At a ceremony last night, Sundance announced this year’s short film prize winners. The 2012 shorts jury, which included Beavis and Butthead creator Mike Judge, Pariah director Dee Rees, and TIFF public program director Shane Smith, narrowed down the sixty-four shorts currently playing at the festival to six winners. The big winner was Cutter Hodierne’s fictional Somali pirate expose Fishing Without Nets, which took home the Jury Prize in Short Filmmaking. Meanwhile, Ben and Josh Sadie’s (Daddy Longlegs) The Black Balloon was awarded the US Fiction Prize while Kosovo filmmaker Blerta Zeqiri’s The Return (Kthimi) won the International Fiction Prize. The […]
by Jane Schoenbrun on Jan 25, 2012Jeremiah Zagar, the prolific documentary filmmaker behind 2008’s In a Dream is back with Heart Stop Beating: A Body Without A Pulse, a new short screening before Escape Fire this week at Sundance. Heart Stop Beating is a brief, fascinating look at Billy Cohn & Bud Frazier, two doctors who successfully replaced a dying man’s heart with a mechanical device this past March, proving that human physiology can be supported without a pulse. Over its four minute run-time, the documentary features glimpses into the operating room, as well as interviews with Cohn and Frazer. Watch it above. Also available to […]
by Jane Schoenbrun on Jan 25, 2012The films that make up Sundance’s Shorts Program II all address issues of basic intimacy and loneliness. Whether telling the story of a homecoming between wife and husband, an unexpected encounter with a stranger, or in one case, the way technology’s interference in everyday life renders a relationship unidentifiable, these young filmmakers are all attempting to understand emotions that still remain mysterious. Take Brie Larson, Sarah Ramos, and Jessie Ennis’ The Arm, for example. The film begins misleadingly. A narrative seemingly about a power struggle between two male teenage friends turns quickly into a darkly humorous depiction of a subject […]
by Alexandra Byer on Jan 23, 2012