentary on the band, which was what was first proposed. I have strong feelings about the distance between performer and audience, and I didn’t want to contribute anything more to this gap. I wanted to make something that I would be psyched to see and here it is. That and deciding which kid to kill in a scene were pretty difficult. In the end it was a combination of his hair and fake blood that did it.
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 26, 2010
“ALL MY FRIENDS ARE FUNERAL SINGERS” | writer-director, Tim Rutili

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Tuesday, Jan. 26, 9:00 pm — New Frontier on Main, Park City] The most difficult decisions on our film were made in the editing process and had to do with balancing music, tangent and story. We had one scene in particular that looked great and had a really good friend of mine and her son acting in it. Everywhere we placed the scene in our movie seemed to throw it out of balance or clutter the narrative. The last thing I wanted to do was lose some of those shots, and I especially didn’t want to cut my […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 26, 2010
“LOUIS C.K.: HILARIOUS” | director, Louis C.K.

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Tuesday, Jan. 26, 5:30 pm — Library Center Theatre, Park City] The hardest decision was the location. I had to choose between Boston, Milwaukee, Cleveland and Minneapolis. The criteria was that I needed a theater that I could sell out twice in order to shoot two performances. Those were the cities where I was selling tickets the fastest. Minneapolis has great crowds but the theater is white and kind of sterile and the audience is separated from the stage. Cleveland is great but the show I had booked there was a little too late in the year. I […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 26, 2010
“ME TOO” | co-writer-co-director, Alvaro Pastor

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Tuesday, Jan. 26, 9:00 pm — Egyptian Theatre, Park City] We made lots of hard decisions making Me Too. I think, in fact, directing is making decisions all the time. For both of us, me and Antonio Naharro, the hardest one was to ask for the real Pablo Pineda to play Daniel on this film. It was difficult because when we realized that nobody else could play this role we had no choice. In fact the film couldn’t have been made without him playing this kind of alter ego of himself. How it affected the film? Well, the […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 26, 2010

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