Over the last six days the New Frontier Story Lab at the Sundance Resort has facilitated new conversations between an inspiring group of creative professionals about how to innovate the art and form of story.One of the biggest takeaways was the value of spending deep reflective time on story with artists coming from incredibly diverse disciplines. Many of the conversations focused on ways to evoke empathy in these new forms, how to give the audience presence or a feeling of being embodied, and how to co-create experiences within a community. Epiphanies abounded and I’m eagerly anticipating the ways these new ideas will manifest in both the Fellows’ projects and the Advisors’ creative practices.  

I couldn’t begin to give the full scope of these conversations within the limitations of this post. In fact, I think the full meaning of what we experienced will take time to land in my own understanding. But I’d love you to imagine what conversations took place between our Fellows and these masters of story, moving image and story-enabling technology:

Kathleen Forde (Artistic Director at Large, Borusan Contemporary)

Anselm Hook (Programmer and Artist)

The 2014 New Frontier Story Lab will truly be a landmark moment in the evolution of the New Frontier program. This year’s projects are undoubtedly pushing the boundaries of story and story design from a variety of deeply thoughtful approaches: the conflict zone photojournalist, attempting to dissipate war by creating an embodied experience that humanizes the “enemy”; the virtuosic performer using projection- mapped light and audience immersion to explore the dimensions between the creator and created; the stand-up comedian looking to reinvent the one-hour comedy special by eliminating the distance between performer and audience in his the exploration of the “new brown experience;" the hybrid documentary/video game that throws its players into the fog of revolution, in which every decision leads to a historical truth; the algorithm-based film that gives a real-time experience of the earth struggling through climate change in the context of our own social-media sourced testimony; the deeply meditative game that affords players a rich aesthetic and philosophical year in the life of Thoreau at Walden Pond. Convening October 22nd-27th for a week-long immersive Lab at the Sundance Resort in Utah, these six creative teams will work with Creative Advisors to take their projects and their disciplines to new frontiers:

1979 Revolution
Vassiliki Khonsari and Navid Khonsari

1979 Revolution, the action/adventure game, immerses players in the gritty, euphoric streets of revolution – where the choices you make may betray you. Set in the actual events of 1979 Iran.

Walden, A Game
Tracy Fullerton and Lucas Peterson

Walden, A Game, simulates the experiment-in-living made by Henry David Thoreau at Walden Pond in 1845-47, allowing players to walk in his virtual footsteps, attend to the tasks of living a self-reliant existence, and discover in the beauty of a virtual landscape the ideas and writings of this unique philosopher.

Heart Corps
Dandypunk and Darin Basile

Ink illustrations are brought to life with projection mapping and live performance, in a fully immersive, "walk-through", graphic novel experience.

Sakoon/Paint The Town
Hasan Minhaj and Greg Walloch

A participatory multi-platform journey with comedian Hasan Minhaj that explores the complicated and nuanced struggles of the "new brown experience" as an immigrant in America and inspires an enlightened approach to intolerance. The project includes a live solo show, radio broadcasts, feature film and interactive digital media.

Weather
Braden King and Matthew Moore

Weather is a multi-platform, multi-channel interactive installation that seeks to create a deeper and more tangible connection to the impact of Global Climate Change through emotional experience.

The Enemy
Karim Ben Khelifa and Chloé Jarry

The enemy is always invisible, when he becomes visible, he ceases to be the enemy.

We are profoundly shocked and saddened by the news about the death of freelance photojournalist James Foley who was killed on August 19 by the group known as ISIS. Foley’s work as one of three cinematographers on the film E-TEAM (directed by Ross Kauffman and Katy Chevigny) was recognized at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival with the Documentary Cinematography Award for its courageous handheld footage.

This moment reminds us to acknowledge and appreciate the filmmakers, documentarians, and journalists who take a stand for what matters to them by pursuing stories in dangerous situations often at great personal risk. E-Team takes viewers to the frontline in Syria and Libya, where Human Rights Watch workers document war crimes and shine a light on them for the world to see. James Foley, like these human rights workers, dedicated his life to exposing the plight of Libyans and Syrians caught in these deadly conflicts.

We send our deepest condolences to his family, friends and colleagues.

The Documentary Film Program’s (DFP) Spring 2014 grants totaled $975,000 awarded to 44 films, including four films from the Documentary Film Initiative in Asia. This total marks an increase from the Fall 2013 funding that totaled $711,500 in grants and awards across all stages of production.

The larger number of projects selected for support by Sundance Institute reflects a funding philosophy designed to embrace both existing and emerging mandates. Films selected include both passionate treatments of human rights issues and contemporary social relevance globally, as well as artful or cinematic documentary films that are compelling, creative, and meaningful for the culture at large. This expansive round has called for a greater number of film awards than ever before, in this case 44 films globally.

The spring round includes in-country filmmakers from Ukraine, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Colombia, Turkey, and the People's Republic of China. Films selected reflect a wide range of storytelling styles and documentary techniques including personal, experimental, found-footage and hybrid. Check out film stills and shots of the filmmakers and their projects below.

DEVELOPMENT

500 Years (Pamela Yates, U.S.), Baldwin's Children (Raoul Peck, U.S.), Canary in a Coal Mine (Jennifer Brea, U.S.), The Changing Map of Lebanon (George Tarabay, Lebanon),Facing the Dragon (Sedika Mojadidi , Afghanistan), Heaven Admits No Slaves (wt) (Lesya Kalynska and Unnamed Co-Director (unnamed for security reasons), Ukraine/ U.S.), Oakland Police Project (Peter Nicks, U.S.),Out of Mind (Kristi Jacobson, U.S.), Sylvia & Marsha (David France, U.S.) Vidal v. Buckley(Morgan Neville and Robert  Gordon, U.S.), Villages of The Absent (Omar Shami and Ola Shami, Lebanon).  

PRODUCTION/POST-PRODUCTION

Be Natural (Pamela Green and Jarik Van Sluijs, U.S.), Betrayal - The Story of Mr. Zhang (Jiongjiong Qiu, People's Republic of China), Blue ID (Burcu Melekoglu and Vuslat Karan, Turkey), Brick (Jessica Dimmock and Christopher LaMarca, U.S.), Cartel Land (wt) (Matthew Heineman, U.S.),Catching The Sun (Shalini Kantayya, U.S.), Coming and Going (wt)  (Tianlin Xu, People's Republic of China), Censored Voices (Mor Loushy , Israel), A Flickering Truth (Pietra Brettkelly, New Zealand), Where the Marsh Meets the Lake  (Sharon Shattuck, U.S.), Hale County (RaMell Ross, U.S.), In My Father's House (Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg, U.S.),The Flying  Stars (Ngardy Coneth and Allan Tong, Sierra Leone/Canada), The Movie About Anna (Alex Sichel and Elizabeth Giamatti, U.S.), Nuestro Monte Luna (Pablo Alvarez Mesa, Colombia), Out Run (Johnny Symons and S. Leo Chiang, U.S.), The Peacemaker (James Demo, U.S.), Romeo Is Bleeding (Jason Zeldes, U.S.), The Silence of Others  (Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar, Spain), Speed Sisters (Amber Fares, Canada), Strong Island(Yance Ford, U.S.), Uncertain (Anna Sandilands and Ewan McNicol, U.S.), Unlocking the Cage (Chris Hegedus and D A Pennebaker, U.S.), Untitled Transgender Youth Project (Eric Juhola, U.S.), Very Semi-Serious (Leah Wolchok, U.S.), Warrior Women (Christina D. King and Dr. Elizabeth A. Castle, U.S.), Winter Buoy (Frida  Kempff, Canada/Sweden).               

SPRING 2014 AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT (rolling awards)

Cooked  (Judith Helfand, U.S.), Out In The Night (blair dorosh-walther, U.S.)

DOCUMENTARY FILM INITIATIVE IN ASIA 

Double Happiness Limited (Yuan-chimr Lu and Ko-shang Shen, Taiwan), My Dear Lines  (Nan Zhang, People’s Republic of China), A Peking Opera Master in New York (Haitao Guo, People’s Republic of China), The Spokesperson (Hui-jing Xu, People’s Republic of China).

In addition to financing, the Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program offers opportunity for creative support and community through documentary Labs, Fellowships, and editorial consultation. Past films supported include Trouble the Water; The Interrupters; The Queen of Versailles; The Invisible War; Powerless; Dirty Wars; The Square; and Art and Craft.

Panelists have included the likes of Laura Silber of Open Society Foundations, Kirsten Livingston of Ford Foundation, Paul van Zyl formerly of the International Center for Transitional Justice, Rinku Sen of Race Forward, and Cynthia Lopez of POV. Panelists have also included Richard Pena, formerly of Film Society at Lincoln Center, Joslyn Barnes of Louverture Films, Academy Award® winners Rob Epstein and Jessica Yu, Academy Award® nominees Kirby Dick, Marshall Curry, and Arthur Dong. When appropriate, select submissions are supported by subject-area experts from the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International, Center for Constitutional Rights, Human Rights Watch, International Center for Transitional Justice, Open Society Foundations and others to illuminate critical context vital to a thorough understanding of complex global issues.

The Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program is supported by Open Society Foundations, Ford Foundation, Hilton Worldwide, Skoll Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, TED, CNN Films, The Charles Engelhard Foundation, Compton Foundation, Emerald Data Solutions, Time Warner Foundation, Joan and Lewis Platt Foundation, Candescent Films, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Arcus Foundation, J.A. & H.G. Woodruff, Jr. Charitable Trust, and David desJardins and Nancy Blachman.

Last week, the 68th annual Tony Awards marked the unofficial coda to theater awards season with a triumphant evening for Robert Freedman and Steven Lutvak’s musical, A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder. But often the zenith of a project’s creative life tends to eclipse its own fascinating journey, like Gentleman’s voyage since participating at the 2006 Sundance Institute Theatre Lab. That raucous black comedy, along with a handful of other award winners below, each at some stage participated in the Theatre Program’s three-week play development retreat designed to support the creation of new work by playwrights, directors, composers and librettists. And while the mission to produce new work invariably trumps any desire for award recognition, the below artists and projects nonetheless warrant acknowledgment.  

Most recently, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins work-shopped his Obie Award winner Appropriate – a self-described family drama with a winding, surprise-filled storyline – at the 2012 Theatre Lab. That same year, Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori brought their musical adaptation of the acclaimed graphic novel by Alison Bechdel, Fun Home, to the intensive retreat. Below, check out all of the Theatre Program-supported award winners along with some shots from their time at the Lab. Congrats to our alumni!

Tony Awards 

 A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder Robert Freedman and Steven Lutvak

• Best Direction of a Musical / Darko Tresnjak 
• Best Book of a Musical / Robert L. Freedman 
• Best Musical 
• Best Costume Design of a Musical / Linda Cho 

Obie Awards

Appropriate by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

• Best New American Play
• Best Performance / Johanna Day
• Best Direction / Liesl Tommy 

Fun Home by Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori

• Best Performance / Sydney Lucas
• Best New Musical 

Drama League Awards

A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder by Robert Freedman and Steven Lutvak

• Distinguished Production of a Musical 

Drama Desk Awards

A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder by Robert Freedman and Steven Lutvak

• Outstanding Musical 
• Outstanding Featured Actress in a Musical / Lauren Worsham 
• Outstanding Director of a Musical / Darko Tresnjak 
• Outstanding  Lyrics / Robert L. Freedman and Steven Lutvak
• Outstanding Book of a Musical/Robert L. Freedman
• Outstanding Production Design / Aaron Rhyne 

The Glass Menagerie

• Outstanding Featured Actress in a Play / Celia Keenan-Bolger 

What makes for more unnerving cinema than the suffocating conditions of captivity? Don't answer that, we'd rather not know. But in William Eubank’s The Signal, the perplexing hostage situation at hand has the makings of sci-fi nightmares. Both mind- and genre-bending, Eubank's stunning drama blends the tension of a classic hostage thriller with lyrical cinematography in a narrative that pits up-and-comer Brenton Thwaites against his stoic captor Laurence Fishburne. Here’s the scoop on the film in 6 GIFs. The Signal opens in theaters Friday, June 13.

What is ostensibly the story of young MIT hackers Nick (Brenton Thwaites) and Hailey (Olivia Cooke) falling in love…

…Abruptly takes an ominous, chilling turn.

Following a terrifying confrontation with a fellow hacker in the desert, the pair (and their third-wheeling friend Jonah) regain consciousness in captivity. Their captor (Laurence Fishburne) is an enigmatic, space-age suited man who asks Nick, “Can you recall for me the first time your encountered ‘The Signal’?”

It’s a question that only prompts a larger unearthing regarding Nick and his friends’ confinement.

Leaving them only one recourse: Escape.

And of course, The Signal abounds with grand scenes of classic sci-fi action. Because why not? (Though, you'd be shocked by the moderate budget.)

Nominations for the 68^th annual Tony Awards were announced Tuesday morning. For the first time this year, I was invited to be part of the Tony Awards Nominating Committee, a select and diverse group of about 40 some odd theatre professionals who are charged with seeing each and every Tony eligible play in one season (from July 2013 – May 2014). 

For the last 12 months, I’ve found myself at each and every show on the Great White Way, usually the night or so just before opening (sometimes on Opening Night itself). In rain, snow, freezing cold, humidity–all the ‘colors’ of New York–had the great privilege of sitting down to see the fruits of the American commercial theatre–at its height. You can relive my journey in the Facebook photo album below.

In the last two weeks alone, I’ve seen over 10 plays or musicals. From Twelfth Night starring Mark Rylance as “Olivia,” to Kelli O’Hara in The Bridges of Madison County, Tyne Daly in Terrence McNally’s Mothers and Sons, and from Indina Menzel in If/Then to Alan Cumming and Michelle Williams in Cabaret. It’s been a live whirlwind of live talent. 

On Monday night, April 28, the Committee sat together to cast its votes, and those were announced early this morning, Tuesday, April 29.  Hundreds of Tony “voters” will make the final decision as to who wins.  We will all find out those results on the night of the Tony Awards themselves,  Sunday, June 8.  I will be there – in my probably-rented tux.  You can watch on CBS at 8pm/7pm Central.

In 2010, playwright Anne Washburn was the recipient of a Sundance Institute Time Warner Storytelling Fellowship. In Ms. Washburn’s most recent work, Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play, the writer chillingly conjures the prospect of a post-apocalyptic world, wherein the ‘global energy grid’ has been obliterated. Scene One finds a group of survivors sitting around a campfire attempting feverishly to reconstruct the one story they can all collectively recall: an episode of The Simpsons. As decades leap forward, that culturally-embraced narrative tale – interwoven with other befuddled and hilarious memories of television, music and art -  transmogrifies into complex and original storytelling: furious, desperate and poignant in its ambition to reach and connect meaningfully to its audiences. Live theatre, in effect, triumphs over near societal annihilation, and the ability to “make theatre” moves the world forward and celebrates our species.

At the center of this prophecy lies the “why” of the Sundance Institute Theatre Program (SITP). Even as the options for entertainment and storytelling multiply exponentially, and as technology expands its seemingly infinite offerings, the remarkable singularity of live time “in person” interaction stakes its territory as a cultural touchstone. We shall forever gather around the campfire and tell our stories. On World Theater Day, we create the biggest circle possible, and celebrate the borderless reality of our storytelling.

Below, find a selection of photos from the Sundance Institute East Africa Lab, one of a range of creative Labs hosted throughout the year dedicated to developing new work for the stage.

New projects selected for support include a wide range of filmmaking styles and approaches including experimental, character driven narrative nonfiction, and investigative documentaries. Stories range from very personal  moments (Art and Craft, Never Better) to cultural  appreciation (Like Ants for Sugar) and examples of social inquiry (The Campus Project, Down By Law). Together these artists engage with distinctive stories in creative ways. 

The Fall 2013 round accepted nearly 750 applications worldwide from filmmakers working in 93 countries who submitted work of great artistry and humanity. Selected grantees include original voices from in-country artists from Bangladesh, South Korea, India, Vietnam, Syria, Uruguay, and People’s Republic of China. In funding a broad spectrum of innovative and creative non-fiction storytelling from around the world, Sundance Institute embraces documentary film as a vital contributor to the language of the 21st century.

Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program provides creative and financial support to cinematic feature documentaries from independent filmmakers globally. In addition to financing, the Program offers a year-round suite of creative support opportunities including Creative Labs, Fellowships, and editorial consultation. Past films supported include Why We Fight, Trouble the Water, Ai WeiWei: Never Sorry, The Queen of Versailles, The Invisible War, Powerless, Dirty Wars, and The Square. Submission deadlines are in February and July of each year. 

DEVELOPMENT

3.5 Minutes (Marc Silver, U.K.), The Betel Begins The Conversation (Bao Nguyen, Xuan Anh Duong, Vietnam/U.S.), Brick (Jessica Dimmock, Christopher LaMarca, U.S.), The Campus Project (Kirby Dick, U.S.), Day After Tomorrow, Kamar Ahmad (Bangladesh), Down By Law (George Amponsah, U.K.), Freedom Fighters (Jamie Meltzer, U.S.), How To Change The World, Jerry Rothwell (U.K.), Like Ants For Sugar (Shirley Abraham, India), The Lovers And The Despot (Rob Cannan, Ross Adam, U.K.), Never Better (Claudia Abend, Adriana Loeff, Uruguay), Recovering Irma (Sandra Salas, U.S.), The Trial Of Ratko Mladic (Henry  Singer, Robert Miller, U.K./U.S.), Untitled Cold Case Film (Jason Osder, Will Youmans U.S.).

PRODUCTION/POST-PRODUCTION

Art And Craft (Jennifer Grausman, Sam Cullman, U.S.), Baglar (Berke Bas and Melis Birder, Turkey), Bukom Fighter Makafui Zimrani (Ghana), Cocaine Prison (Violeta Ayala, Bolivia), (T)Error (David Felix Sutcliffe, Lyric R. Cabral, U.S.), In Country (Meghan O'Hara and Mike Attie, U.S.), The Look Of Silence (Joshua Oppenheimer, U.S.), The Notorious Mr. Bout (Tony Gerber and Maxim Pozdorovkin U.S./Russia), Please Remember Me (Qing Zhao and Violet Du Feng, People’s Republic of China), Silvered Water (Ossama Mohammad, Syria), Wind On The Moon (Seung‐Jun Yi, South Korea), A Young Patriot (Haibin Du, People’s Republic of China).

CANDESCENT FILMS AWARD 

E-Team (Katy Chevigny, Ross Kauffman, U.S.), Marmato (Mark Grieco, U.S.), Private Violence (Cynthia Hill, U.S.).

TIME WARNER FELLOWSHIP

Recolectores (The Gatherers) (Bernardo Ruiz, U.S.)

CINEREACH PROJECT AT SUNDANCE INSTITUTE

Rich Hill (Tracy Droz Tragos, Andrew Droz Palermo, U.S.) 

AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT

Diagnosis Of A Faun (Tamar Rogoff and Daisy Wright, U.S.), The House I Live In (Eugene Jarecki, U.S.), Inequality For All (Jacob Kornbluth, U.S.), The Invisible War (Kirby Dick, U.S.).

The Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program is made possible by generous support from Open Society Foundations, Ford Foundation, Hilton Worldwide, The Skoll Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, TED, CNN Films, The Charles Engelhard Foundation, Wallace Global Fund, Compton Foundation, Emerald Data Solutions, Time Warner Foundation, Joan and Lewis Platt Foundation, Candescent Films, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, J.A. & H.G. Woodruff, Jr. Charitable Trust, and David desJardins and Nancy Blachman.

Read more about the DFP Fall 2013 projects.

Allow us to refresh you. Memento made its U.S. premiere at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival and effectively introduced director Christopher Nolan—who was only 30 at the time—as a smart, slick directing force to be reckoned with. In retrospect, it was an auspicious marriage of talent, freshness, and artistry that made Memento such a universal success. Nolan and his lead actor Guy Pearce were burgeoning talents in their own rights, but their newness somehow elevated this cerebral thriller to an even greater stature.

If you’re among the deprived souls who have yet to see Guy Pearce as Leonard Shelby, a man seeking to avenge his wife's murder while suffering from anterograde amnesia, you may want to stop reading here and check it out on Netflix, or better yet in April as part of this year’s ‘From the Collection’ screenings at Sundance London. For everyone else, keep reading and scroll through some gifs to reacquaint yourself with the tangled labyrinth that is Memento. For all of its sleight of hand, Nolan’s directing never approaches frivolity. It is precise in its disorientation, pushing the viewer to empathize with Leonard’s struggle by way of omitting information—or, more accurately, not revealing it until a later time. Ticket packages for Sundance London are available here.

Memento alternates between black-and-white and color sequences in a sort of temporal manipulation. Scenes that appear in black-and-white take place chronologically before color scenes and are presented in appropriate order.

Scenes that appear in color take place chronologically after black-and-white scenes and are presented in reverse order. Got that? (I.e. The opening color scene in the film is chronologically the last scene in the story, and the subsequent black-and-white scene is chronologically the first scene in the story).

As a remedial  to his anterograde amnesia, Leonard Shelby takes Polaroids to document memories that he will not remember.

He also gets tattoos of notes and facts that will help him track down his wife's murderer.

And as if putting together a puzzle without all of the pieces wasn’t convoluted enough, others take advantage of Leonard’s condition and begin to manipulate him, leading him to fuse details of multiple stories into one insoluble mess.

Ultimately, everyone becomes a victim of Leonard’s circumstance. 

But don't worry if you get confused. It happens to the best of us. Specifically, Nicolas Cage.

For the 7th year in a row, @SundanceFest hosted a different Guest Tweeter each day during the first weekend of the Festival. Check out some highlights below and all of their Tweets via Storify: 

Rose McGowan was born in Italy and raised on a steady diet of pasta, European cinema, and classic films. Realizing that her passion lies in filmmaking has been a transformative experience for today's Guest Tweeter, who makes her directorial debut with the short film "Dawn."

I'm so excited for tonight!! People, you can do this! Pick up a camera! Write! #CREATEART #Dawn @rosemcgowan pic.twitter.com/OXraFRBKPt

— SundanceFilmFestival (@sundancefest) January 17, 2014

Jenny Slate kept us engaged on- and off-screen at this year’s Festival with appearances in the short film Catherine and the NEXT film Obvious Child, while also taking the reigns as today’s Guest Tweeter!

Proud proud proud proud to be a #SundanceMember & also that I haven't fallen down yet! @jennyslate pic.twitter.com/SMzaLiq9a1

— SundanceFilmFestival (@sundancefest) January 17, 2014

The subject of To Be Takei, Guest Tweeter George Takei proves why his presence in popular culture, from his iconic role as Hikaru Sulu on Star Trek to his public advocacy of marriage equality, remains as fresh and necessary as ever.

Proud to support indie films & the work of the #Sundance Institute: http://t.co/gyQKi4G372 Now where's the free booze? #OhMyyy @georgetakei

— SundanceFilmFestival (@sundancefest) January 18, 2014

Katie Couric led audiences through a potent exposé in Fed Up, which discloses why generations of American children will now live shorter lives than their parents.

Interview time! Walking down Main Street on our way to @Variety to discuss @fedupmovie. #Sundance pic.twitter.com/GeBMHrOhKG

— SundanceFilmFestival (@sundancefest) January 19, 2014

Jordan Vogt-Roberts studied the wildlife and indigenous creatures of Park City with Nick Offerman.

.@Nick_Offerman just finished rehearsal for tonight's Awards. He immediately ran into the woods to dance @VogtRoberts http://t.co/9nGBZr5O3I

— SundanceFilmFestival (@sundancefest) January 26, 2014

Hi everyone, and welcome to the live blog for the 2014 Sundance Film Festival Awards Ceremony. We’re Eric Hynes, Jeremy Kinser, and Nate von Zumwalt, and we’ll be your eyes and ears for tonight’s festivities.

As it has for the past several years, the Awards Ceremony takes place a few miles north of Park City at the Basin Recreation Fieldhouse at Kimball Junction. It’s a vast hangar of a space, with party lights projected high into the metal rafters, and the floor split in half between a food buffet/gathering space and the event space proper, which is lined with more folding chairs than I’ve ever seen at a Closing Night ceremony. Does this mean that more filmmakers stuck around the Fest longer, thinking they’ve got a good shot at a prize tonight? Or did the unseasonably mild, snow-less weather make Park City more inviting than usual? In any event, the volunteers operating as ushers have more energy than anyone else in this swiftly filling room, dancing along to Le Freak and Justin Timberlake as if prizes were about to be given away for Best Hip Shake or Most Misplaced Hustle.

This year marked the 30^th Anniversary of the Festival. In his introductory comments at the Opening day press conference a week ago last Thursday, Sundance Presidnet and Founder Robert Redford spoke of how the Sundance Film Festival has evolved over the past three decades. “Change is inevitable. You either resist it—we know who those people are—or you go with it,” he said. “We want to ride with that wave.”

In 1985, which was the first festival under the auspices of Sundance Institute, more than 80 features were presented, compared with 118 for this year. The doc jury was comprised of people named Frederick Wiseman, D.A. Pennebaker, and Barbara Kopple, and they gave top awards to Seventeen, Streetwise, and The Times of Harvey Milk, among others. The narrative jury included Peter Biskind, Robert Young, and Mirra Bank, and they honored a few small films called Blood Simple, The Brother From Another Planet, and Stranger Than Paradise. There were 10 awards total in 1985; this year there are 27

This year was also the 25^th Anniversary of Festival Director John Cooper’s involvement with the Fest. At the same Day One press conference, Cooper made special mention of films that he’s been advocating for a great many years of his tenure. “Please pay attention to the World Cinema Competition,” he said, backed by what he considered to be a strong slate of Dramatic and Documentary films, which, along with films screening in the other sections, were drawn from 37 countries. Keep an eye out for this year’s winners in the World Cinema Competition, which should come up towards the beginning of the ceremony.   

Updated 7:55 p.m.

A voice from the heavens introduces tonight’s masters of ceremonies, the husband and wife comedy team of Nick Offerman and Megan Mullally. Together they starred in last year’s U.S. Dramatic Competition film The Kings of Summer, and this year Offerman stars in Nick Offerman: American Ham.

Mullally walks out with a ukulele. Offerman has a guitar in its case at his feet. They talk about their sex lives as intertwined with indie film.

“Our frenzied coitus is the stuff of legend. There’s no place we’d rather get our swerve on than in Park City, Utah,” she says.

“We have seen your movies, and we have found them arousing,” he says.

“RyRy Reynolds, there was more than one pussy talking during your movie,” she says.

Offerman and Mululally's back-and-forth moves towards James Franco, a fixture at Sundance but Nick notes that he doesn’t actually have a film in this year’s fest. “What if I told you he plays you in American Ham, and you didn’t even know it?” she says.

“Classic Franco,” he says.

Now it’s song time. Continuing to work blue, theirs is a ditty about indie films called “Weed and Pussy.”

“Look around at your neighbors and feel proud of yourselves. You’re here. Keep up the good work, please and thank you,” he says.

Mullally introduces the Executive Director of Sundance Institute, Keri Putnam.

“That’s a tough act to follow,” Putnam says. “This has been an amazing ten days—I hope you will all spread the word about the new work you saw here this week, and continue to support independent film in your own communities,” she says. “I hope you will also get involved with Sundance Institute all year long.”

Putnam announces the winners of the Sundance Institute/Mahindra Global Filmmaking Awards, given earlier in the week to emerging filmmakers from the World Cinema stage on the basis of their next screenplay. 

From Vietnam and the UK, Hong Khaou for Monsoon.

From Denmark, Tobias Lindholm for A War.

From Australia, Ashlee Page for Archive.

From India, Neeraj Ghaywan for Fly Away Solo.

Additionally, the Sundance Institute/NHK Award went to Mark Rosenberg for Ad Inexplorata. Putnam introduces the Director of the Sundance Film Festival John Cooper.

Cooper thanks the 1,830 Festival Volunteers, making special mention of the “100 Club”—volunteers that gave over 100 hours of their time to this year’s Festival.

And this year’s Gayle Stevens Volunteer Award, given to a volunteer who has demonstrated a long-standing passion for and commitment to the work of the Institute (Stevens was an active member of the Utah Advisor Board for 18 years and the chair of it for four), was given at the start of the Festival to Gregory Walters, a veteran of seven Festivals.

“Let’s get all clear on this. If you’re a winner, you don’t have to thank everyone in the room. Your parents aren’t here. Let’s keep it moving,” he says about the coming awards speeches.

“We don't judge success by whether your film sold. I talk to audiences and on that front you killed it this year. They laughed and cried and in some cases saw things they didn't know they needed to see,” he says, to a wave of titters. “Thank you for being the amazing class of 2014.”

Cooper introduces the Director of Programming for the Sundance Film Festival, Trevor Groth.

Groth, in a signature argyle sweater, introduces the winner of the Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize, which was announced earlier in the week. It’s a juried award presented to a director with an outstanding film focusing on science or technology as a theme, or depicting a scientist, engineer, or mathematician as a major character, which comes with a no-slouch cash award of $20,000.

Winner of the Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize:

I Origins, written and directed by Mike Cahill

Cahill isn’t here, but producer Hunter Gray takes the stage.

“A wonderful thing happened during the making of this film. Mike became a father. So he’s where he should be, with his wife and newborn baby,” says Gray. Gray notes that this is Cahill’s second time as a Sloan Winner, having previously won for Another Earth. “I've never met anyone as passionate about science and film as Mike.”

Groth returns to talk about the Shorts Program, presented by YouTube. This year’s jury included Ania Trzebiatowska, Vernon Chatman, and Joshua Leonard.

The Shorts Awards were also given out in a separate ceremony earlier this week, and the winners were:

Short Film Special Jury Award for Direction and Ensemble Acting:

Burger, written and directed by Magnus Mork.

Short Film Special Jury Award for Non Fiction:

Love. Love. Love., directed by Sandhya Daisy Sundaram.

Short Film Special Jury Award for Unique Vision:

Rat Pack Rat, written and directed by Todd Rohal.

Short Film Jury Award: Animation:

Yearbook, written and directed by Bernardo Britto.

Short Film Jury Award: Non Fiction:

I Think This Is the Closest to How the Footage Looked, directed by Yuval Hamieri and Michal Vaknin.

Short Film Jury Award: International Fiction:

The Cut, written and directed by Geneviève Dulude-Decelles.

Short Film Jury Award: US Fiction:

Gregory Go Boom, written and directed by Janicza Bravo.

Short Film Grand Jury Prize:

Of God and Dogs, directed by the Abounaddara Collective.

Groth introduces Zach Papale from YouTube, who announces the winner of this year’s Audience Award, chosen from among 15 of the 2014 shorts that screened on YouTube throughout the Festival. Papale says that, “since Day One of the Festival, those 15 short films have collectively received more than 1.7 million views.”

Winner of the 2014 Shorts Audience Award, presented by YouTube:

Chapel Perilous directed by Matthew Lessner. 

“This is kinda scary. Really scary actually. I’m not going to think about it,” says Lessner, who comes up with two of his cast members. “This is my third time back, and this was my best experience thus far.” He thanks YouTube and its audience. “It’s awesome to have people from all over the world see this.”

Updated 8:14 p.m.

Nick Offerman comes back on stage to introduce the World Cinema Films (he seems entranced by a slideshow of the competing titles “Those graphics are giving me an intense flashback,” he says. “I feel good.”), as well as the World Cinema Documentary Jury. Jurors include Caspar Sonnen, the head of new media and creator of the IDFA DocLab at the International Documentary Film Festival of Amsterdam, Sally Riley, the head of the Indigenous Department at ABC1 television in Australia and manager of Screen Australia’s Indigenous Department, and Andrea Nix Fine a filmmaker who with her husband and directing partner, Sean, won the 2013 Academy Award for best documentary short for their film Inocente. Their feature documentary, Life According to Sam, debuted at Sundance last year and War/Dance won the documentary Directing Award at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, and was nominated for an Academy Award.   

Sonnen, about the first award-winner: “A deeply troubling masterpiece with glimpses of joy and hope.”

Winner of the World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award for Cinematic Bravery:

We Come As Friends, directed Hubert Sauper

Sauper: “I can’t thank my momma, she’s far away. I want my co-pilot on stage here. Where’s Barney [TK]? So we were in a flying tin can, in space over the Sudan. If you ever want to make a movie in space, this is the man. One of the finest cinematographers.”

Winner of the World Cinema Documentary Cinematography Award:

Happiness, cinematography by Thomas Balmes and Nina Bernfeld. Directed by Thomas Balmes

Bernfeld thanks Balmes for taking her on for the project, and Bernfeld thanks his wife and children.

Winner of the World Cinema Documentary Editing Award:

20,000 Days on Earth, edited by Jonathan Amos

Jonathan Amos isn’t here.  

Winner of the World Cinema Documentary Directing Award:

20,000 Days on Earth, directed by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard

Forsyth and Pollard send a video message from the UK. “It’s the icing on the cake of what’s been a tremendous Sundance for us,” says Pollard. 

“They won’t give any directing awards for this,” Forsyth says, of the lo-fi clip.

Winner of the World Cinema Documentary Grand Jury Prize:

Return to Homs, directed by Talal Derki

Derki isn’t here, but a producer of the film accepts the award.

“It was a very long journey until we were here,” he says. “This really gives us hope, us and everyone under siege in Homs and other places. It gives us hope that some day the siege will end. That some presidents can be ousted. And some other president in another place can do something finally."

Updated 8:24 p.m.

Megan Mullally comes back on stage to introduce the World Cinema Dramatic Jury, which includes Carlo Chatrian, a celebrated journalist, author, film critic and programmer who is the current Artistic Director of the Locarno International Film Festival, Sebastian Lelio, a Chilean filmmaker whose fourth feature, Gloria is currently nominated for the Independent Spirit award as best foreign language film, and Nansun Shi, a prolific producer who Variety named one of the 50 most influential independent filmmakers around. Her films include the blockbuster hits Infernal Affairs and Young Detective Dee: Rise of the Sea Dragon.

“We’ve had a nice 10 days, enjoying cinema,” says Chatrian.

Winner of the World Cinema Dramatic Special Jury Award for Ensemble Performance:

God Help the Girl, directed by Stuart Murdoch, and starring Emily Browning, Olly Alexander, Hannah Murray, Pierre Boulanger, and Cora Bissett.

Murdoch isn’t here. But he sends a video message.

“Sorry I left town so soon. I would have stayed if I’d known we were going to get an award,” he says, holding his cooing baby.

Winner of the World Cinema Dramatic Cinematography Award:

Lilting, cinematography by Ula Pontikos  

Ula isn’t here, but the producer accepts.

Winner of the World Cinema Dramatic Screenwriting Award:

Blind, written and directed by Eskil Vogt

Vogt isn’t here either, but he sends a video message. Another one holding a baby! This one seems both simultaneously more content than Murdoch’s and more demonstrative with spit up.

“A sign that we didn’t mess it up along the way,” he says about winning for screenplay.

Winner of the World Cinema Dramatic Directing Award:

52 Tuesdays, directed by Sophie Hyde     

Hyde thanks her “beautiful cast” as well as her team and crew. Thanks her investors for “taking a huge risk with us.”

Winner of the World Cinema Dramatic Grand Jury Prize:

To Kill a Man, directed by Alejandro Fernandez Almendras

Almendras sends a message – another with a baby! An older child who’s sticking his feet in the camera. “Show them your feet,” Almendras says.

“We won!!!” they say. The boy also wonders if his mother and brother and grandma won.

He sends a thank you “to all the people of the festival of the snow.”

“I guess you understand the reason why I’m not there now,” he says.

Updated 8:40 p.m.

Offerman comes back on stage to present a montage of films in the Next section, which is devoted to films of bold innovative storytelling that signal a greater next wave in American Cinema. Then he announces the winner of the Next audience award.

Winner of the Audience Award: Best Of NEXT

Imperial Dreams, directed by Malik Vitthal         

Vitthal: “I was in the back looking for dental floss,” he says after a long wait to take the stage. “Thanks to Watts for opening its arms to this project. It’s an important story that needs to get out there.”

Mullally is back to introduce actress Felicity Huffman, who will announce the winners of the World Cinema audience awards. Huffman is an Oscar nominated and Golden Globe winning actress best known for her roles on Sports Night and Desperate Housewives. This year she appears in Rudderless, which was directed by her husband William H. Macy.

Winner of the Audience Award for World Cinema Documentary:

The Green Prince, directed Nadav Schirman

Schirman is also in the back. “Run dude, run,” says Huffman.

Schirman: “I want to thank the audiences. Because we made this film for audiences around the world. It’s a very exciting time to be making documentaries. Because everything is possible in this genre.”

Winner of the Audience Award for World Cinema Dramatic:

Difret, directed by Zeresenay Berhane Mehari

Mehari: “We do have a baby. He’s over there,” he says, pointing offstage. “Today he’s 8 months old. He has a white shirt and bowtie.”

“When we started this project, we heard that people would not want to watch this sort of a story. Thank you very much, your voice goes a long way. We made this film with the support of the audience,” he says.  

“We always say we had twins, the baby and the film,” his partner and collaborator says.

Offerman is back on stage to introduce a montage of U.S. doc and narrative competition films. Then he brings out William H. Macy, who’s here to announce the U.S. Competition Audience Awards, presented by Acura. Macy is an Academy Award and Golden Globe nominee and a SAG Award and Emmy Winner. He currently stars in the Showtime series Shameless, and is making his feature film directorial debut with Rudderless, which is the Closing Night Film of the 2014 Sundance Film Festival. 

Winner of Audience Award: U.S. Documentary:

Alive Inside, directed by Michael Rossato-Bennett

Rossato-Bennett: “This has been an overwhelming experience for me. The beauty and open hearts of people who came up to me.” 

“I made this film because it moved me, and I didn’t know how big the topic was.”

“I made this film, most of it, in my bedroom, across from my bed,” he says, and he thanks his wife for not killing him.

Winner of the Audience Award: U.S. Dramatic:

Whiplash, directed by Damien Chazelle

“This is awesome,” the boyish Chazelle says. “This was not an easy film to make, and not an easy film to convince people to make.”

Thanks actors Miles Teller and J.K. Simmons “above all.”

Updated 8:50 p.m.

Mullally is back on stage to introduce Charlotte Cook, the Director of Programming for Hot Docs, North America’s largest documentary festival, a member of this year’s U.S. Documentary Jury.

Winner for U. S. Documentary Special Jury award for Intuitive Filmmaking:

The Overnighters, directed by Jesse Moss

Moss: “I’d like to thank the Sundance family for believing in this film when we really needed someone to believe in it.”

Winner of the U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Use of Animation:

Watchers in the Sky, directed by Edet Belzberg

Belzberg thanks all of the animators, and Sundance “for its support of filmmakers.”

Offerman is back to introduce Dana Stevens, the film critic at Slate.com, the co-host of the Slate Culture Gabfest podcast and of the Slate Spoiler Special podcast. Stevens is member of this year’s U.S. Dramatic Jury.

“It’s been an honor and joy to serve on this jury, and it’s not been an easy decision,” Stevens says.

Winner of the U.S. Dramatic Special Jury Award for Musical Score Musical Score:

Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter, composed by The Octopus Project

Directors the Zellner brothers accept on their behalf.

Winner of the U.S. Dramatic Special Jury Award for Breakthrough Talent:

Dear White People, directed by Justin Simien

Simien: “Wow! Ok. All right. That’s crazy. Thank you so much. To everybody in general. So grateful to have a platform for this film. This is a dream come true. Thank you.”

Mullally is back to introduce Kahane Cooperman, a documentary filmmaker and the original and current producer of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart for which she has won ten Primetime Emmy Awards and two Peabodys.

Winner of the Cinematography Award: U.S. Documentary:

E-TEAM, Ross Kauffman, Director of Photography; Rachel Beth Anderson, Ross Kauffman, Cinematographers

Kauffman: “Oh I don’t know what to say. This is wild, I didn’t expect it.”

“To all the theater projectionsts, we love you.” Thanks his producers, his crew, and “the editor makes the camera work,” referring to editor David Teague. Thanks the members of the Human Rights Watch E-TEAM.

Offerman is back to introduce Peter Saraf, producer of many Sundance hits such as The Kings of Summer, Safety Not Guaranteed and Little Miss Sunshine. He’s been nominated for multiple Academy Awards and Golden Globes and has won the Independent Spirit, Gotham, and Producers Guild of America awards.

“This film was actually shot on film,” says Saraf, to applause.

Winner of the Cinematography Award: U.S. Dramatic:

Low Down, cinematography by Christopher Blauvelt

Director Jeff Preiss accepts.

“Chris is a beautiful man. His cinematography and his person are the same thing.” Met him and agreed he had to shoot the film “in a half second.” 

Updated 9:10 p.m.

Mullally introduces Jonathan Oppenheim, an editor and producer of feature documentaries who has participated as both an advisor and a fellow at the Sundance Institute Documentary Edit and Story Lab. His work includes the Sundance hits Paris is Burning, Sister Helen, The Oath and Children Underground which was nominated for the Academy Award.

Winner of the Editing Award: U.S. Documentary:

Watchers of the Sky, edited by Jenny Golden and Karen Sim

Golden and Sim: “Coming from Jonathan Oppenheim, who’s one of the legendary editors of our time, it’s an absolute honor.”

Saraf is back to give out another award.

Winner of the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award: U.S. Dramatic:

The Skeleton Twins, screenplay by Craig Johnson and Mark Heyman

Johnson: “We started this eight years ago when we were students at NYU,” he says about his collaboration with Mark Heyman.  

Mullally introduces Morgan Neville, three-time Grammy nominee for his music documentaries. His film Troubadours, screened at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, and he was back last year with 20 Feet from Stardom, which is currently nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary.

Winner of the Directing Award: U.S. Documentary:

The Case Against 8, directed by Ben Cotner and Ryan White

White: “Ben and I met at this film festival 5 years ago. If you'd told us we'd be here five years later we'd have thought you were not a smart person.”

“We were incredibly lucky to follow inspiring people around. Thanks crew. Thanks plaintiffs. You've inspired us and changed the world. We hope all LGBT Americans can walk in the same footsteps that you just did,” he says about the film’s subjects.

Offerman introduces Lone Scherfig. She wrote and directed Denmark’s fifth Dogma film, Italian for Beginners, which won the Silver Bear at the 2001 Berlin Film Festival. She also directed An Education, which won the World Cinema Audience Award at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival and received three Academy Award nominations including best picture.

Winner of the Directing Award: U.S. Dramatic:

Fishing Without Nets, directed by Cutter Hodierne

Massive applause from the back right of the room. Clearly a strong Fishing Without Nets contingent still in town.

Hodierne celebrating on stage with two of his actors. “This was my first feature film. We went to the opposite side of the world and met these two guys who became tow of my best friends. You’re not a director without your actors. These guys came from Kenya. If they could speak English they would really be talking now.”

Actor: “Sorry everybody. Language, English, too small. I love you Sundance. I love you everybody. I love you. I love you!”

Mullally introduces Grammy Award–winning singer/songwriter and international recording artist Tracy Chapman. “A fiercely dedicated social activist with a passion for documentary films,” says Mullally.

“Thank you for the hugs and Sundance love,” Chapman says.

Winner of the U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Documentary:

Rich Hill, directed by Tracy Droz Tragos and Andrew Droz Palermo

Tragos and Palermo come up with two members of their crew.

Tragos: “I didn’t think that anybody saw our film, I don’t know.” Clearly shaken. “It’s a small film but we’ve got a big heart. We dedicate this to thte families in Rich Hill, Missouri. Three boys and their families who were so brave. Who revealed some really hard, tough stuff. Thank you fur letting them into your hearts.”

Palermo: ‘I’m not normally the talker among the two of us.” Palermo dedicates the prize to one of the mothers in the film, who died ten days before the festival.

Offerman is back to introduce Leonard Maltin, who’s best known for his annual Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide and his 30-year run on television’s Entertainment Tonight.

Iconically white-haired and cadenced Maltin notes that Bryan Singer left early because he fell ill.

Winner of the U. S. Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic:

Whiplash, directed by Damien Chazelle

“Now I’ve got to thank more people I guess,” Chazelle says, in collecting his second award. “My first time I was in Park City was last year with my short,” and he thanks the shorts programming team for starting things off a year ago. And that’s it. “It’s time to party. Nick and I hope you join us in our Mountain Time fuck ram,” are Mullally’s final words.

The Sleepwalker and We Come as Friends
By Eric Hynes 

 You may have heard otherwise, but the Festival was still going strong on Friday, the unseasonably mild 9^th day of the Festival. Yes, there were fewer pedestrians on Main Street. And yes, Twitter chatter was down among members of the press, many of whom left town on Wednesday and Thursday along with the bulk of their Industry brethren.

But you wouldn’t know that this was the “relaxed end” of the Festival from any of its venues. You wouldn’t know it from the crowds that still queued up to don virtual reality headsets at New Frontier, that gathered at the pavilion for Doug Aitken’s The Source to catch a few minutes of Jack White and Devendra Banhart extolling the virtues of formalist simplicity before jumping on a shuttle bus to a screening.

You wouldn’t know it from the more than 1,000 people that turned up for an afternoon screening of The Sleepwalker, which is playing as part of the U.S. Dramatic Competition. First-time director Mona Fastvold seemed to anticipate a late-fest low-ebb in her introductory comments. “Some people might find it’s a little difficult in some ways, I guess,” she said. “But I just wanted to say even though it’s at times a stark Scandinavian creature, that it’s ok to laugh.” Ninety-two minutes later, after the unspooling of Fastvold’s slow burn psychological thriller of sibling secrets and sexual rivalries, the director, along with her star and co-screenwriter Brady Corbet, fielded questions about things left unsaid, unsolved, and inexplicit. Whether or not the audience found the film difficult, it couldn’t have been more engaged. But wait, what about this tale of high tension and traumatic childhood experiences was supposed to be lighthearted and funny? “You don’t have to laugh if you don’t want to, I just wanted you to feel that even though it’s a serious movie that you can have whatever feelings you want. Sometimes when it’s a really dramatic moment it can feel funny to me,” Fastvold said. “Yeah, I’m sorry. I’m Scandinavian”—words that finally did provoke laughter from the audience.    

Laughter in the face of grim goings-on was a theme that carried over to the Redstone Cinemas, the most far-flung venue in Park City, where another challenging film played for another audience that proved to be up to the task. With We Come As Friends, director Hubert Sauper spent six years in Sudan, tracking the continued effects of colonization by filming local residents, politicians, soldiers, UN officers, warlords, oil miners, workers, activists, children, and witnessing the birth and almost immediate embattlement of South Sudan. “Don’t be worried if it makes you laugh,” he told the crowd before the screening, and in this case there were more than a few moments of absurd humor. Flying around the country in his own rickety prop plane, “our own little spaceship,” as he called it, he was “landing in areas where we are aliens,” which elicited sequences in which the baffled reactions of those he encountered overmatched whatever astonishment he, or we, might have. “I don’t pretend that I have solutions for these problems,” he said about his impressionistic film, which accumulates into an idiosyncratic portrait of great moral power. “I just go out with the camera to see something you might not always see.” Those are words that suit many films at this year’s Festival, as well as the audiences that remain eager to see them.  

Nick Offerman: American Ham
By Jeremy Kinser 

Comic Nick Offerman loves to eat meat. It’s a trait that, along with his devotion to wood-working, isn’t likely to surprise fans of his Parks & Recreation character Ron Woodruff In Nick Offerman: American Ham (note the title’s double meaning), a rather straightforward recording of the comic actor’s recent stand-up tour, the star walks on stage shirtless and notes that his is a sturdy torso defined by his frequent consumption of bacon and barbecue.

There are other things Offerman loves to eat. He reveals this to his audience while dispensing what he calls "10 Tips for a Prosperous Life." Many of these involve oral sex, as well as handjob and semen gags. In fact, Offerman’s marriage to Megan Mullally, another adored performer, provides much of the rich material for his stand-up act. A tune he wrote about their happy union titled “The Rainbow Song” somehow manages to be both sweet and unbelievably bawdy.

Offerman’s at his sharpest while taking aim at the religious right, or “dicks,” as he puts it who misappropriate Biblical scripture. He rejects the Bible as less a “good book” and more of “an uneven book.” Offerman prefers to read The Hobbit. He’s particularly aghast at what he describes as the hilarity of the chapter of Leviticus and suggests that “the writers of the Onion are all handed a copy of Leviticus their first day on the job.”

An author himself, Offerman’s Paddle Your Own Canoe, was published last year. During the Q&A that followed the premiere a question was fired at the comic asking if the film was considered a companion piece to his book. It’s the other way around, Offerman clarified. “There are a bunch of stories that I couldn’t fit into the stage show,” he answered. “The stage show written out is 12 pages. The book is like 300 more pages of bull shit.”

Sundance vet Jordan Vogt-Roberts (Kings of Summer) recorded two performances of Offerman’s show on the same night last spring at New York’s Town Hall Theater. Asked how helming a concert film differed from directing a scripted narrative, Vogt-Roberts noted that his résumé includes shooting a stand-up comedy series on Comedy Central. “When we first talked about this he came to me and said let’s do this really small and not spend a lot of money,” he revealed. “Let’s shoot it and give it a raw quality and buzz the focus intentionally and let it play from the side angles, which is a reference to a lot of the concert films from the ‘70s that I really loved. Really. I just pointed six cameras and let him do his job – that’s how it differed.” 

Power of Story: Class of '94

It was a class reunion that would charm even the most stubborn indie film aficionados. For the second installment of the Festival's yearly Power of Story series, four indie luminaries from the 1994 Sundance Film Festival took to the stage to reflect on their watershed moment 20 years prior, when an explosion of new talent at the Sundance Film Festival boldly marked the start of a new era in independent film. Kevin Smith (Clerks), Gregg Araki (Totally Fu***d Up), Boaz Yakin, and Rose Troche waxed on the more modest days of independent film with a nostalgia befitting of a group that still very hesitantly welcomes the ways of 21st century indie film. Here are some highlights from the live Tweet coverage by @sundancefestnow:

A: "That year '94, that was the first year any film ever sold at #Sundance. There wasn't that 'I hope I sell it' mentality" @ThatKevinSmith

— Sundance Fest NOW (@sundancefestnow) January 24, 2014

A: "Back then I was fairly depressed. I was like, 'Fuck all these people, what do they want from me?"" Boaz Yakin

— Sundance Fest NOW (@sundancefestnow) January 24, 2014

A: "I had never met a gay person in my whole entire fucking life, and then #Sundance was like gay paradise." @ThatKevinSmith

— Sundance Fest NOW (@sundancefestnow) January 24, 2014

"It seems like the #Sundance audiences are a little kinder these days." Rose Troche

— Sundance Fest NOW (@sundancefestnow) January 24, 2014

A: "Back then, I did all the effects myself, It was very arts-and-craftsy." Rose Troche

— Sundance Fest NOW (@sundancefestnow) January 24, 2014

A: "Back then it was so fucking hard to make a movie." Gregg Araki

— Sundance Fest NOW (@sundancefestnow) January 24, 2014

"It's (digital) the future and we're all going to go there, but it's still woefully lacking." Boaz Yakin

— Sundance Fest NOW (@sundancefestnow) January 24, 2014

"My sister gave me this advice, 'If you want to be a filmmaker then just be a filmmaker. Stop talking about it and be one.'" @ThatKevinSmith

— Sundance Fest NOW (@sundancefestnow) January 24, 2014

Check out this Day 9 Festival roundup from @NowThisNews:

Sundance.org is dispatching its writers to daily screenings and events to capture the 10 days of festivities during the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. Check back each morning for roundups from the previous day's events.

Listen Up Philip
By Eric Hynes 

You can’t say they weren’t warned.

In introducing his new film, Listen Up Philip, to the audience at the MARC Theater on Wednesday night, director Alex Ross Perry torpedoed any expectations that a rollicking feel-good comedy was about to commence. “ Well I hope everyone is ready to feel really shitty about humanity,” he said. While it may have been an indelicate introduction, especially for a film that actually has a lot to say about and for humanity—shitty and otherwise—it definitely prepped viewers for the dyspeptic unpleasantness of Philip (Jason Schwartzman), a young novelist whose misanthropic discontent saturates the first third of the film.

But something unexpected happens as the film progresses—Perry shifts focus from Philip to his frustrated girlfriend, Ashley (Elisabeth Moss), and later to his self-appointed mentor, Ike (Jonathan Pryce), a wizened and embittered superstar writer who serves as both a cautionary tale and a shining beacon for Philip. Though none of the characters come off as especially heroic in this triptych of portraits, the curiosity for and respect of multiple points of view, of lives normally left unseen and unexplored in standard cinematic narratives, made this viewer feel strangely better about humanity.     

“People’s lives exist when you’re not around. If you think you break up with someone and they cease to exist, then you’re wrong,” Perry said during a post-screening Q&A in which he was more amenable and approachable than his opening remarks might have suggested. “As a viewer of films and reader of stories I want to see what that person goes through just as much as I want to see the rest of it.”

He spoke of how the three main characters are all “drawn from the worst parts of my own personality, and the best that I could ever hope to achieve. Ike represents my 70 year-old lifetime of enemies side, which is probably my biggest side. I don’t have the accomplishments that he has, but I have everything else. Ashley is more driven and dedicated to her work than either of the men in the movie, and that’s something that’s been important to me as I’ve been struggling to make small movies for the last several years. And Philip is just a miserable piece of shit. So I just combined all those parts of myself and split them into three different characters.”

In terms of shooting style, he talked about how Super 16mm film was essential for conveying a somewhat antiquated, saturated world in which cell phones don’t exist and giants of literature still roam the earth. As for the copious amounts of close-ups in the film, which in one particular party scene recall the immersive claustrophobia of John Cassavetes’ Faces, Perry said he wouldn’t have it any other way. “Cinema is different from television, and people are starting to forget that. And for me, when I want to sit and see images this big, there’s nothing I want to see more than a face closer than it could ever be in real life. Shots like that don’t work on television, because if you’re sitting in your living room and you’re ten feet away from something, and your television’s only this big, a face like that’s really not going to read. But for something like this, I want to see people’s eyes, the tiniest twitches in their mouth when they react to something. It’s a special gift that only cinema can give, and I wanted to go as far as I could go with it.” 

52 Tuesdays
By Jeremy Kinser

While much attention at the Festival this year has been focused on Boyhood, Richard Linklater’s 12 years-in the-making drama, another film has been made under a similarly innovative process. For her directorial debut 52 Tuesdays (World Dramatic Competition), Sophie Hyde shot her film only on Tuesdays for 52 consecutive weeks and the actors were only given scripts a week in advance and only the scenes that involved their characters. Hyde, who also cowrote (with Matthew Carmack) and produced the Australian-set drama, worked by the same rule— she stopped shooting before midnight on Tuesdays, so whatever was filmed on that day is what happens in the story on that day.

It’s an audacious experiment that, despite some shaggy edges, largely works. The unusual shooting schedule added delicate layers of intimacy and kinetic energy to the story of 16-year-old Billie (Tilda Cobham-Hervey) adjusting to news that her mother (Del Herbert-Jane) plans to begin gender transition, and their time together will be limited to Tuesday afternoons over the course of one year.

Hyde spoke to the audience following the screening Wednesday morning about the inherent challenges in a weekly year-long shoot and noted the obvious — that the film required a major commitment from cast and crew. “Just shooting that amount of time becomes a marathon,” she shared. “We scripted throughout the year from an initial outline. So, yes there were complications. All sorts of things went wrong.” Cormack agreed, but added, “As a writer it’s a fantastic thing to have a deadline every week.”

The atypical filming process seems to have actually aided the realism of the performances, particularly Cobham-Hervey’s. The potential for stardom is clear in this first-time actor, who alternates intensity and winsomeness reminiscent of recent breakout stars Carey Mulligan and Mia Wasikowska. “Not having worked in film was actually a blessing,” Cobham-Hervey revealed to the audience, and compared the making of the film to living in a parallel universe. “It was like being in a giant Sims game, being controlled, or like being in a choose-your-own-adventure novel.”

A member of the audience asked whether Herbert-Jane, who played James, Billie’s transitioning mother, and who was not in attendance, had similarly undergone gender reassignment. Carmack revealed that Herbert-Jane initially began working with the writers as a consultant. “We asked Del to screen test and it went very well,” he added.

“They (a gender-neutral pronoun preferred by some transgender people) are gender non-conforming, neither male nor female,” Hyde offered. “Del was cast because of their unique prospective on gender. It’s a fictionalized character. James is very much a transgender man, but Del isn’t like that at all. Whether Del went through transition or not, that’s something Del likes to keep private.”

Despite the adventurous filmmaking and the positive response from the screening audience, the director admitted she’s not sure she’d do it again. “Next time I want to shoot something in two weeks,” she said, with a laugh.

This Is Not a Panel
By Nate von Zumwalt 

The pseudo panelists on Wednesday’s sidesplitting, eccentric This Is Not a Panel did all they could to heed the event’s raison d’etre. Conceived as anything but a formal discussion with a fixed Q&A session, directors Michael Tully (Ping Pong Summer), Alex Ross Perry (Listen Up Philip), David Zellner (Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter), and Jenny Slate (Obvious Child, and for our purposes, played by Nathan Zellner) eschewed the banalities of “panel talk” for a part free-flowing conversation, part show-and-tell experience.

Lacking a traditional moderator, Tully seized the reins and engaged in a battle of wit with fellow filmmaker and friend Perry for the better part of the non-panel, which opened with a very panel-y question from an audience member about film financing. “We’ll answer that and then we’ll spring into some clips and stuff to make it real fun…so this doesn’t actually start to sound like a real panel,” said Tully. “Find someone with a lot of money,” suggested Perry, in response to the challenge of financing a film outside of a studio. “I got all of my money from one guy—such a fake reality, but it still exists.”

Appearing not in place of, but in fact as the unable-to-attend Jenny Slate (who would later call in), Nathan Zellner introduced the first show-and-tell item, Steely Dan’s “Caves of Altamira,” cueing a subdued jam session. “I like listening to Steely Dan lyrics when I’m working,” explained Slate (Zellner). Perry, hardly veiling his comical misanthropy, took exception to the ensuing question of whether he enjoyed listening to music while working. “No. And I don’t write outside my house; I hate being outside my house. It’s my home.” Perry continued, introducing his show-and-tell item. “It’s a clip from a 1972 movie called We Won’t Grow Old Together, about a miserable relationship.”

Tully, still playing moderator, opened the floor for an audience question. “What’s the worst job you’ve ever had?” a woman asked. The hilarious range of responses were uttered as follows:

Alex Ross Perry: “You’re looking at it. You wouldn’t believe how much money we get paid to do these panels.”

David Zellner: “My all-time worst job was probably the McDonald’s bun factory.” 

Jenny Slate (Nathan Zellner): “Standard waitressing, oil rigger in Alaska. My hardest acting job was when I was told to ‘have fun.’”

Another question fired in from the audience. “When you need to take a break from work, what do you do for fun?”

Perry: "Fun? The only fun part of the day is if you go see a movie by yourself. But only if you get through a good day of work."

Slate (Zellner): “Extreme sports. I like rock climbing, scuba diving.”

Tully: “Watching a movie, eating dinner.”

Rounding out the show-and-tell component, David Zellner muted the humorous tone with his item of inspiration, Pancake Bunny. Rather than touting the meme that emerged from the viral images of a bunny balancing various objects on its head, Zellner chose to reference the original blog by the Japanese man who shot and posted the images in the late ‘90s. As Zellner noted, this trivial piece of “interweb novelty” becomes an incredibly poignant story of the bunny’s existence, all the way up to its death and burial.

It was an odd cap to the day’s conversation, but one that secured the theme of the day—this was definitely not a panel. 

That's a wrap on Day 7. Check out this Instagram video recap from @NowThisNews.

Sundance.org is dispatching its writers to daily screenings and events to capture the 10 days of festivities during the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. Check back each morning for roundups from the previous day's events.

Appropriate Behavior
By Jeremy Kinser

With Appropriate Behavior, a frank, funny, bitingly personal look at a bisexual woman in Brooklyn reeling from a recent breakup, Desiree Akhavan gives notice that she’s a triple-threat to be reckoned with.

The sometimes-melancholy comedy, a NEXT selection, will inevitably draw comparisons to HBO’s zeigeist-y series Girls, but the film’s structure is indebted just as much to the template for all modern rom-coms, Annie Hall, as Akhavan’s character Shirin zig-zags back in time in an attempt to make sense of why she’s suddenly single.

In the opening scene, Shirin splits from the Park Slope apartment she shares with her girlfriend Maxine (Rebecca Henderson, butch and fierce) and leaves their home walking down a Brooklyn street carrying a sex toy, the strap dangling limp in a forlorn manner that reflects its owner. Rebellious and directionless, Shirin flounders in the aftermath of the breakup and struggles as much to come to terms with what led to the split as she does trying to come out to her strict Iranian-American parents.

Perhaps inspired by another iconic Diane Keaton film, Looking for Mr. Goodbar, Shirin balances her day job teaching a pre-kindergarten class in filmmaking by embarking at night on a series of pansexual encounters. But the bed-hopping scenes are neither gratuitous nor celebratory–simply real and awkward.

During the Q&A that followed the screening Akhavan, whose screen presence recalls equal parts Greta Gerwig and Sarah Silverman, noted that she elevated her own best and worst qualities in creating Shirin.“It’s tied to the truth of me, but I would never walk down the street with a dildo,” she cracked to laughter from the audience. She also offered that playing her screen alter ego taught her to “hang in there and not be afraid to take risks.”

Akhavan, who developed Appropriate Behavior as her thesis for NYU’s graduate film program, recounted an anecdote about the challenges of shooting a micro-budget film on the streets of Brooklyn and calling for quiet mid-afternoon on a weekday.

“Some guy leaned outside his window and yelled ‘Fuck you! This an aesthetic to you. This is my life!’” she said, laughing along with the audience. “I just felt this was a refreshing New York sensibility.” 

A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night
By Eric Hynes 

You’ve probably never heard of Ana Lily Amirpour, but that should change after her debut film, the Persian vampire comedy romance A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, screens throughout Park City this week. Not only is the film a sui generis combination of singular style and brazen cinematic homage, but as proven during a post-screening Q&A at the Egyptian Theater on Tuesday afternoon, Amirpour herself is a rather notable piece of work.     

The film takes place in the desolate, dusty oil town of Bad City, where a young man struggles against a junky dad and a preening pimp, and an unassuming young woman stalks the night as a vigilante vampire. Shot in stunning anamorphic black and white by cinematographer Lyle Vincent, and accompanied by a soundtrack that mixes Iranian and European pop and rock with an operatic, Ennio Morricone-like score, Amirpour’s film, which screens as part of the World Dramatic Competition, evokes everything from Down By Law to Rebel Without a Cause without skipping its own beat.

When asked about her inspiration for the film, she cited Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, David Lynch’s Wild at Heart, Francis Ford Coppola’s Rumble Fish and Harmony Korine’s Gummo—“for those weird small towns that actually are real, but seem totally not,” she said. And to describe why she chose her film format, she said that black and white gave her “a separation from reality” that fostered some of the more supernatural elements of the story. And also: “Anamorphic makes me just come in my pants.”   

Flanked by her extended cast and crew, Amirpour was dressed in fingerless gloves, downturned combat boots, a T-shirt featuring Willem Dafoe’s psycho character from Wild at Heat, and a large band-aid on her forehead, and proved both combative and co-conspiratorially warm with the audience. When asked to talk about the turnaround of title, which would seem to augur danger for the girl but in actuality she’s the one in charge, she offered, “I flipped the script on the bitch.” When asked about the complex personality of her lead character, she said, “She’s a vampire, dog. She’s a serial killer, an historian, a romantic, an addict. Yeah, she’s been around.” When told that her film evoked the style of a music video, she pantomimed shooting herself in the temple with the microphone. Yet a few minutes prior she invited an audience member out for a bourbon to discuss the film.

Talking about the tattoos of the pimp character, Amirpour revealed a bit of her process of artistic conviction and open collaboration, saying her muse was a member of the South African rap-rave band Die Antwoord, but that the personality of Dominic Rains also fed into her choices for his floridly filled body canvas. “You have your ideas, and I’m pretty specific and into the shit I’m into, but then the people you have are part of all that shit,” she said, then clarified: “I mean shit in a good way.” Rains added that he was mysteriously instructed to watch the TV show Friends to prepare for the part, and to pay attention to one character in particular. “I got caught up on ten seasons of Friends,” he said. “And know Ross pretty well now.”

Amirpour concluded the freewheeling session with an explanation for her band-aid, recounting that three night prior she cracked her head open on the balcony of her condo, requiring 35 stitches. “It looked like a giant red mouth with blood pouring out of it. Please find me after and I’ll show you a picture on my phone—I shit you not, it’s some next level fucking shit. So I’ve been riding a mild concussion the last few days. I just thought, you know, you should know.”

Shorts Awards and Party

The Shorts Awards and Party presented by YouTube routinely marks a welcome respite—or collective exhale—from the frenetic first weekend at the Sundance Film Festival. Annually hosted at Jupiter Bowl just down the highway from Main Street Park City, the event convenes shorts filmmakers, programmers, and jurors for a casual awards ceremony to recognize the best of Fest in the abbreviated format. This year’s short film program is composed of 66 short films selected from a record 8,161 submissions, and after a brief introduction from Director of Programming Trevor Groth, shorts programmer Mike Plante got right into announcing the winners—though only after a self-inflicted barb for affixing his reading glasses: “Hey, I’m 43.”

This year’s short film jurors included Vernon Chatman, producer, writer, director and voice actor; filmmaker/actor Joshua Leonard; and Ania Trzebiatowska, artist director of the Off Plus Camera International Festival of Independent Cinema, based in Krakow, Poland.

Here are the winners:

Short Film Grand Jury Prize:
Of God and Dogs / Syrian Arab Republic (Director: Abounaddara Collective) — A young, free Syrian soldier confesses to killing a man he knew was innocent. He promises to take vengeance on the God who led him to commit the murder.

Short Film Jury Award: U.S. Fiction:
Gregory Go Boom / U.S.A. (Director and screenwriter: Janicza Bravo) — A paraplegic man leaves home to be on his own.

Short Film Jury Award: International Fiction:
The Cut / Canada (Director and screenwriter: Geneviève Dulude-Decelles) — The Cut tells the story of a father and a daughter, whose relationship fluctuates between proximity and detachment, at the moment of a haircut.

Short Film Jury Award: Non-fiction:
I Think This Is the Closest to How the Footage Looked / Israel (Directors: Yuval Hameiri, Michal Vaknin) — A man with poor means recreates a lost memory of the last day with his mom. Objects come to life in a desperate struggle to produce a single moment that is gone.

Short Film Jury Award: Animation:
Yearbook / U.S.A. (Director and screenwriter: Bernardo Britto) — A man is hired to compile the definitive history of human existence before the planet blows up.

Short Film Special Jury Award for Unique Vision:
Rat Pack Rat / U.S.A. (Director and screenwriter: Todd Rohal) — A Sammy Davis Jr. impersonator, hired to visit a loyal Rat Pack fan, finds himself performing the last rites at the boy's bedside.

Short Film Special Jury Award for Non-fiction:
Love. Love. Love. / Russia (Director: Sandhya Daisy Sundaram) — Every year, through the endless winters, her love takes new shapes and forms. 

Short Film Special Jury Award for Direction and Ensemble Acting:
Burger / United Kingdom, Norway (Director and screenwriter: Magnus Mork) — It's late night in a burger bar in Wales...

Sundance.org is dispatching its writers to daily screenings and events to capture the 10 days of festivities during the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. Check back each morning for roundups from the previous day's events.

The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz
By Nate von Zumwalt

For a federal criminal case lacking a verdict, United States v. Aaron Swartz produces plenty of alarming answers. Perhaps most salient among them is that the defendant’s death was utterly avoidable, if not criminal itself. That well-supported notion permeates Brian Knappengberger’s U.S. Documentary Competition selection The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz, a film that follows the late computer programmer’s ascent from childhood prodigy to flourishing startup developer to sociopolitical activist. Only one year after his death, and with unbridled access to Swartz’s family, friends, and colleagues, Knappenberger’s documentary takes on one of the most pressing and convoluted issues facing our modern digital world: access to information.

Between 2011 and 2012, Swartz was indicted on a handful of federal charges for downloading academic journal articles from the online service JSTOR via the MIT network. As detailed in the film, Swartz was not merely caught in the act of physically connecting his laptop to a network switch at MIT; rather, the Secret Service (yes, that Secret Service led this case) began to document his illicit activity in order to build a case that would incarcerate him for 35 years and brand him a lifetime felon. It’s that seemingly cutthroat pursuit of Swartz’s prosecution that pulses throughout The Internet’s Own Boy, eventually leading the 26-year-old activist to take his own life and leaving an indelible black eye on the face of the U.S. government.

At the film’s premiere on Monday, Swartz’s father (Robert Swartz) and two brothers joined director Brian Knappenberger on stage to field audience questions after receiving an expressive standing ovation.

“All of this is unbelievably hard for us,” explained a still weary sounding Robert Swartz only a year after his son’s death. “Aaron is dead–there’s nothing we can do about that. But we can try to make the world a better place.”

A palpable pathos loitered among the full house that stayed for the Q&A, and the Swartz family was laconic yet profound in airing their grievances around the unnecessary death of their loved one. “There was no victim. JSTOR said they weren’t interested in prosecuting. What was going on here?,” asked Robert Swartz. “The government said, ‘Well we need this for deterrent.’ It all made no sense.” The question still lingers, who are the real victims here?

With a verdict forever wanting, one conclusion can be had: the prosecutorial efforts surrounding Aaron Swartz’s federal case ran wild and without warrant.  

20,000 Days On Earth
By Eric Hynes

Anyone who expected a standard issue rock doc about Bad Seeds frontman, poet, novelist and screenwriter Nick Cave from 20,000 Days on Earth, which had its world premiere at the Egyptian Theater on Monday night, was in for a surprise. The film, which screens in the World Dramatic Competition at the Festival, eschews standard narrative structure for a number of idiosyncratic but confidently deployed conceits toward understanding the artist and man better, including a candid interview with Cave by a psychoanalyst, archival photos projected against the wall of a cramped office that resembles a detective agency, and a series of rainy car drives through Cave’s chosen town of Brighton with key figures from his life (Ray Winstone, Blixa Bargeld, Kylie Minogue). Filmmakers Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, as well as Cave himself, were on hand for a post-screening Q&A.

Forsyth and Pollard said they’d been collaborating with Cave in various forms for seven years before they embarked on this project, which coincided with developing the latest Bad Seeds album. “Nick thought that he could cope with having us in the studio when he was making and demoing and writing Push the Sky Away,” Pollard said. “We knew we had to make it into something much bigger than a standard promotional sort of doc, that it had to be something a lot more ambitious and crazy.”

Though the filmmakers had intimate access to the demoing, writing, and making of the album, and included long, unbroken sequences of both studio and concert recordings in the final cut, key elements of the film didn’t materialize until Nick let them look through his notebooks. “We started dialing through all of the discarded lyrics, all of the songs that didn’t become anything—just an amazing amount of stuff—and began to find phrases that really rang, that did something for us instinctually,” Pollard said. “And one of them was this odd calculation that he’d been on earth for 20,000 days, and that strange odd phrase, 20,000 Days on Earth, immediately became the film’s title. We didn’t know why or how, but it stuck. So much came from Nick’s notebooks. The entire opening scene in the bedroom, the voiceover was all there, it was a discarded lyric and we just took it.”

Pollard said that they referenced films like the Led Zeppelin doc The Song Remains the Same, Godard’s One Plus One, and Lindsay Anderson’s O Lucky Man! when making the film, noting that she considers all of those films to be failures but wildly ambitious ones. “This is the first time we’ve done this, and I hope we get to do it again, but we didn’t really have a career to waste, so we had to just go with it,” she said.

When someone from the audience asked whether they considered the film to be a documentary or autobiography or, perhaps, a “psychodrama,” Cave quickly responded: “Psychodrama. Just take out the drama bit.” He and the filmmakers nodded for another moment before Cave said, “We like that. Thank you.”

Riffing on a lyric from the song “Higgs Boson Blues,” a woman from the audience asked of Cave, whose legendarily lean frame was dressed in a familiar dark suit and open white collared shirt. “Before you leave tonight, can I feel your heartbeat?”

“There were a thousand answers that went through my mind just now,” he said. “We can talk about it later. It’s beating very fast at the moment.” He then took a dramatic pause before adding. “Sure. Form a queue.”

#FreeFail

On Day 5 of the Festival, we celebrated failure with a day-long series of panels and other events. Artists and cultural luminaries led discussions and workshops designed to embrace failure as essential to risk-taking, innovation, and the creative process. Check out some highlights from #FreeFail below.

Women In Film
By Eric Hynes

At the annual Women in Film Brunch, which swelled this year to fill the warehouse-sized room at The Shop in Park City with a growing community of female film professionals, optimism for and commitment to change were in very large supply. A year after research showed that women directors and producers were grossly underrepresented in both Hollywood and Sundance Film Festival films, Sundance Institute Executive Director Keri Putnam and President of Women in Film Cathy Schulman introduced new research as well as initiatives for directly responding to the findings.

“It was very clear to us that we needed to be armed with statistical research. There’s an absolute power in numbers,” Schulman said about the commissioned study led by Stacy Smith of USC’s Anenberg Center on Communication Leadership and Policy. As announced at last year’s brunch, Smith found that from 2002-2013 only 16.9% of directors of U.S. Dramatic films at the festival were directed or produced by women, while in mainstream Hollywood films the number dropped to below 5%.

“The facts weren’t good. But that wasn’t a surprise. The goal was to understand them better,” Schulman said. “The research study’s key takeaways were that access to and knowledge about financing, lack of mentorship networks, and lack of awareness about the scope of the problems were the main impediments.”

In terms of financing and mentorship, Putnam introduced a new professional coach-matching program to the women’s initiative fellowship, and talked about an expanded network of allied organizations. “We reached out to organizations that had been way ahead of us in this space,” she said.

This year’s version of the study declared there has been “no meaningful change in representation of American women directors and producers at the Sundance Film festival,” and found that representation remains significantly higher within documentaries and within categories that showcase first films—suggesting that women still struggle to mount sustained careers within the narrative arena.

But in new research focused on American filmmakers in the Sundance filmmaker’s labs, Smith found some intriguing and encouraging numbers. In the Feature Film Program (FFP), which supported 116 projects from 2002-2013, 77 had a sole male director, while 39 had a female attached (33% of the whole). Of these two groups, both had a completion rate of 41%, and of the 81% of these projects that were accepted into the top ten film festivals worldwide, 33% had a female director—identical to the percentage of those that received lab support. “Labs level the gender playing field,” Smith said. “Labs launch female filmmaker’s careers.”

As for the Documentary Labs, Smith found that 66% of projects are female directed, and that there are no gender differences in the 85% completion rate.

“In the findings we saw that women with support succeed at equal rates,” Schulman said, using Smith’s to illuminate a path forward for change on a much greater scale. “Imagine the support that now the allied organizations can give, and in our further reach, the support that the industry can be taught to give, and how we can equal the playing fields all the way to the top.”

That's it for Day 5. Check out this Instagram Video roundup from @NowThisNews:

Sundance.org is dispatching its writers to daily screenings and events to capture the 10 days of festivities during the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. Check back each morning for roundups from the previous day's events.

Life Itself
By Jeremy Kinser 

While introducing Life Itself, a gripping, moving look at the life and career of Roger Ebert by Steve James (Hoop Dreams), Sundance Festival director John Cooper confessed that it was “absolutely, positively the easiest film to program” in the Festival’s history, primarily because “it’s about a man we all knew and loved.”

This sentiment was evidently shared by the audience, which gave the film a lengthy standing ovation and frequently erupted in laughter and sobs during the premiere of the documentary. Life Itself, based on Ebert’s memoir of the same name, is more of a frank and fearless portrait of the beloved critic, rather than a fawning tribute. James’ film traces the Pulitzer-winner’s story from his somewhat decadent bachelor days to his verbal on-air sparring with rival Gene Siskel on their popular TV series that made household names of both men. Outtakes from their review program that show the two engaging in insults with each other drew raucous laughs from the audience.

James doesn’t hold back when depicting Ebert’s long battle with cancer, which eventually claimed his life last April. There are scenes in Ebert’s hospital room that are often challenging to watch, but as Chaz, Ebert’s devoted wife revealed during the Q&A that followed the premiere, her husband found “warts-and-all” documentaries offered a more authentic experience to moviegoers. She recalled a note Ebert wrote for James that asked him to “show the man, not the icon.”

It’s impossible to watch the film without wondering which direction the late critic would have turned his famous thumb. Ebert’s devoted wife Chaz said that it would definitely be “two thumbs up, way up.” Marlene Iglitzen, the widow of Siskel, who died in 1999, noted that her late husband would also have loved the movie, but "of course, he would have wanted a little more of himself in it."

The heated banter between Ebert and Siskel and their unabashed passion for cinema undoubtedly inspired generations of moviegoers and filmmakers. But was their rivalry real or just put on for the cameras? Chaz told the audience the relationship between the two men evolved. “In the beginning it really was contentious,” she said. “For almost 5 or 6 years they worked together and they didn’t speak to each other outside of [work]. Their relationship became like brothers with them fighting like brothers. In the end they did love each other.”

The Skeleton Twins
By Jeremy Kinser 

Ahead of its Sundance premiere on Saturday, The Skeleton Twins had been billed as a non-comedy starring Saturday Night Live vets Bill Hader and Kristin Wiig as estranged siblings. This description isn’t quite accurate. While the film is at times a very affecting and penetrating drama, it also contains as many genuine laughs as any film in recent memory. Director Craig Johnson, who cowrote the screenplay with Black Swan’s Mark Heyman, effortlessly balances the film’s tricky tone.

Hader is a revelation as Milo, a gay, depressed struggling actor and Wiig delivers perhaps her most impressive work as Maggie, a dental hygienist dissatisfied with her marriage to her uncomplicated husband (Luke Wilson, in a fine comic performance). The siblings live on opposite coasts but reconnect after a decade when both contemplate suicide on the same day. The well-honed chemistry between Hader and Wiig comes to a head in what will likely become known as the film’s set piece — Hader’s epic lip-syncing performance set to Starship’s power ballad “Nothing’s Going to Stop Us Now” in an attempt to reaffirm the bond between the siblings.

Hader, who will likely find himself an in-demand film actor upon the release of the film, wasn’t Johnson’s first choice to play Milo. “We were thinking about some people and I must say, Bill wasn’t on my initial radar,” the director revealed during the Q&A after the premiere. Johnson said it was casting director Avy Kafuman who suggested the comic after she was impressed by a dramatic reading opposite Kate Winslet.

Johnson said he and Hader met at a bar for a drink and soon realized they were both big movie nerds. “We kind of geeked out a little talking about directors, and I kind of had this idea that Milo is a little bit more of a nerd,” he explained. “Then I thought, We’ve found our nerd.”

Asked by an audience member if he had difficulty distinguishing Milo from Stefon, his gay club kid character Stefon on SNL, Johnson answered for his star. “The saying the only trait shared by the two characters share is that both are gay,” he stated, adding “It was never a problem.”

A Most Wanted Man
By Eric Hynes

From the Labs to the Festival itself, Sundance has always put a strong emphasis on storytelling—crafting compelling narratives for personal tales as well as genre explorations and documentaries. At the Eccles on Sunday afternoon, the audience was treated to a form of storytelling so classically compelling that it seemed to have emerged from a different era. Instead, it was the world premiere of Anton Corbijn’s A Most Wanted Man, an adaptation of master of the international thriller John Le Carré’s 1998 novel of 21^st century espionage that unfolds with the disorienting seductiveness of a page-turner. Set in Hamburg, Germany, it follows German spy Gunther Bachmann (Philip Seymour Hoffman) as he fends off both German and American colleagues to solve for a situation in which a Chechen defector, who may or may not be a terrorist, seeks to claim an inheritance from a shady banker (Willem Dafoe) with the help of a leftist attorney (Rachel McAdams).

“I wanted to make something that was relevant to our lives after 9/11. The way the world changed so quickly, how we judge people so quickly, how it’s all black and white,” Corbijn said at the post-screening Q&A. Indeed, even after the film comes to its conclusion, it’s still hard to get a definitive read on any of the characters’ intentions.

The film presented a unique challenge for the largely American cast in that not only were they all playing non-Americans, but that the crossroads nature of Hamburg meant that the accents and origins of their characters weren’t easy to peg.  

While McAdams described a process in which she studied with a coach and watched films to adopt an accent specific to Hamburg, Dafoe was confronted with the more complicated task of divining the speaking style of a banker transplanted to Germany. “For me, Tommy Brue is a guy that’s been kicking around in Europe for a while. He’s probably Scottish, but you don’t want to go with a Scottish accent. He’s not German. You want to take away my Midwest honk, so you don’t have an American in there,” he said. “So I found someone who had a similar background and job, and I taped him doing my lines. And I basically copied him and worked from there.”

“There are certain things that have to happen for me to believe it. I’m not even thinking about you guys yet,” Hoffman said, referring to the audience. “For me to actually believe that I could speak at all, there are certain things that I have to work on. With this character, he’s not just German—he’s an international man. He’s a guy who’s been around and probably speaks many languages. He’ll change himself when he has to. So I went from there. It’s just hard work. And it’s what you have to do to do your job.”

When a questioner marveled at his performances in both Corbijn’s film and God’s Pocket, which premiered at the festival on Friday, Hoffman winced a little, revealing the high standards to which he measures himself.  “I was watching and I had some issues today,” he said, referring to his performance. “That shows you what it’s like actually.”

Sundance.org is dispatching its writers to daily screenings and events to capture the 10 days of festivities during the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. Check back each morning for roundups from the previous day's events.

I Origins
By Eric Hynes

Mike Cahill will never be accused of lacking for ambition as a filmmaker. Three years after winning a Special Jury Prize at the 2011 Festival for his lo-fi sci-fi fugue Another Earth, he returned for the world premiere of his latest, I Origins, at the Eccles Theater on Saturday afternoon. Spanning over seven near-future years, roving from New York to Idaho to India, and touching on everything from love and marriage to life, death, evolution, reincarnation and the afterlife, the film nevertheless maintains a consistently searching tone. Stars Michael Pitt, Britt Marling, and Astrid Bergès-Frisbey appeared alongside the nervously giddy Cahill for a post-screening Q&A.

“The movie is working on a lot of layers, and I find it so difficult to describe it,” Cahill said. “Because it’s romantic, it’s scientific, it’s about loss and love and the existential question about what happens after we die. And those are the kinds of things that I’m fascinated by. I’m trying to tell something so epic but in an intimate, personal story.” When several questioners brought up resonances between the new film and Another Earth, particularly the idea of people confronting different versions of themselves, either in present or future lives, Cahill admitted that it’s a prevailing obsession. “Clearly I’m chasing after something.  I’m fascinated by that question of where do the atoms stop, and the spirit begins in a human being. I’ll probably keep digging at that over and over again in film after film,” he said.

Another questioner pointed out that the plots of both films hinge on incidents of “huge, senseless loss.” “Life’s kind of messy sometimes,” he said, echoing an exchange between Pitt and Marling in the film. “I think I’m drawn towards the hope inside the dark things. I like to look where things are painful and then find the most beautiful thing I can. And I think science fiction can fulfill some existential fantasies we have, of feeling okay with the big picture in life.” 

In turn, Marling, who co-wrote and starred in Another Earth but only performs in I Origins, said she feels similarly drawn to wherever Cahill wants to go. “I’ve been watching Mike as an artist since I was 17. And largely knowing him is how I’ve come to define what being an artist is,” she said. “He’s someone who sees things that nobody else can see, and then has the unique ability to make other people feel and see those things. I’ve been in awe of him since I was a teenager and I’m in awe of him now, today, watching this.” 

Wish I Was Here
By Eric Hynes

Nearly 10 years to the day after his debut film Garden State screened in competition at the Festival, Zach Braff returned to Sundance on Saturday morning for the world premiere of his long-anticipated follow-up, Wish I Was Here, at the MARC Theater. Employing a similar blend of comedy and drama, earnestness and absurdism as that indie breakout, the new film follows Aidan Bloom (Braff), a struggling actor who faces crises of life and faith when his father (Mandy Patinkin) is diagnosed with terminal cancer. With his father no longer able to pay for the private Jewish school that his two children attend, and with no gigs on the horizon, he’s forced to home school the kids while his wife Sarah (Kate Hudson) works a desk job she can’t stand. Meanwhile his reclusive little brother (Josh Gad) refuses to even visit their ailing dad.

Flanked by his brother and screenwriting partner Adam, his production team, as well as Hudson, Gad, and the rest of the primary cast, Braff spoke at the post-screening Q&A about the personal nature of the story. “My favorite movies are ones when filmmakers and writers are writing their own experiences,” he said. “Garden State was—these are all the things me and my 25 year-old friends are obsessing about and thinking about and worrying about, and I put it into a movie. With this, my brother has two young children—what is he wrestling with in teaching them? With me, it’s my own spirituality. It isn’t a film that got passed around and eventually made. No one else could have told this story that my brother and I wrote. That’s what we do—we try to be super honest and put it all out there for better and for worse. Rip open your jacket and be like, well, whether you like it or not this is what’s in us.”

In turn, both Hudson and Gad said they responded to the script on deeply personal levels. “I read it and it hit me like a Mack truck,” said Hudson. “The themes of the film are things that I can relate to, as a mom with two kids, fearing all those moments in your life when people have to go. The extreme importance of connection.” 

Gad spoke about growing up, much like the Braffs, in a very Jewish household, and like his character in the film, with a complicated relationship with his father. “So when Zach approached me, it was something that was very personal,” he said. “And it was something that was scary. And I feel that that’s always the best journey to go on.”

Sundance.org is dispatching its writers to daily screenings and events to capture the 10 days of festivities during the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. Check back each morning for roundups from the previous day's events.

Camp X-Ray
By Jeremy Kinser

First-time filmmaker Peter Sattler got the inspiration for Camp X-Ray, a gritty drama about soldiers watching over suspected terrorists in Guantanamo Bay, after he watched documentary footage of a guard and a detainee discussing the books on a library cart.

“It was the most surreal, absurd interchange I’ve ever seen in my life,” Sattler told the audience at the Q&A following the film’s premiere Friday. “I saw this vision of a two-hander, one room-type of movie where these two characters just talk. I wondered what they’d talk about. To me, it was a cool way to address Guantanemo Bay indirectly.”

The writer/director said he didn’t want to make a propaganda movie. Yet Camp X-Ray is often sympathetic to the plight of the prisoners, specifically Ali, an innocent detainee, played by Peyman Moaadi, in the film’s strongest performance. Ali is watched over by a female guard named Amy (Kristen Stewart), who begins to question the abusive treatment of detainees at the camp. After some Hannibal Lecter-Clarice Starling-style banter, the two form an unlikely friendship over, you guessed it, the selection of reading material at the controversial U.S. prison camp.

Moaadi, a gifted, charismatic actor known to movie audiences for his searing work in 2011’s A Separation, discussed the preparation he underwent to play Ali, saying he spent many hours alone in his prison cell. “They only let me out to come here today,” he joked.

Stewart’s pouty sullenness has often characterized previous performances, but it serves her well here. The actress, also on hand for the Q&A, told the audience it was important for her to figure out exactly who her sometimes inscrutable character was so she spent hours watching numerous documentaries about the subject matter, which depicted “both sides of the coin.” Stewart revealed that she also trained for several days with a “really awesome Marine named JB who…whipped me into shape.”

Stewart effectively de-glammed herself to play Amy and Sattler added that just getting Stewart into the uniform resulted in a huge transformation in his star. Sattler said he initially intended for Stewart’s character to be male, but he changed to a female protagonist to create more conflict between the two main characters.

“And Muslims’ extremist relationship toward women complicated [the story] so I clicked into that,” Sattler revealed.

God's Pocket
By Eric Hynes

In what is only the first installment of Sundance’s Mad Men invasion, veteran actor and Roger Sterling progenitor John Slattery premiered his debut film, God’s Pocket, which screens in the 2014 U.S. Dramatic Competition, at the Eccles Theater on Friday afternoon. Alongside him for the after-screening Q&A were his two leading actors, Mad Men co-star Christina Hendricks and Academy Award-winner Philip Seymour Hoffman, both of whom spoke of being swept up in Slattery’s passion for a project that took a decade to realize. (Slattery's other Mad Men compatriot, Elisabeth Moss, appears in an additional two films at this year's Festival).

Based on a novel by Pete Dexter, God’s Pocket follows Mickey (Hoffman), a melancholic smalltime criminal whose life is upended when his stepson is accidentally killed in mysterious circumstances. With his devastated wife (Hendricks) in mourning, he struggles to raise money for the funeral while negotiating the rough and tumble culture of his working class neighborhood. While navigating a host of genres and tones, from realism to noir to slapstick comedy to thriller to melodrama to intimate portraiture, God’s Pocket also serves as a showcase for lively performances from the likes of John Turturro, Richard Jenkins, Eddie Marsan, and Caleb Landry Jones. 

After reading the book 10 years ago, Slattery discovered that the rights were unavailable, but persisted in putting together a screenplay until the rights were eventually cleared. “What I liked about it was the middle America quality, the no-nonsense quality of these people to be able to cut through the bullshit and just talk straight. To do what needs to be done to get what they want. There was a bedrock of straight talk and casual violence and mayhem that I wanted to be believable, so that it could become funny,” Slattery said. “And that quality is in the book. It’s believable as realism and as near-fantasy, absurdist storytelling.” 

For Hoffman, Slattery’s commitment to the film convinced him to get involved. “You try to get involved with projects that are personal. And this was obviously personal, with John. And that kind of bled through the whole shoot. So you get on his passion train, and that translates. You show up and you’re exposed and you’re vulnerable, and you’re who you are. And John let that happen, and we let that happen with John. And that’s what you see in the movie. A lot of trust.” 

Hendricks spoke of seeing a different side of Slattery, one that involved freedom to make the film he wanted to make. “It was 100% his story, and it was so exciting to get to watch him do that, and feel that energy with him,” said Hendricks. 

Fishing Without Nets
By Jeremy Kinser

Director Cutter Hodierne believes there’s room for another Somali pirate drama such as his Fishing Without Nets, even just months after the release of Paul Greengrass’ widely acclaimed Captain Phillips. “The fact that there're several films that tackle different angles I think is just a sign of how meaty the material is,” Hodierne said following the film’s premiere Friday night. “You could probably make six or seven films about this.”

Hodierne has expanded his fictional short film with the same title, which was awarded the top short film jury prize at Sundance two years ago, into intensely gripping first feature. The filmmaker said the idea came to him between 2008 and 2009 after reading numerous articles about piracy off the Horn of Africa. “I’d read all these stories and think there are so many angles to this, but what I cared most about was who are they and why do they do that,” Hodierne revealed.

The subtitled drama focuses on a fisherman who resorts to piracy to feed his family and ultimately hijacks and oil tanker and takes the crew hostage. Hodierne shot the film in Kenya using Somali actors who speak in their native language. He admitted that the language barriers he faced directing non-professional actors who don’t speak English was huge.

“I learned that there’s so much that can be communicated without words,” he said, adding that he was also very dependent on the translators. Hodierne would explain the point of the scene, but he left it up to the actors to write the dialogue in their native tongue. “They had a beginning, middle and end to the scene,” he said. “I think 99 percent of communication is tone and body language. I’d watch a take and not know what they said but I’d know whether it was good or not. It was an excellent exercise in knowing how acting works and what filmmaking is really all about.”

The writer/director also expressed the importance of the Sundance Institute Screenwriters Lab, which he attended in 2012, in turning his short into a feature.

“I had an incredible group of mentors,” he remembered. “I’d say that more than fixing the specifics of the script they taught me how to think differently about the process. They encourage you to come at writing a script in a more pure way. Anyone who gets the opportunity to do that should jump on it because it’s one of the best experiences I’ve ever had.”

CAPTIVATED: The Trials of Pamela Smart
By Nate von Zumwalt

It may no longer reverberate with the affect of a Casey Anthony, Amanda Knox, or Trayvon Martin, but for a certain generation the name Pamela Smart still evokes a shudder and a wince. Director Jeremiah Zagar, who premiered his U.S. Documentary Competition film last night for a rapt Park City audience, doesn’t beseech viewers to reconsider that response—they’ll do it of their own accord.

CAPTIVATED: The Trials of Pamela Smart revisits the first fully televised court case in history—one rife with sex and scandal—while cleverly meditating on the inescapable implications of the 24-hour tabloid-like reporting. How effectively did the media sensationalize and warp the realities of this tantalizing tale of adultery and murder? Zagar asserts that the film doesn’t endeavor to answer that question, but instead to merely propose it.

“The goal is for you to question [the trial], and you hope as an editor and as a filmmaker that you’re asking good questions and not giving answers,” he said. In making CAPTIVATED, Zagar employed his extensive editing background to craft a story that he acknowledged could be manipulated by doing “one thing to make Pam seem completely guilty, or one thing to make her seem completely innocent.” The irony is more than readily apparent; it all but smacks you in the face.

Sundance Film Festival Senior Programmer David Courier, who introduced the film, solicited audience members to "raise [their] hand if they assumed Pamela Smart was guilty?“ An overwhelming faction of the audience lifted an arm. "How many people changed their minds after seeing this movie?" continued Courier. Nearly the same group of hands elevated toward the Library Centre Theatre ceiling.

"I think it’s clear that [Pamela Smart] got a really shitty trial," concluded Zagar. “I don’t think in this case there was one specific person that was the enemy. I think it was an amalgam of all these circumstance and this phenomenon that turned everyone into someone that you could no longer trust.”

That does it for Day 2. Check out this Instagram Video roundup from @NowThisNews:

Sundance.org is dispatching its writers to daily screenings and events to capture the 10 days of festivities during the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. Check back each morning for roundups from the previous day's events.

Day One Press Conference
Nate von Zumwalt 

There was a stubborn elephant in the room at yesterday’s Day One Press Conference, the official commencement of the 2014 Sundance Film Festival. Robert Redford gently, gracefully escorted it on its way.

The Sundance Institute President and Founder’s name was absent from an early morning announcement of the 2014 Oscar nominees for his role in All Is Lost, creating a seemingly unavoidable motif. “First of all,” began Redford, “I don’t want that to get in the way of why we’re here. Would it have been wonderful to be nominated? Of course. But I’m not disturbed by it or upset by it.” With that business behind him, the actor and director shifted to a more reflective tone as he discussed the 30^th Anniversary of the Festival, acknowledging its changes even amidst a steadfast mission.

“Change is inevitable. You either resist it – we know who those people are – or you go with it. We want to ride with that wave.” It’s a notion that was echoed by his partners on stage, which included Sundance Institute Executive Director Keri Putnam and Festival Director John Cooper.

“I don’t think the mission has really changed at all in the last 30 years,” offered Putnam. “We have seen a really remarkable evolution of the programs in terms of finding different types of storytellers to support.” That evolution is marked by an expansion of artist programs to include 18 Labs and 400 artists supported annually by the Institute. “Sundance Institute has grown, but its mission remains the same.”

Cooper, now in his 25^th year with the Festival, addressed the notion in the context of the 10-day event and its nearly 200 films. “What I’ve seen from the Festival side is just an increased excellence in originality and creativity in the artists themselves. We’ve seen the birth of a community,” he said. That community continues to extend its reach globally with 37 countries represented in the 2014 program. As the man at the Festival’s helm so succinctly put it: “Please pay attention to the World Cinema Competition.”

Despite its many vicissitudes, three spirited decades of them, the Sundance Film Festival still fits the bill for Redford’s original vision. “The obvious place to take a festival like this would have been either New York or Los Angeles. Well I said, ‘Let’s go to Utah, and let’s put it in the middle of winter—make it weird.’ But also, and probably more important, it was a place to put this new concept of independent film.” That concept is no longer as revolutionary as it was in 1984, but Sundance remains wintry, weird, and full of independent film.

Whiplash 
Eric Hynes

A few hours after their annual press conference officially opened this year’s Festival, both Robert Redford and John Cooper were on hand at the Eccles Theater to kick things off for real, introducing the world premiere of U.S. Dramatic Competition film Whiplash. 

In honor of the 30^th anniversary of the Festival he created from scratch, Redford said he’d proposed starting the night in style. “Oh I got an idea—how about we roll a big cake onto the stage, and the I jump out of it?” he said. “But that got shot down pretty fast.” But Cooper, who followed him at the podium moments later, disputed that narrative. “Just for the record I did not veto the cake. I was into it,” he said.  

Based on an award-winning short that screened at the Festival just last year—“the fastest turnaround we’ve ever had for a short to a feature,” Cooper said—Whiplash centers on a student-mentor relationship that gets out of hand. Miles Teller (The Spectacular Now) plays Andrew, a freshman and aspiring jazz drummer at the fictional Shaffer Conservatory of Music in New York, where the forbidding Mr. Fletcher (a fierce, be-muscled J.K. Simmons) conducts the top college jazz outfit in the country. What proceeds is a runaway tête-à-tête between a demanding (to the point of abusive) teacher and his ambitious and impressionable protégé. Nearly every scene is dramatized through music, which comes off as both exhilarating and terrifying, and often at the same time. Few films have ever captured the discipline and bloody-palmed physical grind of musicianship as well as Whiplash.            

“I’m a drummer myself, and I was in a Jazz ensemble in high school with a conductor who was kind of in this vein,” director Damien Chazelle said after the screening. “It had always been a fun hobby for me, and for four years it became a source of constant dread, terror and anxiety. Looking back it was an interesting experience, because I became a much better drummer than I knew I ever would have, but I also didn’t enjoy it at all.” 

For Teller, who had experience as a drummer but never played jazz, the great challenge of the role was practicing to become an authority at the kit. “The most important thing was the drumming, because it would be hard for me to sit in a room knowing that, well, Damien is a better drummer than me, this other guy is a better drummer than me, I think that grip guy is a better drummer than me,” he said. “So for my own confidence I had to feel pretty good on it.”

When someone from the audience asked who’s playing the drums in the film, Chazelle was quick to respond. “It’s Miles,” he said, which elicited sustained applause. Though there were passages of pre-recorded music and some post-work involving other musicians, “the through-line, and 99% of the visuals, is Miles.” The hard work, it would certainly seem, paid off. “Yeah, I play,” said Teller, with a sneakily proud shrug. 

Dinosaur 13
Eric Hynes

Opening night at the Eccles Theatre continued with the world premiere of Dinosaur 13, presented as part of the U.S. Documentary Competition. Directed by Todd Miller, the film tells the incredible true-life tale of the Larson family, a group of paleontologists who made the unprecedented discovery of the largely intact remains of a Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton near the Ruth Mason Quarry in South Dakota in 1992. Two years after removing the fossils—which they named “Sue” in honor of Susan Hendrickson, who happened upon them—to the Black Hills Institution in Hill City, SD, where they studied their findings and displayed them for the public, the FBI showed up in force to seize them. What proceeds is an infuriating, labyrinthine odyssey through the U.S. legal system, involving land rights, Native American claims, governmental trusts, distrust between the independent and institutional science communities, and strangely vindictive federal practices. Before the dust settles in this documentary thriller, not only are the Larsons left grieving over their confiscated discovery, but Peter Larson spends nearly two years behind bars for what would seem like petty, and debatable, document-filing crimes.     

More than a decade and a half removed from the events of the film, Larson expressed relief that Sue was at least in good hands, having been purchased through Sotheby’s by the Field Museum in Chicago. “She’s with her foster parents now and her foster parents are doing a fantastic job,” he said. 

But his attorney, Patrick Duffy, was as passionate an advocate for his client in person as he proved to be in the film. “I will say this: there was no justice to be had at all. Believe it or not, you only saw the tip of the sharkfin in this movie,” he said. Riding the wave of enthusiasm from the opening night crowd, Duffy pushed for the debut of the film to play a key role in making real-world amends. “I’d like to ask you one big favor—help me. Because my next step is to get my client a pardon from president Barack Obama,” he said to sustained applause. “This movie, to be frank with you, will be exhibit A.”

The Green Prince
Jeremy Kinser

Mosab Hassan Yousef’s story is an unbelievably harrowing tale. As the cherished son of one of the key leaders of Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement, Yousef was arrested and imprisoned at 17 for buying illegal weapons, and eventually recruited to work as an informant on his father for Shin Bet, Israeli’s secret service, for over a decade. 

The Green Prince, the intense third documentary from Nadav Schirman (The Champagne Spy, In the Dark), contains a narrative so gripping, and filled with enough political intrigue, deceit and unimaginable choices that it plays at times like a thrilling companion piece to Zero Dark Thirty.

Yousef, who now resides in Southern California, allowed Schirman to adapt his 2010 autobiography Son of Hamas for the film, because he really wanted his story to reach a wider audience through documentary filmmaking. “Nadav understood the dimensions of the story,” Yousef said. “It was very hard for someone from a foreign culture. The nature of the story is universal, but it took place in the Middle East and Nadav was capable of reading the story correctly and I was encouraged after meeting with him.” 

Yousef’s Israeli handler Gonen Ben Yitzhak joined the two men following the World Documentary screening Thursday night at the Marc Theatre to discuss their collaboration. Yitzhak confessed that he initially had reservations about participating in the documentary. “In the beginning I didn’t want to do the project because I had enough troubles with Shin Bet,” he said. “I think after my first meeting with Nadav I knew I’d met an extraordinary person and this was his project and I said I’d do it.”

Yousef, who watched the film with an audience for the first time, described the experience as very humbling and understands the potential impact of his story. “How many times do you hear the son of  Hamas come forward and say he works for Isaraeli intelligence?” he asked, adding he hopes his story will help stop the madness in the Middle East. “It makes me look much better than I am,” he told the audience. “I just hope I can bring some truth and love to that region.” 

Lilting
Jeremy Kinser

Lilting, the first feature from writer/director Hong Khaou, is an affecting, intimate drama about how it feels to live as a foreigner in a country with no grasp of the language and your only lifeline to the outside world around you is suddenly gone forever. 

The drama gracefully and sometimes humorously centers on June, a Cambodian-Chinese mother (played by iconic Hong Kong action heroine Cheng Pei Pei), who lives in London but has never assimilated to the culture of her new home. She lives in a retirement home, mourns the untimely death of her beloved only son Kai, and is courted by a fellow retiree, an Englishman with whom she cannot communicate. 

When Richard (Ben Whishaw, in a remarkably moving performance), the young British man who, unbeknownst to her, was Kai’s lover, visits with a translator, the two deeply-bereaved souls are able to forge a bond that transcends the language barriers.

Khaou, also Cambodian-Chinese and whose family has lived in Britain for 30 years, said he wanted to use language as an analogy to comment on the challenges of communication. As a child he translated TV shows for his mother and a few years ago he decided it would make a premise for a film. He began to wonder, “What would she do if her lifeline to the outside was gone?” 

Khaou, whose short film Spring premiered at Sundance in 2011, counts John Sayles’ drama Lone Star as a primary influence on his film.

That's a wrap on Day One. Check out this Instagram Video roundup from @NowThisNews:

It goes without saying: Even in an age governed by VOD and digital platforms, there is an inimitable quality to viewing film in its traditional setting. That is (if you forgot), the theater. So goes the Sundance Film Festival experience, which is equally challenging to recreate. Despite that realization, we continue to refine our coverage of the Fesitval with new tools and ambitious angles of reporting. Browse below to discover all of the ways you can stay up to speed with highlights from the 2014 Sundance Film Festival.

Live@Sundance

For the first time ever, the Sundance Film Festival broadcasts a daily live show from Park City, Utah, showcasing unique stories on films, artists, and events beginning January 17 at 11 a.m. MT. Shira Lazar, host and co-founder of the award-winning What’s Trending; Casey Niestat, creator of the HBO series The Neistat Brothers; and Jimmy Conrad, host of YouTube’s KickTV share host duties throughout the week-long show aired on the Sundance Film Festival YouTube channel. In addition to Live@Sundance, join us for the Day One Press Conference, the Shorts Awards, and the Awards Ceremony hosted by Nick Offerman and Megan Mullally.

Each show is interactive, so be sure to tweet questions to the hosts and guests using hashtags: #Sundance #live. Live@Sundance guests range from filmmakers Damien Chazelle and Cutter Hodierne, to actors Miles Teller and Tessa Thompson, and digital media artists Aaron Koblin and Doug Aitken. Check out the complete Live@Sundance schedule here. 

Social Media

Follow and like us on these platforms for updates and news:
Twitter: @sundancefest
Twitter: @sundancefestnow
Facebook: @Sundance Film Festival
Pinterest: @Sundance Film Festival
Instagram: @SundanceInstitute
Tumblr: SundanceArchives
Google +: Sundance Institute / Film Festival

Guest Tweeters

For the 7th year in a row, @sundancefest features Guest Tweeters during the first weekend of the Festival. This year’s line-up includes:

1/16 @RoseMcGowan
1/17 @JennySlate
1/18 @GeorgeTakei
1/19 @KatieCouric
1/25 Jordan Vogt-Roberts (@VogtRoberts) and Awards Night host Nick Offerman (@Nick_Offerman)

Twitter Data Visualization

For the first-time in its history, the Sundance Film Festival has partnered with Twitter and developer Wayin to create a data visualization that measures and displays social conversation during the Festival. Beginning January 15, the #Sundance Spark will rank the ‘Top 10 Most Talked About’ films on Twitter, in real-time, and display those film stills and handles as well as volume of tweets per hour. Additionally, the #Sundance Spark will pull in tweets and Vines from the Sundance Film Festival, filmmakers, and press. This fully interactive visualization will live on the digital signage at the Festival, on sundance.org, and within the Sundance Film Festival mobile app.

Social Media Collaborators

@NowThisNews is creating daily Sundance Film Festival round-up video pieces for Instagram and Vine.

@Wired will cover #FreeFail on Monday, January 20, including a pre-Festival release of an exclusive Instagram video from artist Taryn Simon. @Wired also offers exclusive access to images from the Failure Day conference as well as images of select #NewFrontier artists and installations, to be rolled out on their Instagram account over the 10 days of the Festival.

Short Films On YouTube

Beginning January 16, Watch a selection of 15 short films premiering at the Festival on the Sundance Film Festival YouTube Channel.

Email Updates

Sign up to be an Insider and receive daily email updates from the Festival, including exclusive coverage of film premieres and profile stories on this year's crop of filmmakers.

GoWatchIt

GoWatchIt allows users to search for movies across any platform to watch or save for later. If a film at this year’s Festival catches your interest and you want to be notified when it is available, visit GoWatchIt to do just that! Just register and choose how you'd like to be notified. If you'd like to track them in one easy step, follow the 2014 Sundance Film Festival channel on GoWatchit.

As Sundance Institute invests in the advancement of story by supporting artists in the New Frontier program, we realized we should also create space for “the observer,” a critical role in innovation. The observer helps to contextualize new things, create language, identify what’s not working, and amplify what resonates.

We invited filmmaker Samah Tokmachi to come to the 2013 New Frontier Story Lab in the role of Creative Observer. We loved the playfulness of his aesthetic, as seen in his Zen Den piece for SoulPancake, and his inquisitive nature, as demonstrated in his short film Living in a Global Society. So, we charged him with creating a video essay about his experience of the New Frontier Story Lab, in hopes that his reflections would enrich the wider discourse about media innovation and the future of storytelling.

Although the Lab included robust conversations about new story media and tools, Samah’s impressive and beautiful video essay affirms the fundamental realities of story that every innovator should embrace.

We'll just go ahead and say it--traveling to the Sundance Film Festival is not for the faint of heart. The good news is that Festival alumni Katie Aselton and David Lowery are agents of prudence when it comes to Park City travels. On one instance, Aselton recalls an absence of chivalry that led to a late Festival arrival and a lesson learned.

"I seem to remember in 2004 or 2005 getting left behind at an airport by the two Duplass boys [Mark and Jay] for the last two spots on a plane that wasn't going to be delayed by weather. I got to Park City eventually, but it was a good lesson to give yourself some time getting out there. It doesn't hurt to get in a day or two early."

And while it can be easy to forego proper planning for outbound travels, director David Lowery sees opportunity in the obstacle.

"If your flight home is delayed due to a blizzard, take advantage of it! Go back to Park City, find a friend's place to crash at and go skiing. It's the perfect way to cap off a trip to the festival. Also, you won't have time to go skiing otherwise."

There's still time to book your Sundance Film Festival getaway with Southwest Airlines, the official airline of the 2014 Sundance Film Festival. And for the best selections at the lowest rates, book your lodging through Sundance Film Festival. With over 50 hotels and condos to choose from, you’ll find the location you need at the price you want, including the Waldorf Astoria Park City, the Official Hotel of the 2014 Sundance Film Festival.

Official Airline of the 2014 Sundance Film Festival
Southwest Airlines
1-800-I-FLY-SWA or (1-800-435-9792)
http://www.southwest.com/

Official Hotel of the 2014 Sundance Film Festival
Waldorf Astoria Park City
(435) 647-5550
www.parkcitywaldorfastoria.com

Ladies and gentlemen, we are 30! Let’s not fail to celebrate.

I set an agenda at the Film Festival offices to find a way to recognize our 30th Festival in the most fun and unique way possible. Here is what we came up with…

On Monday, January 20, with FREE FAIL we will dedicate a day of panels, workshops, and special events to exploring an always feared, often denied, but most vital aspect of the creative process: FAILURE. Here’s how you can join us in our un-anniversary celebration.

Look for a lively spin on the theme of failure at the Cinema Café, Filmmaker Lodge, and New Frontier panel line-up.

Read film industry luminaries’ accounts of their brushes with failure at Sundance.org starting January 2.

Show up at the centerpiece panel “Exploratory Detours” at the Egyptian Theater moderated by author, scholar, and curator Sarah Lewis, whose upcoming book The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery explores this theme across a myriad of disciplines from science to athletics to music and art.

Participate in our full day of Fail Safe Workshops. An eclectic selection of hands-on workshops designed to let you experience failure firsthand. This is going to get crazy! We’ll share our line up in early January.

Feel my pain in a cathartic moment when we celebrate a film we failed to show the first time around – Wes Anderson’s debut feature Bottle Rocket (which incidentally launched the careers of Anderson, Luke Wilson, and Owen Wilson. I know, I know don’t remind me.)

And last but not least, let’s not fail to have fun at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival.

Surely Spike Lee knows that the "remake" is the most hazardous terrain for a director to explore. Beyond the usual critics, there lie an obsessive and carping band of film fans ready to lambaste any rethinking of the original vision—and often before a script has even surfaced. 

On that note, Spike Lee’s Oldboy recently hit theaters, which reimagines Park Chan-wook’s 2005 Sundance Film Festival selection of the same name. Lee is considerably loyal to the original in his remake, which see Josh Brolin swapped in for Choi Min-sik as a kidnapped man left to his own devices as he tries to escape imprisonment and track down his captors. Below we’ve juxtaposed five GIFs from each version to emphasize the similarities in both narrative and style.

Which Oldboy do you prefer?

Both men wake up disoriented in an isolated hotel room, replete with surveillance cameras.

Each is resigned to flipping through channels to begin piecing together their stories...

...Which leads to the realization that their wives have been murdered, and a wall must be punched.

In an obsessive desire to find and kill their captors, they spend downtime training and shadowboxing.

And when they spring from suitcases, they check their wallets and prepare to avenge their wives' deaths.

And then Nicolas Cage shows up for no reason at all.

In a respite from the busy indie box office in recent months, we take a look at Sundance-supported films coming to DVD, Blu-Ray, and television this month. Right on time for the gift-giving season, these seven films from the 2013 Sundance Film Festival are available for purchase this December.

Tuesday, December 10

Adore, directed by Anne Fontaine

Touchy Feely, directed by Lynn Shelton

Tuesday, December 17

Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, directed by David Lowery

Newlyweeds, directed by Shaka King

The Spectacular Now, directed by James Ponsoldt (iTunes release)

Monday, December 30

How to Survive a Plague, directed by David France, PBS, 10 p.m.

Tuesday, December 31

Don Jon, directed by Joseph Gordon-Levitt

Sweetwater, directed by Logan Miller

Hell Baby, directed by Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant

Over the past eight years, Sundance Institute’s New Frontier program has been building a community of brilliant creative minds from a broad range of artistic, scientific, and technology backgrounds, who are “geeked” about playing together in the story innovation sandbox. 

Last month, the New Frontier Story Lab brought a fraction of that community to the ancient mountains of Utah to share what they’ve learned from their experiments and to help develop the visionary projects of our 2013 Fellows. 

Before the Lab, my Sundance colleagues and I felt like we were constructing some kind of convergence experiment, asking ourselves questions like 

“What if the Academy Award-nominated writer who conceived the ingenious twist to Cape Fear that iconic talents Scorsese, Nolte and DeNiro used to rivet audiences; was in the room with a former Disney Imagineer, whose transmedia campaigns brought millions of fanboy/fangirl fantasies to life? And, we added the digital artist who (from a lighthouse in Iceland) studied the inner workings of Bjork’s mind to created fluid iPad interfaces that allowed millions of her adherents to explore and interact with her imagination?” 

What would happen?

“What if the Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker who used rare footage to depict the power of rhetoric, from its darkest manifestations (i.e. Jim Jones) to its most enlightened (i.e. Martin Luther King); convened with an artist who is literally inventing the New Frontier of storytelling, from immersive theater experiences that use biometric devices to track empathy to a cuddly robot that school children remotely move around the terrestrial landscape and into space? And had them converse with the writer whose life as a youth in Chicago record shops inspired his witty treatment of the High Fidelity characters that further endear America to John Cusack and launched Jack Black’s career?”

What would they discover?

“How about inviting a LARPing, swing dancing game designer (whose Diner Dash is one of the top-selling downloadable games of all-time) to have a brainstorm session with a prolific self-taught opera composer, who began as a cantor and once played in a rock band? And include the interactive producer who broke the NatGeo documentary paradigm by usurping surveillance cameras in Canadian bear country and building a platform for audiences to pierce the veil of our true proximity and connectedness to wildlife? 

What would they remix and mash up?

Profile: Bear 71 Co-Creator and Creative Director Jeremy Mendes from Submarine Channel on Vimeo.

“What if we brought the interactive installation artist who got planetariums around the world to allow her to submerge audiences in the ocean on the Transit of Venus and hold living coral in their hands through augmented reality; and got her together with a Pulitzer prize-winning playwright who spent four years researching her master work, by visiting the women in the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo? What if they shared impact strategies with the man who spent six years in closed-door rooms around the U.S. and Israel, where he earned the trust of LBGTQ individuals within the Orthodox Jewish community to tell their story of Trembling Before G-d?

How would they change the world?

“What happens if the writer/director who used Uma Thurman and Paul Rudd’s comic timing to bring the complications of motherhood and ‘coming of age’ to life; hangs out with the ‘rock star’ data visualization artist who manipulated Google Earth to bring Arcade Fire to our neighborhoods and Google Chrome to allow millions of Johnny Cash fans to co-create a tribute to the man in black? What if they’re joined by a music/tech convergence genius who figured out parallel remixing for a haptic technology  game that allows users to orchestrate as if they were Mickey Mouse in Fantasia? 

What would they innovate?

After the Lab, we can attest that the answer to each of these questions is, “It would be awesome!”

It was inspiring to get an in-depth look at how these storytellers minds work, how their hearts find inspiration, and their hands execute the development of such paradigm shifting projects. It was satisfying to see them expand their own creative practices and increase their awareness of possibility by being in conversation with each other. It was exciting to see them find collaborators from completely different fields of knowledge to work on new projects that will no doubt define the future of storytelling.

Sundance Institute wants to say “thank you” to these amazing artists who served as Creative Advisors at the 2013 New Frontier Story Lab, who were game to play in the sandbox together and be subjects in our convergence experiment. Scott Snibbe (Artist – Bjork’s Biophila), D.V. DeVincentis (Screenwriter – High Fidelity), Chris Holmes  (Musician and DJ – Beck, Paul McCartney), Sandi DuBowski (Director – Trembling Before G-d), Wesley Strick (Screenwriter – Cape Fear), Nick Fortugno (Co-Founder, Playmatics), Katherine Dieckmann (Screenwriter and Director -- Motherhood), Lance Weiler (Artist – Pandemic 1.0, Collapsus), Lynn Nottage (Playwright – Ruined), Noland Walker (Director - A Day in the Life of Jeremiah Burke High School), Susan Bonds (CEO, 42 Entertainment), Lynette Wallworth (Artist – CORAL Rekindling Venus), Stewart Wallace (Composer – The Bonesetter’s Daughter), Jeremy Mendes (National Film Board of Canada, Interactive Producer – Bear 71) and Aaron Koblin (Leads the Data Arts Team at Google’s Creative Lab).

The Sundance Institute Native American and Indigenous Program is now accepting applications for its 2014 Native Lab Fellowship, a two-stage artist development program that admits four projects and commences with a filmmakers lab in May 2014.The fellowship is open to Native American, Native Hawaiian and Alaska Native film artists, who are asked to submit a proposal for an original native, documentary short, or feature length film. Click here to apply for the 2014 Native Lab Fellowship.

“We encourage artists from all tribal communities to submit their work to the Native Lab for consideration,” says Bird Runningwater (Mescalero Apache), director of the Sundance Institute Native American and Indigenous Program. “The creative environment Sundance Institute fosters gives filmmakers an opportunity to shape their work, find a unique voice and share different perspectives through film.”

Examples of artists who have emerged from the program include Billy Luther (Miss Navajo) and Sterlin Harjo (Barking Water), whose films are available for streaming through Sundance Institute’s #ArtistServices program, as well as on Netflix. 

Watch Miss Navajo via #ArtistServices (here) or Netflix (here).

Watch Barking Water via #ArtistServices (here) or Netflix (here).