Sundance Film Festival

“THE TILLMAN STORY” | director, Amir Bar-Lev

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, Jan. 23, 3:00 pm – Temple Theatre, Park City] Here’s a challenge I faced making The Tillman Story: As a documentary filmmaker making a movie about Pat Tillman, I’m expected, of course, to get to bottom of who he really was and to leave no stone unturned in presenting his biography and character to my audience. Pat Tillman is synonymous with sacrifice and unflinching patriotic duty because it’s generally accepted that he was so moved by the events of 9/11 that he dropped everything, quit his football career, and enlisted in the Army Rangers. However the more […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 23, 2010
“LIFECYCLES” | Matthew Moore

[New Frontier Performances and Installations] As a fourth-generation farmer, there seems to be an endless supply of crossroads while growing produce where, unlike in an editing program, you cannot undo the last 50 decisions you have made. What day to plant, how many seeds to place in a foot, how long to water, is that a weed, should I pull it? So here is a brilliant idea — how about I film that process? Hopefully the seed I placed in focus under the lens is the one that will emerge unscathed. That is how my project “lifecycles” began. Unfortunately all […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 23, 2010
RUNNING OUT OF AIR: PENNING MIDNIGHT MOVIE “BURIED” | By Melissa Silvestri

This piece was originally printed in our 2010 Winter issue. Hell can be many things — being buried alive in the Iraqi desert, for example, or perhaps just watching your screenplay slowly disintegrate on the shelf during never-ending studio “development.” The opposite of most screenwriters, Chris Sparling knows the former but not the latter. He went directly from struggling indie director to successful Hollywood scribe when the screenplay for his horror thriller Buried was picked up, cast with a major up-and-coming star, and thrown before the cameras in just six months. And now it’s receiving its U.S. premiere at the […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 23, 2010
“MOTHER AND CHILD” | writer-director, Rodrigo Garcia

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, Jan. 23, 3:00 pm — Screening Room, Sundance Resort] The hardest decision for me is offering the role to an actor. Even if it’s an actor that I admire, or have worked with before or dream of working with, or even if I’ve written the role with them in mind, the moment is traumatic. It’s the leap from the imagination to the concrete, from fantasy to reality. Plus I know that if you cast the wrong actor (and any great actor can potentially be wrong for a specific role), it’s a mistake that you never recuperate from. […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 23, 2010
Women Without Men’s Shirin Neshat

UNTITLED (WOMEN OF ALLAH). PHOTO COURTESY OF GLADSTONE GALLERY, NEW YORK. “It’s very flattering to be interviewed by a film magazine as opposed to an art publication,” said Shirin Neshat. “I am very flattered anybody would think it’s worth talking to me.” Widely-acknowledged as one of the most influential contemporary Middle-Eastern artists (and apparently one of the most modest), Neshat and her work are staples of museums and galleries around the world, while remaining relatively little-known in film circles. That changed this year when she burst onto the independent international film stage with her first feature film, Women Without Men. […]
by Livia Bloom Ingram on Jan 23, 2010
“NUUMMIOQ” | director, Otto Rosing & Torben Bech

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, Jan. 23, 11:30 am — Egyptian Theatre, Park City] There were so many factors that worked against us: the constant weather instability, sensitive technical equipment and working in a country without technical backup. This was compounded with the pressure of a constant lack of funds. At times it was like we were walking on unstable sheets of sea ice, and if we didn’t continue to go forward, we would fall through the ice sheets and drown. The next challenge was turning the material that we shot into a movie in the editing room. Listening to material and […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 23, 2010
“LAST TRAIN HOME” | director, Lixin Fan

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, Jan. 23, 12:00 pm — Screening Room, Sundance Resort] The most difficult decision I had in the making of Last Train Home is one that spans from shooting ground to editing room. It was at the painful moment when the crew and I witnessed the father become frustrated and hit his daughter right after they arrived at their village home before New Year’s Eve. To film or not to film? The ultimate question in documentary filmmaking was being put in front of me. In a filmmaking sense, this was a rarely intense moment, which revealed incredible personalities […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 23, 2010
“WINTER’S BONE” | co-writer-director, Debra Granik

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, Jan. 23, 12:15 pm — Eccles Theatre, Park City] In Daniel Woodrell’s novel, the protagonist, Ree Dolly, has two younger brothers. We decided to cast these roles in Missouri and held auditions during preproduction. We were excited to find Isaiah Stone for the part of the older boy, Sonny, but we struggled to cast the younger boy. We auditioned a lot of boys, and then paired different boys with each other. We thought we were getting close, but something was holding me back. The boys we were moving toward were not from the rural areas in which […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 23, 2010
“ARMLESS” | director, Habid Azar

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 22, 9:00 pm — Yarrow Hotel Theatre, Park City] Finding locations with no budget was by far the hardest thing we had to do. There are two specific examples that I think are interesting: We had a one-page scene that took place in an operating room. Finding an actual operating room was impossible so the decision became do we change the scene or do we fake the location? In the end our brilliant production designers Ryan Kravetz and Eunice Bae dressed a corner of a room with a few boxes of medical-looking equipment, hung a curtain […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 22, 2010
“THE OATH” | director, Laura Poitras

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 22, 9:30 pm — Temple Theatre, Park City] There is a scene in The Oath when I ask Abu Jandal if he would have participated in the 9/11 attacks if Osama bin Laden had asked him to participate. He answered my question (I don’t want to reveal his response), and the next day he asked me to delete it. I decided to include both his answer and his request to delete it in the film. In the process of editing the film, we held work-in-progress screenings and some people questioned the ethics of including his answer […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 22, 2010

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