Tabitha Jackson, Director, Sundance Film Festival and Public Programming, will be stepping down from the role following this month’s Sundance Film Festival London, the Sundance Institute announced today. Jackson ran Sundance’s Documentary Film Program from 2013 until taking over the festival leadership role in 2020. Her two years as Festival Director coincided with the pandemic, during which she led the festival’s pivot to a successful virtual model that saw increased audiences as well as a Satellite Screen program that extended programming to arthouses around the country. In her previous Sundance role as head of the Documentary Film Program, Jackson, a […]

“Heartbreaking,” “disappointed,” “crushing”—those are just some of the ways that filmmakers described the news that the 2022 Sundance Film Festival was going entirely virtual for a second year in a row. While lots of producers, directors, and sales agents were counting on in-person presentations to elevate their premieres in the buzzy environment of Park City, the shift to online-only was particularly stinging for filmmakers and sellers with artier, cinematic, or more challenging films that may get lost amid the Netflixification of the festival. “It’s a bummer,” admits Sam Green, director of opening night film 32 Sounds, which is described as […]

Festival director Tabitha Jackson announced today details of the upcoming Sundance Film Festival, which will take place in Park City, Utah and across various Satellite Screen venues January 20 – 30, 2022. Most significantly, after 2021’s virtual edition, Sundance 2022 will be an in-person event. The festival will require attendees of events in Utah to be fully vaccinated, with further details about health precautions and mask-wearing to be issued in the coming months. The festival will also be larger than last year’s scaled-down edition but still smaller than the pre-pandemic 2020 festival. For further details, read the complete letter from […]

The Sundance Institute announced details of its 2021 edition — plans that will see Sundance offer titles to home audiences via a custom-designed online platform while socially-distanced live events (continent upon local health and safety guidelines at the time of the screenings) will occur in Park City, Utah as well as at a number of “satellite screens” across the country. Running January 28 – February 3, 2021, the Sundance Film Festival will stream its more than 70 features in three-hour blocks throughout the day, with films beginning simultaneously “to preserve the energy of a Festival,” according to the press release. […]

During the festival’s 2020 awards ceremony tonight, the Sundance Institute announced Tabitha Jackson, the Director since 2013 of the Institute’s Documentary Film Program, to be the new Director of the Sundance Film Festival. Jackson will succeed John Cooper, who, after 11 years as Director of the Festival, will move into a newly created Emeritus Director role. Said the Sundance Institute’s Executive Director, Keri Putnam, in a press release, “Tabitha is fiercely devoted to independent artists, has been a visionary member of the Sundance Institute’s leadership team for the last six years. Her authenticity, experience and perspective will serve her well […]

Among the 33 non-fiction works comprising the recently announced Sundance Institute Documentary Fund and Stories of Change Grantees is a particularly noteworthy project that’s both the debut documentary by a major international auteur as well as a first-time collaboration between the Sundance Institute and the U.K.’s Institute for Contemporary Art. Chocobar (working title), currently in development, is the first non-fiction film from Argentinian director Lucrecia Martel, whose Zama is bound to top many U.S. critic ten-best lists later this year. It tells the story of murdered photographer and land rights activist Javier Chocobar, slain while fighting the removal of his […]

Tabitha Jackson, director of the Documentary Film Program at Sundance Institute, and Joaquin Alvarado, from Studiotube and former director of Centre for Investigative Reporting, were in discussion in March 2018 at CPH:DOX about the relationship between journalism and creative documentary filmmaking as part of Doc Society’s the Safe+Secure initiative. The following is a lightly edited transcript of their dialogue. Alvarado: When we say documentaries, it means a lot of different things today — they have evolved greatly in the last couple of decades. How you would you sort of level-set for folks the space of documentary and how we talk […]

“We have to make artful films,” declared Tabitha Jackson at this morning’s DOC NYC keynote. Her thoughtful and engaging address — accompanied, half-jokingly, by what she dubbed her first attempt at Powerpoint — was filled not with statistics about audience reach or NGO partnerships but instead illustrations drawn from documentaries as well as poetry, visual art and experimental films. Indeed, this Director of the Sundance Documentary Film Program — one of the field’s most important funders — could not have been clearer about the direction she intends to bring to the program when she said, to applause, “The lingua franca […]

Speaking April 30, 1999, at Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center, Werzog Herzog laid down 12 edicts on the pursuit of “ecstatic truth” in the documentary. “The so-called Cinema Verité is devoid of verité,” Herzog proclaimed in his “Minnesota Declaration,” announcing instead his devotion to “poetic, ecstatic truth” accessible “only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.” He was speaking specifically about his 1992 masterwork Lessons Of Darkness: unfaked, awe-inspiring footage of Kuwait’s oil fields on fire after the Iraq War, framed by a made-up Pascal epigraph and narration from the perspective of an alien intelligence baffled by what it’s seeing. Herzog unrepentantly […]