The intersection of science and storytelling is the topic of discussion at this enlightening panel discussion with Dr. Helen Fisher, Dr. Angela Belcher, Tracy Day, Jake Schreier, Dr. Robert Full, Gwyn Lurie, Alex Rivera, and Doron Weber at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival.

Sundance Shorts Programmer Jon Korn sits down to a hilarious chat about comedy with a very multitalented bunch: David Zellner, Lauren Ann Miller, Mike Birbiglia, and Mark Duplass.

To many of us at Sundance Institute, the Super Bowl is less about the observance of America’s most grandiose sporting event and more about a well-deserved respite from the 10 frenetic days of the Festival. That said, throw a few Sundance alumni into the mix and watch our ears perk up. This year saw some unlikely pop cultural confluence between Sundance Institute and the Super Bowl, specifically in the form of seven advertisements from six Sundance alumni directors. Check out their Super Bowl spots below.

Todd Phillips (­Frat House, Old School, The Hangover)

Taika Waititi (Eagle vs. Shark, Boy)

David Gordon Green (All the Real Girls, Snow Angels, Pineapple Express)

Jake Scott (Welcome to the Rileys)

Miguel Arteta (Cedar Rapids, Youth in Revolt)

Chris Smith (American Movie, Home Movie)

A federal appeals court ruled on Tuesday that the voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage in California is unconstitutional. In light of today's decision, we revisit a documentary most pertinent to the issue of equal marriage rights, particularly the passing of Prop 8 in California. Reed Cowan and Steven Greenstreet's "8: The Mormon Proposition" premiered at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival.

There's something undeniably powerful about documentaries and their ability to deliver a message topical, emotional, political, and personal. And make me weep like you wouldn't believe.

Yesterday I met up with my friend Channing — who happened to be in town for the Festival — to see 8: The Mormon Proposition. Channing has roots here in Utah, and was eager to see this film in particular. We waited together in the snaking ticket line to enter the Racquet Club Theater. Other people in the line were already discussing the topics addressed by the film: separation of church and state, civil unions, the meaning of marriage. The crowd already seemed to be largely on the side of the filmmakers, but as director Reed Cowan mentioned in his introduction once we were inside, he's not immature enough to think that the entire audience agreed with him. Producer Steven Greenstreet made a statement as well, and was overcome with emotion before the film had even begun. I figured right about then that I was in for a bit of an emotional rollercoaster.

Hoo, boy. They started early, the tears. I handed Channing a napkin from the coffee concession stand outside the theater and kept two for myself. Throughout the movie, you could hear the sobs echoing from different corners of the cinema. This film, or its message at least, certainly had an affect on so many who were there.

At the Q&A, the directors echoed what they'd said in their introduction: "every life has a story, every story has a lesson." They had mentioned before the film that they welcomed the disbelievers and wanted us to be united in dialogue, and that taking part in the dialogue is what's most essential. A questioner asked what legal options we have to reverse what's happened in California and Maine. San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom — who was present in support of the film — was invited to the mic to address this question. He said that like a good politician, instead of answering the question directly, he would instead borrow the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: "the arc of the universe is long, but it bends back towards justice."

I said goodbye to Channing, who was as shaken as I was, and left the theater weak from trying to stifle my own emotion. I was unsure of how I could process what I'd just seen into words. Rather than try to turn the emotions into more words than I can handle in one little blog post, I'll just say this: the emotional impact of these films is measurable and immense, if my wobbly knees and multiple trips out of the office to have a good cry in the snow are evidence enough.

Photo by Zan McQuade

Filmmaker and musician Terence Nance premiered his debut feature, An Oversimplification of Beauty, in the New Frontier section of the 2012 Sundance Film Festival and performed as Terence Etc. at Day 1 of Sundance ASCAP Music Café. The Dallas born, Brooklyn-based artist chronicled his journey with actresses Namik Minter and Chanelle Pearson from the editing room in New York to the snowy hills of Park City:

Jigar Mehta is a digital entrepreneur and video journalist. He is the co-founder of the collaborative storytelling platform GroupStream which powers his documentary project 18 Days in Egypt. Visit the 18 Days in Egypt Kickstarter page to help fund the hiring of young Egyptian journalists and students to travel throughout Egypt to collect stories from the last year. This project was part of the inaugural Sundance Institute New Frontier Story Lab.

The entire 18 Days in Egypt team is in Cairo for the first anniversary of the Revolution. Little did we know that a major event would occur while we were here. One year exactly after the Battle of the Camels, when mounted thugs stormed into Cairo’s Tahrir Square and beat protesters, a soccer match erupted in violence leaving 74 dead.

18 Days in Egypt is an interactive documentary project that tells the story of the Egyptian Revolution, using the personal media created by Egyptians in the midst of their ongoing struggle. We want Egyptians to tell this story themselves, with their footage, their photos, their e-mails, their texts, even their Tweets and Facebook status updates, all created during the revolution.

18 Days in Egypt, which planned to deploy a team of young Egyptian journalists to collect stories and media fragments created around the events of the past year for an interactive documentary, changed course. Since the Egyptian freedom struggle continues today, 18 Days in Egypt is a living documentary—capturing the events of the revolution as it spirals forward.

The fellows at 18 Days in Egypt have been in the field documenting the latest clashes between protesters and security forces. They have been collecting social media from protesters, and using it to create distinct story streams at www.18DaysinEgypt.com

Events took a turn for the dramatic on February 1, when a soccer match between the al-Masry and al-Ahly teams turned deadly. In a matter of minutes, the death toll climbed from 5 to 20 to over 70. Our fellows gathered personal interviews and firsthand footage from on the ground to create a stream capturing little known details of the Ahly Massacre.

The die hard soccer fans, known as Ultras, retaliated with marches against the military council, which they believe orchestrated the attacks on the pro-revolution Ultras.

A funeral for the youngest killed in the attack—a 14-year-old!—was captured through the words of his friends just minutes before and after his funeral service.

As the clashes continued, our fellows focused on stories from the frontlines, including those about women, shopkeepers who stay open despite being surrounded by violence, motorcycle ambulances, and the tough task of negotiating a truce.

We have 6 fellows who are funded for 6 weeks to focus on stories in Cairo. That’s why we are raising funds through our Kickstarter campaign to fund the work of the fellows for an additional 6 months and to expand the program to 20 fellows.

Our fellows are: Sara Elkamel, an Egyptian journalist living in Cairo; Nesma El Shazly, a political science graduate of Cairo’s American University; Mostafaa Sheshtawy, an engineer and citizen photo journalist; Mohamed Abd El-Hamid, student and young revolutionary, and Carmel Delshad, a multimedia journalist.

Our fellows are back out today covering the personal stories on the frontlines of these clashes. We publish first to our twitter account so be sure to follow @18daysinegypt.

John E. Warnock is Co-Chairman of the Board of Directors of Adobe Systems, Inc., a company he co-founded in 1982 with Charles Geschke. Dr. Warnock was President of Adobe for his first two years and Chairman and CEO for his remaining 16 years at Adobe. Warnock has pioneered the development of graphics, publishing, Web and electronic document technologies that have revolutionized the field of publishing and visual communication. He is also a member of the Sundance Institute Board of Trustees.

Over the past 25 years, technology advances have dramatically changed the fundamental structure of all media businesses.

All of these transformations have had a common thread: The high cost of capital equipment and complex distribution systems have kept competitors out of the traditional media businesses, and kept profits high. For instance, in the newspaper businesses there is reliance on massive printing presses, reporter networks, paper sources, and complex distribution systems. In the Movie business, there are large studios, expensive camera and lighting equipment, film and processing laboratories, and relationships with networks of theaters. In the world of publishing, there are dependencies on prepress, presses and complex distribution. The music business depended on extensive recording studios, and distribution networks.

Technology developments have changed all those barriers to entry.

It all started in the printing and publishing area with the invention of the personal computer, the inexpensive laser printer, and desktop publishing software. This drastically reduced the cost of entry into the publishing arena. The growth of the Internet, and electronic publishing brought down the barriers of distribution. The desktop software dramatically reduced the cost of creating magazines, books and all other printed material.

The arrival of the ubiquitous use of the Internet, the iPod, and iTunes allowed the transformation of the music industry. Records, tapes, and CDs are becoming artifacts of the past. Now, young artists use the Internet, YouTube, and Facebook to gain exposure. Desktop software is replacing the complex mixing equipment of the past.

The advent of low-cost memory, high quality video technology, and high-bandwidth communication has changed all the cost characteristics of the moving picture industry. The Internet is changing the fundamental distribution mechanisms.

Since its inception, Sundance has always believed in supporting, and promoting the voice of independent story telling. Now the direction of Sundance and the direction of technology are completely aligned. We actually are entering an age of the democratization of all media.

Sundance’s role in this new age, is to insure that the cream rises to the top - that the artists are educated through the labs, that quality films are produced, that they gain financial support and that they receive effective distribution of the message.

Originally, Sundance supported artists only through the labs. It role was to teach acting, directing, producing, and composing to aspiring film makers. Over the last ten years Sundance has funded documentaries thereby extending its assistance to film makers.

Over the last year and a half, several new initiatives called ‘Artist Services,' under the leadership of Keri Putman, have extended Sundance’s effectiveness in helping artists.

In addition to our documentary funding through the Institute, Sundance has sponsored over fifty projects and raised $1.5 million through Kickstarter (a public funding website). Seventeen of the films at Sundance this year were partially funded through Kickstarter.

Through partnerships with iTunes, Amazon, Hulu, Netflix, Sundance NOW and YouTube, Sundance has arranged for the digital premieres of 13 new films.

Technology is reducing the economic barriers between the artist and the audience. Sundance is trying to exploit the new technologies in every way it can to allow all the new talented voices to be heard.

Captain's log: Sundance 2012 

The first time I attended the Sundance Film Festival was in 1989, when I was the composer for sex, lies and videotape. Sundance was the ground floor from which the film went on to garner worldwide acclaim; and for all of us involved it was like driving a rocket ship. Even back then, Sundance was a feeding frenzy for independent film enthusiasts; and getting into popular screenings, parties and events took some serious determination.

I've been here several times since SLV. But this year, for the first time, I'm attending as a U.S. Dramatic Juror. And I must say that the experience has been upper crust all the way. I get to attend all the buzz worthy screenings. I have a personal chauffeur and an ever increasing pile of gourmet swag accumulating in my room. I get to hang out with the festival organizers from time to time and my fellow jurors, who are actors, writers, cinematographers, editors and directors -- all the people that I seldom come in contact with in the solitary endeavor of composing music. It's been the closest thing to having my own personal Beatlemania since my days in the Red Hot Chili Peppers. 

As a juror, any discussion of the films in my category is disallowed until the final awards ceremony. However, I think I can toss out a few observations on some of the music I've heard thus far. 

The hybrid song/score, combo-platter seems to be in vogue this year. And for that, the weapon of choice is clearly solo acoustic guitar accompanied by a vocalist. This appears to be predominantly licensed songs and where that doesn't work, an original score piece in a complimentary instrumental style is created. The approach is characteristic for films in what seems to be an emerging genre that me and my fellow jurors affectionately refer to as WPP or "White People Problems." I don't mean this in a derogatory sense as some of the films in this category are exceptional. They have a generally comic tone with heart and emotion, graphic sexual situations with humorous overtones and are populated with 20 to 30 somethings who are either lost, bored, breaking up with their significant other, can't make up their mind who to sleep with and so on….you know WPP.  

Some of these hybrid scores however, are a seamless blend between pre-fab and original music and in that regard, are very different from the song/score soundtracks of the past where songs and underscore typically didn't acknowledge one another stylistically. One great example of that in this festival was Middle of Nowhere  -- not of the WPP genre but actually a serious urban drama whose score was an effective and imaginative take on what I can only describe as abstracted R & B. 

Another urban contemporary gangster film whose score caught my attention was LUV. Portuguese composer Nuno Malo's elegant, beat-free orchestral score was laced with ambient electric guitars and created a memorable one-of-a-kind musical universe for a film that defied convention by sidestepping the expected hip-hop driven soundtrack. 

My Festival favorite in the score department is Beasts of the Southern Wild. Set in the Louisiana delta, the score acknowledges the local cajun culture with the use of fiddle, accordion and banjo as soloists set against the backdrop of a traditional orchestral palette. Director Behn Zeitlin (who also co-composed the score!) described the music as "nationalistic." I would go with "anthemic." The score is distinctive, memorable, broadly emotional and because, I suspect that the director also wrote the music, there are those rare extended scenes where the music is given a chance to take center stage and carry the story without the help of dialog or effects. 

What I love about this Festival is that it encourages independent filmmakers to develop their own unique voice, to find new ways to create something fresh and unexpected. And I can hear that mindset trickle down to many of the composers who are their accomplices in developing that voice. 

Those who wanted to see Brian Klugman and Lee Sternthal’s directorial debut, The Words, had to wait until closing night of the Sundance Film Festival for its world premiere. That seemed only fitting, however, as both directors openly admitted at Friday’s screening that the film took nearly 12 years to make and waiting anxiously a few extra days “felt like par for the course.”

Led by a strong cast that included Bradley Cooper, Jeremy Irons, Dennis Quaid, and Zoe Saldana, The Words tells the story of Rory Jansen (Cooper), a budding novelist who struggles with his sudden propulsion to literary stardom, brought about by a yellowed manuscript he finds in a beat-up satchel in a Parisian antique shop. With the pressures of a new wife (Saldana) and a dogged determination to work his way up and out of a publishing company mailroom, Jansen decides to call the work his own, and immediately struggles with the soul-sucking realization of what he has done, especially after meeting the elderly man (Irons) whose work he plagiarized. 

The story of this one writer (or two, maybe three…it’s sometimes hard to tell) makes us examine the choices we make and the unexpected impact those decisions have not only on our own lives, but also on those closest to us. 

After the film’s premiere, Klugman and Sternthal were joined by Cooper, Quaid, Saldana, Ben Barnes, along with other crewmembers for a Q&A.

Q: Combinations of directors and writers where both people share both jobs are unusual. How do you guys work together?

Sternthal: Every day is different. There’s a mystery and magic to it. I don’t like to talk bout it because I’m just really lucky to have that with Brian. 

Q: When you write about a writer who writes about a writer, it’s natural to wonder if the writer is writing about himself. 

Klugman: Any time you take pen to paper we have our own subjective experiences and lives to draw from. I think every character is drawn in some parts from you. That’s really one of the big themes going on here, I think. 

Q: The film took a long time to make. What advice can you give to other filmmakers who are struggling to get their work finished?

Klugman: The best advice I can give is to hang in there. It comes together with the right timing and with the right people. I don’t think we were ready to make the film that we made 12 years ago. It happened when it was right. 

Q: Why do you writers have such a fascination with Paris?

Sternthal: It’s such a beautiful city. It’s such an historic setting in literature. Even going back to the 19^th century, it’s just so full of romance. I think Americans grab onto that because you don’t have as much of it here.

Q: How did you arrive to these actors after such a long process and how did Bradley become involved as an executive producer?

Cooper: I’ve been a part of the project since almost its inception. So being cast, I think it was a nice gesture on (the directors’) part because I was already so invested in it.

Klugman: All I can say about the casting process was that we had very limited resources and very little time to make this movie. Had we had unlimited resources and unlimited time, we still would have cast every single person the same. We got the actors that we wanted to play these roles. We went after them and we could not believe when they started saying yes. And consistently saying yes! There are so many wonderful performances to work with here, so we really wound up with a dream cast.

“Every year the Sundance Film Festival brings to light exciting new directions and fresh voices in independent film, and this year is no different,” said John Cooper, Director of the Sundance Film Festival. “While these awards further distinguish those that have had the most impact on audiences and our jury, the level of talent showcased across the board at the Festival was really impressive, and all are to be congratulated and thanked for sharing their work with us.”

Keri Putnam, Executive Director of Sundance Institute, said, “As we close what was a remarkable 10 days of the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, we look to the year ahead with incredible optimism for the independent film community. As filmmakers continue to push each other to achieve new heights in storytelling we are excited to see what’s next.”

The 2012 Sundance Film Festival Awards presented this evening were:

The Grand Jury Prize: Documentary was presented by Charles Ferguson to:
The House I Live In / U.S.A. (Director: Eugene Jarecki) — For over 40 years, the War on Drugs has accounted for 45 million arrests, made America the world's largest jailer and damaged poor communities at home and abroad. Yet, drugs are cheaper, purer and more available today than ever. Where did we go wrong and what is the path toward healing?

The Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic was presented by Justin Lin to:
Beasts of the Southern Wild / U.S.A. (Director: Benh Zeitlin, Screenwriters: Benh Zeitlin, Lucy Alibar) — Waters gonna rise up, wild animals gonna rerun from the grave, and everything south of the levee is goin’ under, in this tale of a six year old named Hushpuppy, who lives with her daddy at the edge of the world. Cast: Quvenzhané Wallis, Dwight Henry.

The World Cinema Jury Prize: Documentary was presented by Nick Fraser to:
The Law in These Parts / Israel (Director: Ra'anan Alexandrowicz) — Israel's 43-year military legal system in the Occupied Palestinian Territories unfolds through provocative interviews with the system’s architects and historical footage showing the enactment of these laws upon the Palestinian population.

The World Cinema Jury Prize: Dramatic was presented by Julia Ormond to:
Violeta Went to Heaven (Violeta se Fue a Los Cielos) / Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Spain (Director: Andrés Wood, Screenwriters: Eliseo Altunaga, Rodrigo Bazaes, Guillermo Calderón, Andrés Wood) — A portrait of famed Chilean singer and folklorist Violeta Parra filled with her musical work, her memories, her loves and her hopes. Cast: Francisca Gavilán, Thomas Durand, Luis Machín, Gabriela Aguilera, Roberto Farías.

The Audience Award: U.S. Documentary, Presented by Acura, was presented by Mike Birbiglia to:
The Invisible War / U.S.A. (Director: Kirby Dick) — An investigative and powerfully emotional examination of the epidemic of rape of soldiers within the U.S. military, the institutions that cover up its existence and the profound personal and social consequences that arise from it.

The Audience Award: U.S. Dramatic, Presented by Acura, was presented by Mike Birbiglia to:
The Surrogate / U.S.A. (Director and screenwriter: Ben Lewin) — Mark O'Brien, a 36-year-old poet and journalist in an iron lung, decides he no longer wishes to be a virgin. With the help of his therapist and the guidance of his priest, he contacts a professional sex surrogate to take him on a journey to manhood. Cast: John Hawkes, Helen Hunt, William H. Macy.

The World Cinema Audience Award: Documentary was presented by Edward James Olmos to:
SEARCHING FOR SUGAR MAN / Sweden, United Kingdom (Director: Malik Bendjelloul) — Rodriguez was the greatest ‘70s US rock icon who never was. Hailed as the greatest recording artist of his generation he disappeared into oblivion – rising again from the ashes in a completely different context many miles away.

The World Cinema Audience Award: Dramatic was presented by Edward James Olmos to:
Valley of Saints / India, U.S.A. (Director and screenwriter: Musa Syeed) — Gulzar plans to run away from the war and poverty surrounding his village in Kashmir with his best friend, but a beautiful young woman researching the dying lake leads him to contemplate a different future Cast: Gulzar Ahmad Bhat, Mohammed Afzal Sofi, Neelofar Hamid.

The Best of NEXT <=> Audience Award, Presented by Adobe Systems Incorporated, was presented by Tim Heidecker to:
Sleepwalk With Me / U.S.A. (Director: Mike Birbiglia, Screenwriters: Mike Birbiglia, Ira Glass, Joe Birbiglia, Seth Barrish) — Reluctant to confront his fears of love, honesty, and growing up, a budding standup comedian has both a hilarious and intense struggle with sleepwalking. Cast: Mike Birbiglia, Lauren Ambrose, Carol Kane, James Rebhorn, Cristin Milioti.

The U.S. Directing Award: Documentary was presented by Fenton Bailey to:
The Queen of Versailles / U.S.A. (Director: Lauren Greenfield) — Jackie and David were triumphantly constructing the biggest house in America – a sprawling, 90,000-square-foot palace inspired by Versailles – when their timeshare empire falters due to the economic crisis. Their story reveals the innate virtues and flaws of the American Dream.

The U.S. Directing Award: Dramatic was presented by Lynn Shelton to:
Middle Of Nowhere / U.S.A. (Director and screenwriter: Ava DuVernay) — When her husband is incarcerated, an African-American woman struggles to maintain her marriage and her identity. Cast: Emayatzy Corinealdi, David Oyelowo, Omari Hardwick, Lorraine Touissaint, Edwina Findley.

The World Cinema Directing Award: Documentary was presented by Jean-Marie Teno to:
5 Broken Cameras / Palestine, Israel, France (Directors: Emad Burnat, Guy Davidi) — A Palestinian journalist chronicles his village’s resistance to a separation barrier being erected on their land and in the process captures his young son’s lens on the world.

The World Cinema Directing Award: Dramatic was presented by Alexei Popogrebsky to:
Teddy Bear / Denmark (Director: Mads Matthiesen, Screenwriters: Mads Matthiesen, Martin Pieter Zandvliet) — Dennis, a painfully shy 38-year-old bodybuilder who lives with his mother, sets off to Thailand in search of love. Cast: Kim Kold, Elsebeth Steentoft, Lamaiporn Sangmanee Hougaard, David Winters, Allan Mogensen.

The Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award was presented by Anthony Mackie to:
Safety Not Guaranteed / U.S.A. (Director: Colin Trevorrow, Screenwriter: Derek Connolly) — A trio of magazine employees investigate a classified ad seeking a partner for time travel. One employee develops feelings for the paranoid but compelling loner and seeks to discover what he’s really up to. Cast: Aubrey Plaza, Mark Duplass, Jake Johnson, Karan Soni.

The World Cinema Screenwriting Award was presented by Richard Pena to:
Young & Wild / Chile (Director: Marialy Rivas, Screenwriters: Marialy Rivas, Camila Gutiérrez, Pedro Peirano, Sebastián Sepúlveda) — 17-year-old Daniela, raised in the bosom of a strict Evangelical family and recently unmasked as a fornicator by her shocked parents, struggles to find her own path to spiritual harmony. Cast: Alicia Rodríguez, Aline Kuppenheim, María Gracia Omegna, Felipe Pinto.

The U.S. Documentary Editing Award was presented by Kim Roberts to:
DETROPIA / U.S.A. (Directors: Heidi Ewing, Rachel Grady) — The woes of Detroit are emblematic of the collapse of the U.S. manufacturing base. This is the dramatic story of a city and its people who refuse to leave the building, even as the flames are rising.

The World Cinema Documentary Editing Award was presented by Clara Kim to:
Indie Game: The Movie / Canada (Directors: Lisanne Pajot, James Swirsky) — Follow the dramatic journeys of indie game developers as they create games and release those works, and themselves, to the world.

The Excellence in Cinematography Award: U.S. Documentary was presented by Tia Lessin to:
Chasing Ice / U.S.A. (Director: Jeff Orlowski) — Science, spectacle and human passion mix in this stunningly cinematic portrait as National Geographic photographer James Balog captures time-lapse photography of glaciers over several years providing tangible visual evidence of climate change.

The Excellence in Cinematography Award: U.S. Dramatic was presented by Amy Vincent to:
Beasts of the Southern Wild / U.S.A. (Director: Benh Zeitlin, Screenwriters: Benh Zeitlin, Lucy Alibar) — Waters gonna rise up, wild animals gonna rerun from the grave, and everything south of the levee is goin’ under, in this tale of a six year old named Hushpuppy, who lives with her daddy at the edge of the world. Cast: Quvenzhané Wallis, Dwight Henry.

The World Cinema Cinematography Award: Documentary was presented by Jean-Marie Teno to:
Putin's Kiss / Denmark (Director: Lise Birk Pedersen) — 19-year-old Marsha is a model spokesperson in a strongly nationalistic Russian youth movement that aims to protect the country from its enemies. When she starts recognizing the organization’s flaws, she must take a stand for or against it.

The World Cinema Cinematography Award: Dramatic was presented by Alexei Popogrebsky to:
My Brother the Devil / United Kingdom (Director and screenwriter: Sally El Hosaini) — A pair of British Arab brothers trying to get by in gangland London learn the extraordinary courage it takes to be yourself. Cast: James Floyd, Saïd Taghmaoui, Fady Elsayed.

A U.S. Documentary Special Jury Prize for an Agent of Change was presented by Heather Croall to:
Love Free or Die / U.S.A. (Director: Macky Alston) — One man whose two defining passions are in conflict: An openly gay bishop refuses to leave the Church or the man he loves.

A U.S. Documentary Special Jury Prize for Spirit of Defiance was presented by Heather Croall to:
Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry / U.S.A., China (Director: Alison Klayman) — Renowned Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei has garnered international attention as much for his ambitious artwork as his political provocations and increasingly public clashes with the Chinese government.

A U.S. Dramatic Special Jury Prize for Excellence in Independent Film Producing was presented by Cliff Martinez to:
Andrea Sperling and Jonathan Schwartz for Smashed and Nobody Walks

• Smashed / U.S.A. (Director: James Ponsoldt, Screenwriters: Susan Burke, James Ponsoldt) — Kate and Charlie are a young married couple whose bond is built on a mutual love of music, laughter and... drinking. When Kate decides to get sober, her new lifestyle brings troubling issues to the surface and calls into question her relationship with Charlie. Cast: Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Aaron Paul, Octavia Spencer, Nick Offerman, Megan Mullally.
• Nobody Walks / U.S.A. (Director: Ry Russo-Young, Screenwriters: Lena Dunham, Ry Russo-Young) — Martine, a young artist from New York, is invited into the home of a hip, liberal LA family for a week. Her presence unravels the family’s carefully maintained status quo, and a mess of sexual and emotional entanglements ensues. Cast: John Krasinski, Olivia Thirlby, Rosemarie DeWitt, India Ennenga, Justin Kirk.

A U.S. Dramatic Special Jury Prize for Ensemble Acting was presented by Cliff Martinez to:
The Surrogate / U.S.A. (Director and screenwriter: Ben Lewin) — Mark O'Brien, a 36-year-old poet and journalist in an iron lung, decides he no longer wishes to be a virgin. With the help of his therapist and the guidance of his priest, he contacts a professional sex surrogate to take him on a journey to manhood. Cast: John Hawkes, Helen Hunt, William H. Macy.

A World Cinema Dramatic Special Jury Prize for Artistic Vision was presented by Clara Kim to:
Can / Turkey (Director and screenwriter: Rasit Celikezer) — A young married couple live happily in Istanbul, but their decision to illegally procure a child threatens their future together. Cast: Selen Uçer, Serdar Orçin, Berkan Demirbag, Erkan Avci.

A World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Prize for its Celebration of the Artistic Spirit was presented by Richard Pena to:
SEARCHING FOR SUGAR MAN / Sweden, United Kingdom (Director: Malik Bendjelloul) — Rodriguez was the greatest ‘70s US rock icon who never was. Hailed as the greatest recording artist of his generation he disappeared into oblivion – rising again from the ashes in a completely different context many miles away.

The inaugural Short Film Audience Award, Presented by Yahoo!, based on online voting for nine short films that premiered at the Festival and are currently featured on Yahoo! Screen, was presented to:
The Debutante Hunters (Director: Maria White) — In the Lowcountry of South Carolina a group of true Southern belles reveal their more rugged side, providing a glimpse into what drives them to hunt in the wild.

The following awards were presented at separate ceremonies at the Festival:

The Jury Prize in Short Filmmaking was awarded to: FISHING WITHOUT NETS / U.S.A. (Director: Cutter Hodierne, Screenwriters: Cutter Hodierne, John Hibey). The Jury Prize in Short Film, U.S. Fiction was presented to: The Black Balloon / U.S.A. (Directors: Benny Safdie, Josh Safdie). The Jury Prize in Short Film, International Fiction was presented to: The Return (Kthimi) / Kosovo (Director: Blerta Zeqiri, Screenwriter: Shefqet Gjocaj). The Jury Prize in Short Film, Non-Fiction was presented to: The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom / U.S.A. (Director: Lucy Walker). The Jury Prize in Animated Short Film was presented to: A Morning Stroll / United Kingdom (Director: Grant Orchard). A Special Jury Award for Comedic Storytelling was presented to: The Arm / U.S.A. (Directors and screenwriters: Brie Larson, Sarah Ramos, Jessie Ennis). A Special Jury Award for Animation Direction was presented to: Robots of Brixton / United Kingdom (Director: Kibwe Tavares).

The winning directors and projects of the Sundance Institute | Mahindra Global Filmmaking Award, in recognition and support of emerging independent filmmakers from around the world, are: Etienne Kallos / Vrystaat (Free State) (South Africa); Ariel Kleiman / Partisan (Australia); Dominga Sotomayor / Tarde Para Morir Joven (Late To Die Young) (Chile); and Shonali Bose / Margarita. With a Straw (India).

The Sundance/NHK International Filmmaker Award, honoring and supporting emerging filmmakers, was presented to Jens Assur, director of the upcoming film Close Far Away.

The inaugural Hilton Worldwide LightStay Sustainability Award for a completed feature film was presented to The Island President, directed by Jon Shenk. The in-process feature film award was presented to Solar Mamas, directed by Jehane Noujaim and Mona Eldaief. Each project received $25,000.

The inaugural Sundance Institute Indian Paintbrush Producer’s Award and $10,000 grant was presented to Dan Janvey and Josh Penn for Beasts of the Southern Wild.

The Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prizes, presented to outstanding feature films focusing on science or technology as a theme, or depicting a scientist, engineer, or mathematician as a major character, were presented to Robot & Frank, directed by Jake Schreier and written by Christopher Ford, and Valley of Saints, directed and written by Musa Syeed. The two films will split the $20,000 cash award by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

The 2012 Sundance Film Festival Jurors were: U.S. Documentary Competition: Fenton Bailey, Heather Croall, Charles Ferguson, Tia Lessin, Kim Roberts; U.S. Dramatic Competition: Justin Lin, Anthony Mackie, Cliff Martinez, Lynn Shelton, Amy Vincent; World Cinema Documentary Competition: Nick Fraser, Clara Kim, Jean-Marie Teno; World Cinema Dramatic Competition: Julia Ormond, Richard Pena, Alexei Popogrebsky; Alfred P. Sloan Award: Tracy Day, Helen Fisher, Dr. Robert J. Full, Gwyn Lurie, Alex Rivera; Short Film Competition: Mike Judge, Dee Rees, Shane Smith.

The 2012 Sundance Film Festival presented 117 feature-length films, representing 30 countries by 45 first-time filmmakers, including 24 in competition. These films were selected from 4,042 feature-length film submissions composed of 2,059 U.S. and 1,983 international feature-length films. 91 films at the Festival were world premieres. The Short Film Program was comprised of 64 short films selected from a record 7,675 submissions.

The 2012 Sundance Film Festival runs through January 29 in Park City, Salt Lake City, Ogden and Sundance, Utah. A complete list of films and events is available at www.sundance.org/festival.

The Sundance Film Festival
A program of the non-profit Sundance Institute, the Festival has introduced global audiences to some of the most ground-breaking films of the past two decades, including sex, lies, and videotape, Maria Full of Grace, The Cove, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, An Inconvenient Truth, Precious, Trouble the Water, and Napoleon Dynamite, and through its New Frontier initiative, has showcased the cinematic works of media artists including Isaac Julien, Doug Aitken, Pierre Huyghe, Jennifer Steinkamp, and Matthew Barney. The 2012 Sundance Film Festival sponsors include: Presenting Sponsors – Entertainment Weekly, HP, Acura, Sundance Channel and Chase SapphireSM ; Leadership Sponsors – Adobe Systems Incorporated, Bing™, Canon, DIRECTV, Focus Forward, a partnership between GE and CINELAN, Southwest Airlines, Sprint and Yahoo!; Sustaining Sponsors – Bertolli® Frozen Meal Soups, FilterForGood®, a partnership between Brita® and Nalgene ®, Grey Goose® Vodka, Hilton HHonors and Waldorf Astoria Hotels & Resorts, L'Oréal Paris, Stella Artois®, Timberland, Time Warner Inc. and YouTubeTM. Sundance Institute recognizes critical support from the Utah Governor's Office of Economic Development, and the State of Utah as Festival Host State. The support of these organizations will defray costs associated with the 10-day Festival and the nonprofit Sundance Institute's year-round programs for independent film and theatre artists. www.sundance.org/festival

Sundance Institute
Sundance Institute is a global nonprofit organization founded by Robert Redford in 1981. Through its artistic development programs for directors, screenwriters, producers, composers and playwrights, the Institute seeks to discover and support independent film and theatre artists from the United States and around the world, and to introduce audiences to their new work. The Institute promotes independent storytelling to inform, inspire, and unite diverse populations around the globe. Internationally recognized for its annual Sundance Film Festival, Sundance Institute has nurtured such projects as Born into Brothels, Trouble the Water, Son of Babylon, Amreeka, An Inconvenient Truth,Spring Awakening, I Am My Own Wife, Light in the Piazza and Angels in America. Join Sundance Institute on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

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For images go to http://press.sundance.org/press.

Hi everyone, and welcome to the live blog for the 2012 Sundance Film Festival Awards Ceremony. We’re Eric Hynes and Claiborne Smith, and we’ll be your tag-team virtual hosts for tonight’s festivities.

For the second year in a row, the Awards Ceremony takes place few miles north of Park City at the Basin Recreation Fieldhouse at Kimball Junction. The football field sized space has been split into two halves: a party lounge with bar tables, stools, and buffet tables; and a ceremonial half with folding chairs facing a stage comprised of giant building blocks decorated in this year’s Festival’s colors of yellow, black and white, and signs heralding this year’s theme, Look Again.

At the Festival’s opening day press conference, Festival Director John Cooper spoke of how Hollywood and indie films are moving father and father apart, stylistically. As more Transformers populate megaplex screens, the range and diversity of stories emerging from indie filmmakers—on full view for the past 10 days of the Festival—becomes richer. The state of independent film is “very healthy, it’s creative, it’s original,” Cooper said. “I think the stories are as diverse as they can be. They’re personal and I think they’re a unique perspective on the world we live in.” He talked about how every year people ask him what the themes of the Festival are, but “the truth is, they’re aren’t any. Independent film is the theme.”

All told, 27 awards will be given out over the next 60 minutes, so prepare yourselves for a flurry of activity on this blog. And start familiarizing yourselves with the filmmakers and titles you’re about to hear. Something tells us that you’ll be talking about them in the months and years to come.

Updated 7:21 PM:

The evening kicks off with a “Voice of God” introducing the Festival Director, John Cooper (we don’t think it was actually God - just the voice of God). Cooper looks chagrinned. “We had this whole bit where [Parker Posey] was ready to come out as the Queen of indie film to the music from Aida,” Cooper said. Posey was supposed to be the evening’s emcee tonight, but she fell ill. Sad handlers are holding her queen garb, one of whom is even wearing her crown. Cooper wishes her well; so does the audience. 

Cooper introduces the Executive Director of Sundance Institute, Keri Putnam. She encourages everyone to get involved with the Institute beyond these 10 days of the Festival. “We’re active 365 days a year and all over the world discovering and supporting new independent artists—so please visit us online, come see some of our public programs, and really be part of our community.”

Putnam presents the second annual winners of the Sundance Institute/Mahindra Global Filmmaking award, which were announced earlier in the week, to:

Shonali Bose, Margarita With a Straw (India); Etienne Kallos, Free State (South Africa); Ariel Kleiman, Partisan (Australia); Dominga Sotomayor, Late to Die Young (Chile)

Cooper’s back on stage, thanking the Festival staff and 1850 Festival volunteers, giving special mention to those volunteers who’ve worked more than 100 hours during the Festival: “The 100 Club.” The indie film community took a hit this week - with the death of beloved indie film producer Bingham Ray. Cooper gets a little choked up reading from an appreciation of him written by a friend of his, a poker partner - Ray was described as “a fierce competitor and raconteur,” someone who started out at the Bleeker Street Cinema. He was “intimately involved with some of the figures he used to protect” and “as with everything else, he had no problem challenging them when he thought they were wrong.” Cooper thanks this year’s filmmakers for sharing “your stories and your souls” with audiences at the 2012 Festival. 

Cooper confesses he’s had a dream - a dream of a co-host. He introduces director and actor Katie Aselton, whose thriller Black Rock played in the Midnight section at this year’s Festival. Aselton is helping Cooper host tonight’s awards ceremony. They tell everyone they’re thanking God right now so that all the filmmakers who will be on stage tonight to accept awards can make their thank you’s brief. Brief!

Cooper then introduces renowned biological anthropologist Helen Fisher to present the Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize, which is presented to a director with an outstanding film focusing on science or technology as a theme; it comes with a cash award of $20,000.

For the first time, the prize goes to two films: Robot & Frank and Valley of Saints, each of whose directors received $10,000 at a reception on Friday.

Updated 7:32 PM:

Cooper and Aselton return to the stage and introduces natty, argyle-sweater wearing Trevor Groth, director of programming for the Sundance Film Festival. He announces the winners of the Shorts Program, presented by Yahoo!, which were presented earlier in the week. Jurors included Shane Smith of TIFF Bell Lightbox, King of the Hill creator Mike Judge, and Pariah director Dee Rees, a big winner at last year’s Festival. 

Groth also announces the first annual Shorts Audience Award. Holly Boyer from Yahoo! joins Groth on stage. Audiences across the nation have been voting on the winner of the Shorts Audience Award. And the award goes to ... The Debutante Hunters, directed by Maria White. White tells the audience that she and her husband volunteered for the Festival 10 years ago, so to end up winning is something very special for her. “We had thousands of thousands of people see our film that we never expected to see it,” she says. 

Coming up next, the winners of the World Cinema Competition Documentary Competition.

Updated 7:47 PM:

John Cooper and Katie Aselton introduce the jurors for the World Cinema Documentary Competition: Clara Kim, curator of the Walker Art Center, filmmaker Jean-Marie Teno, and BBC Storyville founder Nick Fraser. Twelve internationally produced films, from Canada and Denmark to China and Palestine, competed in this section this year. “We saw some incredible films, and have the distinct pleasure of giving 5 prizes for this category,” says Kim. The first prizewinner is about, “A man whose humble and rich existence reminds us of the integrity of life.”

Winner of the World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Prize for its Celebration of the Artistic Spirit:
Searching for Sugar Man, directed by Malik Bendjelloul (Sweden/UK)

“Is this really happening? This was supposed to be six minutes for Swedish TV,” says Bendjelloul. He introduces subject Rodriguez, who stands from his seat and receives rich applause. Read our coverage of Sugar Man’s world premiere.

Teno introduces the next award winner. “Many filmmakers have been taking the camera and making films. Cinematography is very, very important - it rises to the level of artwork. Sometimes you leave a film and for a long time, some images from the film you have just seen flash in your mind. In a state of propaganda and people in this kind of oppressive regime are behaving.”

Winner of the World Cinema Cinematography Award for Documentary Filmmaking:
Putin’s Kiss, cinematography by Lars Skree (Denmaerk)

Director Lise Birk Pedersen accepts for Skree.

Kim presents the next winner, “A seamless journey into independently minded individuals.” 

Winner of the World Cinema Documentary Editing Award:
Indie Game: The Movie, edited by Lisanne Pajot and James Swirsky. (Canada)

“Two years ago we hopped into a Toyota without cruise control, and never imagined that we’d be here, ” say the filmmakers.

Winner of the World Cinema Documentary Directing Award:
5 Broken Cameras, directed by Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi (Palestine/Israel/France)

“I can’t believe I’m standing here,” says Burnat. “This film was a gift from the beginning. It was a gift for me to go to this village building where I spent many years.”

Regarding the next prize: “A great film, a tough film, and unforgiving film,” says Fraser. “Apparently intelligent men, acting in what they think is their best interest, turn the rule of law into an oppressive system. The jury loved this film - we hope it goes out into the world and changes people.”

Winner of the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize in Documentary:
The Law in These Parts (Shilton Ha Chok), directed by Ra’anan Alexandrowicz (Israel)

“This is the hardest film I’ve made,” says Alexandrowicz. He thanks the doc program at Sundance Institute. “This is an amazing moment for me as a filmmaker, but it’s a film about a painful and unresolved subject. What you find out in the film, and in other films in this festival, is that upholding law doesn’t always lead to justice. It can even be used as a tool against certain segments of society. We have to oppose them, and if necessary we have to break them.”

Updated 7:57 PM:

Cooper introduces the jury for the World Cinema Dramatic Competition: New York Film Festival director Richard Pena, filmmaker Alexei Popogrebsky, and actress Julia Ormond. Fourteen films from countries such as Japan, Argentina, Turkey, and the Czech Republic competed in this section this year.

Winner of the World Cinema Dramatic Special Jury Prize for Artistic Vision:
Can, directed by Rasit Celikezer (Turkey)

“What can I say? This is a story. This is long days; this is a great story, Sundance,” says Celikezer. “Thank you, so much. I dedicated my film to all kids and now I'm dedicating this award to my little daughter and all other kids. Thank you so much.”

Winner of the World Cinema Cinematography Award, Dramatic:
My Brother the Devil, cinematography by David Raedeker (UK)

“I went on a journey with this film, and it was a rollercoaster,” says Raedeker.

Winner of the World Cinema Screenwriting Award, Dramatic:
Young & Wild, written by Marialy Rivas, Camila Gutierrez, Pedro Peirano (Chile)

“Do you want to cry? Me too. We grew up in a country during the dictatorship,” says Rivas. “Since I was seven I wanted to be a filmmaker to escape that violent reality. Every film is an act of love.”

Winner of the World Cinema Directing Award, Dramatic:
Teddy Bear, directed by Mads Matthiesen (Denmark)

“That’s great, man. Great surprise. Just want to thank Sundance. It’s a pleasure coming here. Everything around this Festival, the audiences, is great,” says Matthiesen. Claiborne Smith talked to Matthiesen for Sundance.org.

For a film that Ormond calls, “an extraordinary hymn”:

Winner of the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize, Dramatic:
Violeta Went to Heaven (Violeta se Fue a Los Cielos), directed by Andres Wood (Chile/Argentina/Brazil/Spain)

Wood can’t be in attendance, but sends an acceptance speech remotely, which Ormond delivers. “We are delighted and surprised we wish we were there tonight to celebrate with you. We want to think the people of the festival, jury and audience. We accept it on behalf of the Chilean community.”

Coming up next, the Audience Awards.

Updated 8:11 PM:

Cooper introduces Tim Heidecker, known to viewers of Adult Swim, where his subversive shows like "Tom Goes to the Mayor" and "Tim and Eric, Awesome Show, Great Job," have aired. Heidecker presents the Best of NEXT Audience Award (the 2012 Festival is the fourth year for the NEXT showcase, which features films by often new filmmakers of bold, pure storytelling). 

“I was hoping we could do something right now,” says Heidecker. “Would everybody mind standing up for one second, please? Okay, you can sit down. Thank you very much. Do we have any walk outs? I usually get some walk outs.” He prompts the NEXT films to scroll across the screen, but the video appears to malfunction. “Those were all terrible films,” he jokes. “Well, who the hell cares.”

Winner of the Best of NEXT Audience Award:
Sleepwalk with Me, directed by comedian and writer Mike Birbiglia

The first thing Birbiglia does is mention Craig Zobel’s Compliance, another NEXT film, which he says is his favorite film in the Festival. “Without guys like Miguel Arteta telling me I could direct when I couldn't,” he says, “I wouldn't be here.” Read Birbiglia’s comments from the Sleepwalk with Me premiere.

Aselton introduces veteran actor and political activist Edward James Olmos, appearing in the 2012 Festival film Filly Brown, who in turn introduces, seemingly off-the-cuff, filmmaker Robert M. Young. “He’s truly the father of independent film in America. He's a giant amongst those of us who are independent filmmakers in this country This man helped create Sundance Institute, and we want to thank you on behalf of the entire industry,” says Olmos.

“I don’t think I deserve to be up here,” Young says. “I was at the first Sundance—I know a number of you here and I'm honored just to be recognized. I’m 87, still going, still making films.” Olmos continues, introducing the Audience Awards.

Winner of the World Cinema Audience Award for Documentary Film:
Searching for Sugar Man, directed by Malik Bendjelloul (Sweden)

Bendjelloul brings up Rodriguez, who’s dressed in trademark black, from dark mane to shiny leather pants. “I’m so excited I can’t catch my breath. He’s the whole hero of my life,” Rodriguez says about Bendjelloul. Read our coverage of Sugar Man’s world premiere.

Winner of the World Cinema Audience Award for Dramatic Film: 
Valley of Saints, directed by Musa Syeed (India/U.S.A.).

This is the second win for Valley of Saints - earlier this week, the film received a $10,000 award from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for the innovative way the film depicts the scientist at the heart of the film. Producer Nicholas Bruckman accepts. “My only job was to make our awards here,” he says, “and I only just made it.”

Updated 8:19 PM:

Clips from the U.S. Documentary and Dramatic Competition films are shown. Mike Birbiglia, fresh off his recent win for Sleepwalk with Me, presents the U.S. Competition Audience Awards, sponsored by Acura. “Because the first thing you do when you make an independent film is choose your luxury sedan,” Birbiglia says. “Once you do that, you’re pretty much done.”

Winner of the U.S. Documentary Competition Audience Award, presented by Acura:
The Invisible War, directed by Kirby Dick.

 “I never thought I’d win an audience award,” Dick says. He dedicates the award to the many soldiers who have been raped within the American military. “This award really is to them (the victims), so this epidemic stops.”  

 “You are heard, you are appreciated, you are not forgotten, and you are no longer invisible,” says producer Amy Ziering.

Winner of the U.S. Dramatic Competition Audience Award, presented by Acura:
The Surrogate, directed by Ben Lewin.

Standing ovation for Lewin, whose film routinely received standing ovations during the Festival. “A word of advice to independent filmmakers,” says Lewin. “Don’t sleep with the leading lady. Sleep with the producer.” He’s accompanied by his wife, producer Judi Levine. “Love is a journey,” he adds. “That’s it.”

“I think I learned very early that it’s good to sleep with the director,” adds Levine. Read Claiborne Smith’s profile of The Surrogate’s John Hawkes. Coming up next, the winners of the U.S. Documentary and Dramatic competitions.

Updated 8:35 PM:

Aselton come back on stage - it’s time for the awards for the U.S. Documentary and Dramatic competition awards. They introduce Heather Croall, the director of the Sheffield Doc/Fest, one of the best documentary festivals in the world.   Two special jury prizes - a rarity.

Winner of the U.S. Documentary Special Jury Prize for Grace Under Pressure:
Love Free or Die, directed by Macky Alston 

The film is about what happened after the Episcopal Church in New Hampshire came under fire for electing an openly gay man as its bishop. 

Alston’s on stage - 15 years ago, I was here with another film. I remember the first time I didn’t get into Sundance. I remember the bathtub. I remember the raging tantrum - my husband taking my photo in the audience can attest to that. And then the day came when we heard we got into Sundance with this film and I was a bigger mess than before.”

Winner of the U.S. Documentary Special Jury Prize for Spirit of Defiance:
Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, directed by Alison Klayman

“I think I’m too nervous to say too much,” Klayman says, but she thanks Ai Weiwei and her family and crew. She asks the audience to flip the bird - she takes a photo and plans to send it to Ai Weiwei. 

Cliff Martinez, former member of the Red Hot Chili Peppers and film composer for many of Steven Soderbergh's movies, including sex, lies, and videotape and Contagion, presents the “life’s blood of independent cinema,” the Special Jury Prize: Dramatic for independent film producing. The award goes to Smashed producers Andrea Sperling and Jonathan Schwartz. Sperling isn’t in attendance but Schwartz thanks her - “all the credit in my life goes to my wife Jennifer,” he says. He thanks Ry Russo-Young and James Ponsoldt, who we worked with this past year in producing their films. The Special Jury Prize: Dramatic for ensemble acting goes to the cast of The Surrogate. Producer Judi Levine is back on stage - “I have to tell you this was an extraordinary experience. The cast brought everything they could to their characters” - she heaps praise on Helen Hunt, John Hawkes, and William H. Macy. Aselton introduces Tia Lessin, who produced and directed the groundbreaking Trouble the Water, about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina—that documentary won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2008 Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award.

Winner of the Excellence in Cinematography Award for U.S. Documentary Filmmaking:Chasing Ice, Jeff Orlowski

Orlowski thanks Sundance and his father, who taught him how to do photography, and James Balog, the subject of the film, who taught him “how to be an artist.” Cinematographer Amy Vincent (Hustle & Flow) comes on stage to present the...

Winner of Excellence in Cinematography Award - Dramatic to:
Beasts of the Southern Wild, Ben Richardson

Richardson seems surprised. “Above all, I want to say thank you to Behn Zeitlin. I wish my dad could see this” and to his mom, “who never in my whole life doubted I could do the things I wanted to do.”

Award-winning documentary editor Kim Roberts presents the...

U.S. Documentary Editing Award to:
Detropia, edited by Enat Sidi

Roberts explains that the award is given to Sidi “for trusting in the power of verite ... and in the cadence of poetry.” Filmmaker Heidi Ewing is onstage with her. “I feel very privileged that I get to make films with my friends,” Sidi says. Actor Anthony Mackie comes on stage to give the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award.

“Sometimes you see a movie without a script and it lets you know how important a screenwriter is,” Mackie says. “Sometimes you see a movie that exemplifies the idea of creative thought.”  The winner is Derek Connolly, the screenwriter behind Safety Not Guaranteed. Connolly looks way too young to be getting an award of this stature. “I’m going to keep this brief or my head is going to explode all over the first row,” Connolly says. He thanks the producers and crew.

Cooper and Aselton introduce director Fenton Bailey, who's made many appearances at the Festival over the years, from Party Monster to Becoming Chaz. 

Winner of the U.S. Directing Award for Documentary Film:
Lauren Greenfield, director of The Queen of Versailles

“I want to especially thank Jackie Segal and her family for bravely sticking with the story when it changed in unexpected ways,” Greenfield says.

Humpday and Your Sister's Sister director Lynn Shelton is now on stage to announce..

Winner of the U.S. Directing Award for Dramatic Film: Middle of Nowhere, director Ava DuVernay

Shelton explains that the Award goes to DuVernay for providing “a glimpse into the world of those left behind.” DuVernay say she’s “stunned” and “very happy” - she thanks her producers, the crew, her fellow filmmakers, and a cast “led by this brave, generous soul,” Emayatzy Corinealdi - she stresses that it’s important for the film to be seen beyond Park City and for “filmmakers of color to see one another’s films and have them seen.”

It's now time for the Grand Jury Prize in the Documentary category - writer and documentary maker Charles Ferguson's No End in Sight: The American Occupation of Iraq premiered at the 2007 Festival and won a Special Jury Prize that year. Ferguson says the jury wanted to give more awards than they were allowed to - many of the films are about the same thing, “what the hell is happening to the United States.” But one film stood out, he says. “The film made us feel and think about this problem in a new way.”

Winner of the Grand Jury Prize for Documentary:
The House I Live In, directed by Eugene Jarecki

The film is about America’s criminal justice system, and why so many Americans are incarcerated. Jarecki says, “We began a journey many many years ago when someone I love in the audience very much ... she inspired me to be very concerend about social justice and it set me and my team on a journey to find out what’s happening to families like Manny’s” ... “it’s a terrible, tragic little secret” we have in America, he says. The criminal justice system is “tragically immoral,” Jarecki says and we need reform - putting people in jail for nonviolent crime must end, he says. “I thank those men and women who shared their stories with us.”

Updated 8:51 PM:

The last award of the night: 

Fast & Furious director Justin Lin is now on stage to present:

The Winner of the Grand Jury Prize - Dramatic
Beasts of the Southern Wild, directed by Benh Zeitlin

“With powerful and raw performances ... this film represents what independent film is all about,” Lin explains. Zeitlin brings some of the film’s cast and crew on stage with him. “I got nothing to say,” says the film’s star, Quvenzhane Wallis. “That's why I told you to talk to the mic.”  “We should have a ton of people up here,” Zeitlin says. “We had more freedom to make this film than any first-time director has had in America. I hope this movie is a flag that goes up to tell producers to allow filmmakers to be as wild as they could be to direct a film.” He thanks his family in Louisiana and seems happily overwhelmed. A big group hug is happening on stage. 

Cooper and Aselton are back on stage. “I’ve always wanted to be Parker Posey,” Aselton says and the night ends. Thanks to everyone out there for following us throughout the Ceremony - see you next year!

Last night, a small group of international cineastes gathered to celebrate the 2012 Sundance/NHK International Filmmaker Award. The intimate dinner helmed by Michelle Satter, director of Sundance Institute’s Feature Film Program, and Alesia Weston, the program’s associate director of international initiatives, was the perfect reunion for Sundance and longtime friends from NHK (the Japan Broadcasting Corporation), who have been teaming up for over 15 years to support filmmakers in the global arena. Asami Tomoko, Kazuko Taguchi, and Morihisa Matsudaira were present on behalf of NHK—along with last year’s award-winners, director-writer Benh Zeitlin and co-writer Lucy Alibar, whose film Beasts of the Southern Wild premiered last week in the Festival’s Dramatic Competition—to toast this year’s winner, Jens Assur for Close Far Away.

Feature Film Program Director Michelle Satter with NHK award winners. Photo by Colby D. Crossland.

The Scandinavian writer-director Assur describes Close Far Away as “a dramatic thriller about people’s behavior in vulnerable situations.” The title stems from the ripple effect caused by these behaviors – how individual actions create a complex web of outcomes both personally and globally. “The goal is to make a film that moves and touches a global audience,” remarked Assur as he thanked Sundance Institute and NHK for their support.  The annual award supports a visionary filmmaker not just with funding, but also by closely working with the winner throughout the year to provide creative and strategic support through the development, financing, and production of their film.

Assur will be filming in both Europe and Africa and he is especially grateful to receive support for his international production. He has previously made two short films – The Last Dog in Rwanda shot in Africa and Killing the Chickens to Save the Monkeys (playing at this year’s Festival) shot in Asia – and the filmmaker understands how some of the hardest work of international filming comes in the pre-production stage of readying for the journey. Preparing to start production this spring, Assur looks forward to the opportunity to learn from the experience. “My goal is to develop skills as a writer-director and to understand the producing process,” he added, “If you want to make unique projects, it’s not just about the funding, but how to carry out the project in a new way.”

Benh Zeitlin, Lucy Alibar, and Jens Assur at the NHK dinner. Photo by Colby D. Crossland.

With a background as a photojournalist and a close-knit relationship with DP Marek Wieser, Assur is planning for the visual imagery of the film to be quite intense. Although the look of the film will be a distinguishing factor, he insists that he turned from photography to film because he wanted to work in a medium that is “not about nice pictures, but about stories.” He added, “Film is about images, but with more tools to create story – music, dialogue, set design, architecture,” and he hopes to take full advantage of all such tools to transform his story. “My goal is to always bring an audience on a journey.” 

The high quality of the films produced after the support of the Sundance/NHK Award attests to its mission to raise international awareness for groundbreaking new voices. Case and point, just this week Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Elena, which received the Sundance/NHK Award in 2010 and is screening at this Festival, received four Golden Eagles, the Russian Oscars, for Best Picture, Director, Cinematography and Supporting Actress. Needless to say, the international community eagerly awaits Jens Assur’s feature debut.

In addition to the 181 of films being presented at this year’s Festival, there’s also an ambitious slate of panels, populated by an eclectic mix of artists, film industry professionals and an array of leading edge thinkers, politicians and academics. What they all have in common is a shared interest and investment in how film impacts and intersects with the culture at large. To that end, we’re conducting a series of conversations with some of the more notable participants whose expertise lies in disciplines, which on the surface might seem to have little to do with the filmmaking process. But after digging a little deeper, and it quickly becomes clear how their work has informed the art and craft of narrative and documentary storytelling and how film continues to inform and shape their research and ideas.

Professor, lecturer, author and sex columnist, Helen Fisher is a 21^st century public intellectual. In addition to being a researcher and faculty member of the Center for Human Evolution Studies in the Department of Anthropology at Rutgers University, she serves as Chief Scientific Advisor to dating site Chemistry.com. She’s written for outlets as varied as the New York Review of Books and O, the Oprah Magazine; and her TED talk on human love and cheating has been viewed by 1.5 million people online. Thanks to her five published books (the most recent of which is Why Him? Why Her?: How to Find and Keep Lasting Love from 2010) and extensive research into evolution, the human brain and personality type have helped to define our public discourse on sex, love, marriage, and gender. In anticipation of Dr. Fisher’s participation in “Control Factor,” a panel discussion about incorporating science into narratives, we spoke with Professor Fisher about using film as a messenger and receptor for our notions about love and romance.  

It would be interesting to talk about the research you’ve done on romance and human brain in terms of film. What effect do films have on our romantic selves, and on our expectations for sex and romantic connection?

First of all, humans are highly visual animals. The smell centers of the brain are way reduced, and the visual centers and verbal centers are extremely overdeveloped compared to any other animal on this planet. So we can very naturally get into a film because the brain is well built for it. Throughout human evolution, people have been reenacting the hunt, reenacting all kinds of dramas. Drama is very old in the human animal. We can very easily get into the reality of the film—it so easily rings true in the human brain. Once we had the technology to reproduce reality in terms of film, it became instantly popular and will be forever.

Film and film on television is like the global campfire. For millions of years we sat around a campfire and the only people we knew were there, so we gossiped about the people on the other side of the campfire. But now we gossip and talk about films. I don’t know my neighbors, but we both saw the same movie. You and I can’t talk about somebody in my life because you don’t know him, and can’t talk about somebody in your life because I don’t know him, but we can both talk about the film that we saw last week. We sit around this global campfire to form our opinions, to learn how things went bad, how we could do things differently. It’s a great social integrator, and it can set standards very powerfully. It’s a great learning device for showing what not to do in a relationship and what can work in a relationship. And we make all kinds of judgments based on what we’ve seen.

If film appeals to our brain more than other art forms do, it stands to reason that information—and misinformation—about love that we get from film is going to have a real world effect on us.

We’re very susceptible to what we can see and hear. Film has the power to deliver things in an art form that the brain easily sucks up, and we can be less critical of film because it’s so palatable. In some ways I do think film is skewing our understanding of romance. We’ve evolved three distinctly different brain systems for mating and reproduction: one is a sex drive, the second is romantic love, and the third brain system is a deep sense of attachment. The vast majority of films focus on the second of those three brain systems: romantic love. We tend to overdramatize that part of it—though it is very dramatic, of course. We can walk away from the movies with an outsized belief of the importance of romantic love, the transience, power, and despair of romantic love. And not celebrate another brain system which is equally powerful. A film like On Golden Pond was almost one of a kind in that it was deeply about attachment. It’s a very sophisticated brain system, and films don’t tend to appeal to it as readily. It’s a skewed view of life. We don’t all live for love, we don’t all kill ourselves for love. But I have to say that a lot of people do—they don’t kill themselves as often for attachment or the sex drive. You don’t hear people saying I was deeply attached for 20 years and I killed myself when she didn’t call me in the morning. But I’ve been impressed by filmmakers being so deeply intuitive about the expression of romantic love. They tend to get it right, what the feeling is like, the craziness and focused attention on another individual. It’s a lot like the poets. They’ve been able to describe romantic love extremely well without knowing modern studies like mine. You don’t have to be a scientist to get this one right.

Of the three brain systems you describe, pornography exists for desire.

Of course. But in a regular, non-pornographic movie theater, if you counted up the number of words expended by actors and actresses on romance, as opposed to those about the sex drive, you’d find many more about romantic love. Unless it’s a porn flick, which is a different kind of thing.

You mean that even the films that are more direct or explicit about sex are setups for discussions of romance, for expectations for romance?

Sex is embedded in the romantic element of the movie, and the central element is romance. Which is more realistic, by the way. The sex drive does trigger feelings of romantic love. Any kind of sexual activity drives up the level of dopamine in the brain, and can push you over the threshold into falling in love. And with orgasm, there’s a real flood of oxytocin and vasopressin that are linked to feelings of deep attachment. These three brain systems often play out in different ways, but the central component seems to be romantic love. We have a very western view of romantic love in all of our movies. People in Asia, particularly the Chinese, have long been terrified of romantic love. They regard it as fickle, that it can topple the entire system of arranged marriages. There are many places in the world that don’t celebrate romantic love, whereas we seem to regard it as the very core of any kind of relationship. And even though we see the danger in it, it’s almost not explicit. You see people in these movies killing themselves for each other, but somehow you walk away from a movie thinking how blissful this feeling is when you’re in it, rather than how dangerous this thing is when you embark upon it.

Because we can’t help desiring it, we can’t put that part of ourselves away, we want to feel that. With Hollywood being a dream factory, that’s always going to be a part of what we want and get from films.

We also get an unrealistic body image situation. Almost all of the main players are better looking than anyone in the audience. Unrealistically good looking.  

Which presents problems in terms of body image and expectations, but there’s also our relationship with actors on screen: we want them to be attractive, and we want to desire them.

When we put people into the brain scanner and had them look at pictures of people they were madly in love with, as well as people who called forth no positive or negative feelings, we found that when people looked at the neutral photographs there was more brain activity in a particular brain region linked with feelings of pleasure when you look at somebody who’s good looking. Filmmakers know that. So I’m not surprised that we gravitate towards [good-looking people]. We all want to be good looking, and the movies are a dreamland, so why have it call forth our worse fears of being short, fat and ugly? Which is why I like documentaries, because we are short, fat and ugly, and they’re real. I’m not really going for the dream.

I guess I go for both, depending on my mood or desire. There’s still a thrill I can get when that part of my brain is accessed.

I stick to documentaries because I’ve got enough of a dreamland going on in my head. So when I go to the movies I’m not going to be entertained, but to be informed. As an anthropologist, I’m dying to see what real people are doing and how they’re doing it. Going into dreamland actually doesn’t satisfy me. Most people do go for that, though, to get outside of their regular selves. Walking down a busy street during rush hour, you can instantly pick out a pretty face. And you feel better. You literally feel better. And it’s because you’ve triggered this dopamine system to give you a sense of pleasure. Filmmakers want people to have enough fun to tell their friends, so they’re going to put in pretty faces. They don’t know it [in terms of brain functions], but they know it intuitively.

There’s something more than escape, though. You’re actively looking for and feeling pleasure.

You’re looking for escape into pleasure. Even a very scary movie is going to drive up dopamine in the brain. Excitement drives it up, and you come out feeling stimulated. It not only gives you motivation, stimulation and focus, but energy. People feel well when they’re energetic.

You’ve just given me two great ways to describe why I love movies and why I love living in New York City.

(Laughs) There’s a lot of high dopamine levels in cities. People who like a lot of stimulation go to the big cities. I often think that all I’m really doing in life is confirming what everybody already knows but they don’t know why they know it.

But it’s interesting how often we behave in the opposite, too, denying ourselves. Maybe we’re protecting ourselves from what we need.

Movies are a place where people do let themselves go. They might never let themselves go and buy a Harley Davidson, but they’ll go see a movie about Harleys. They don’t want to live with horrors, but they’ll go to a horror movie. Film is a beautiful place to express all those secret parts of you. When we’re watching these people on screen, they are ourselves. We’re watching ourselves. For those two and half hours, we are Angelina Jolie.

Marina Abramovic is ready for her close-up. Eight months after the completion of her historic retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art—the first large-scale exhibit for a solo performance artist in the museum’s history—the artist was present at Sundance for the world premiere of Matthew Akers’s powerful documentary portrait, The Artist is Present.

Using the MoMA show as a launching pad for examining the Abramovic’s life and work, the film explores the nature of performance, art, time, and existence and dedicates much of its running time to the astoundingly epic live performance that accompanied the show. For every day of the run, for every hour that the museum was open, Abramovic sat stoically in a chair in the middle of a squared-off space where museum-goers were invited to sit across from her and look into her eyes -- one at a time, for as long as they wished. Meanwhile, upstairs in the gallery, live performers, many of them nude, recreated works from Abramovic’s 40-year career. The show became a phenomenon, eliciting long lines, attention-hungry scenesters, public weeping, and even a video game. In the process, it made performance art a topic of popular discourse. The show also made Yugoslav-born Abramovic a cover-girl celebrity at the age of 65. We caught up with Akers and Abramovic in the atrium of the Park City Marriott, where they were just finishing up a chocolate break.

How did you become involved with Marina?

Matthew Akers: My producer Jeff Dupre met Marina at a dinner by happenstance. He happened to be sitting in between Marina and Klaus Biesenbach, the curator, and they were talking over him about what they were about to do at MoMA. Jeff told her about what he’d been up to, the projects I had collaborated with him on—Carrier, which was a ten hour, ten part series, and Circus, in which I lived with a circus for a year. I think Marina liked the notion that we were observational filmmakers with this body of work, for which we invested a lot of time. When I went up to meet Marina for the first time I was charmed by her, even though I was skeptical of performance art. I was really exhausted after living with the circus and trying to penetrate that insular world, so I needed assurance that she was going to give me total access.

Marina Abramovic: I saw this as a really important moment, that if we made a film it could reach the larger public—a completely different type of audience that performance art [normally] doesn’t have. So I give him the key and say, “Let’s go into this adventure.” Plus, of course I checked on what they’ve done before, and I saw that they are completely crazy, hardcore guys, who never give up. This was something I really needed.

Matthew Akers: This was a historic moment for performance art—the first time that a performance artist was being given this sort of platform at a major museum, in which she would be doing a performance that would be the longest of her solo career. Right there we knew it make for an interesting story.

Your art is based in exposing yourself and making yourself vulnerable, but documentary filmmaking is different. Were there any lines drawn, where privacy became a different equation?

Marina Abramovic: No, there was no privacy at all. I literally gave him the key. At 6:00 AM in the morning he’s there with a crew, and when I wake up there’s a camera at my head. I’m sick like a dog, vomiting in the bathroom—he’s there to film. There wasn’t any barrier at all.

Matthew Akers: I can’t recount the number of times she dragged me into the bathroom.

Marina Abramovic: I can’t pee without him, it’s true. I really can’t. (Laughs). It really became a part of my life.

Film, by nature, is so different from what you’re doing, where the element of time is such that there’s no editing, and the endurance is part of it. How do you feel about your work being represented on film?

Marina Abramovic: Documentation is so important for me in performance work. I hate photography, when in a lecture about performance art the historian uses slides. It’s not the right material, because you’ve frozen just one image, where performance is about movement, about sound and process. So video was always the best material. I documented from a very early stage. Then, with “The Artist is Present” piece, I just made a video installation in the Garage in Moscow of 736 hours of unedited material, with every person sitting in front of me in real time. But this is something for an art audience, to be presented in museums and galleries. You have to find a solution so that you can have a bridge to the real audience that doesn’t know what performance art is, that has no access to even the idea of this form of art. That was this film for me, to bridge that. You can’t show 736 hours, but I think you can get a good sense of the time with how Matthew edited the material.

Matthew Akers: This is something we thought a lot about when we set out to make the film. We knew that it was ephemeral and that the true transformative power of the work was in seeing it firsthand. So what is the film? Is it documentation? Is it something else? We hope that the film is its own work of art. It’s our subjective view of it. So in some ways, constructing an artifice and making a work of art like we’ve done is a more accurate representation of what was there.

Marina Abramovic: I want to kill them sometimes because they put the music over the real sound of the piece, stuff like that. I had to give up control, and the results have to be accepted. Otherwise I would have a nervous breakdown sitting there for hours, saying I want this or want that. It would never come to anything. So this is really a film. A film about a performance artist. And I couldn’t put any of my ideas inside of it. It has to be his.

Matthew Akers: You like it though, right?

Marina Abramovic: What do you mean, I like? I cry from the beginning to the end. It’s ridiculous. I have not any kind of distance. It’s too emotional for me. But then the public cried too. I think we have to sell the tickets with handkerchiefs. That’s the new thing.

I think it’s wonderful how much you’ve chosen to focus on the people sitting across from Marina in the film. You make me see what she’s seeing, and it’s incredibly powerful.

Matthew Akers: For me, the takeaway ultimately is that it’s not actually about Marina.

Marina Abramovic: Exactly, yeah.

Matthew Akers: It’s about the mirror, about the reflection in her eyes. These profound concepts, about how do you have a genuine human connection, what do you think about time?  As a former skeptic of this particular piece, it’s really been inspirational. It’s made me think about myself.

Marina Abramovic: I like so much this moment with James Franco, where the guy asks if he’s an actor. Because though we had all these glamorous people sitting in front of me, it just wasn’t about that, it eliminates all of this.

Matthew Akers: It was important to have that moment to pose the question of if you’re acting. Because that’s one of the central questions of the film. At one point before The Artist is Present begins, Klaus says the risk is whether or not it ventures into being theatrical. And I think that’s where we do question you and your theatricality, because you do have that tendency. There are a lot of different sides of Marina—as there are with all of us—and I witnessed all of them. But what I’ve realized is that in spite of her theatricality at times, what’s relevant is the power of the work. Despite the fact that she’s a great artist, a glamorous art world icon and superstar with a sometimes glamorous life, I don’t think it has any bearing on what happened there, in that charged charismatic space.

Well the rules of the piece itself take that all out of it.

Marina Abramovic: It was very strict, yeah.

I’m interested in the film as an extension of, or answer to, the gallery show. Whether or not you’re a skeptic of performance art, or even just skeptical of how it can be represented in that environment, it was thrilling to see those ideas in play. To me that was part of the exhibit, and now part of the film: how do you represent these things?

Marina Abramovic: And to re-perform was for me essential, to give up this thing that’s it’s me, me, me, my ego, and nobody can perform my pieces. So that the work can live without you. Because performance art is timeless art. You have to let it go, and you have to let it go while you’re alive.

Was it difficult for you to let go?

Marina Abramovic: No, it started when I was so fed up seeing everyone taking and copying—MTV, fashion, advertising, the new theater—and they weren’t giving credit to the original pieces. They would just take it and steal it. Not just from me but from all these other artists of my generation. I said if you want to do this, do it the right way: ask for permission, pay for permission, and say where the piece came from. This is why I did Seven Easy Pieces at Guggenheim, and when it came time for my retrospective, I had to do the same with my work. It was the natural thing to do. And it’s so liberating. It was important to be detached from the material, to get another point of view on the whole thing.

And you’re doing that on several fronts. You’re giving up control to let somebody else make a film of you, and you’re casting actors to play you, in a sense, in the gallery. I was fascinated by how the piece would change, that not only is someone else representing your work, but that…

Marina Abramovic: … they could put their own charisma, their own self inside of it.

Matthew Akers: They’re not actors, though. They’re performers.

Right, of course, there’s that distinction. But isn’t there a theatricality to the piece? When you enter that space, it’s a kind of theater, no?

Matthew Akers: (Flashes a disapproving look)

Marina Abramovic: It’s a kind of... but it’s incredible to me, why American media have to analyze everything, why they have to, as he shows in the film, talk about this provocateur from ex-Yugoslavia, and why this Fox newswoman says everything was about nudity. Nobody sees the poetical thing. Only taking this kind of spectacular aspect and never getting into what something really means, taking it seriously. It really pisses me off, always. Why does American culture always have to be this way? You’re American, tell me.

I don’t know the answer, but I’m offended by it too.

Marina Abramovic: I want to know (theatrically pounding the table). It’s making me crazy.

So why do you respond so negatively to the idea that there’s a theatrical quality to it?

Matthew Akers: Because it was real. Everything was real. Yes, you can have a real experience [in theater]. But in theater there’s a proscenium, a threshold. This is an act of participation. The public completes the work. The museum worked very hard to minimize the risk to Marina, but people could have attacked her. She has a history of doing things where the public literally could do anything they wanted, and we tried to point out in the film how this is the difference. There’s a real element of risk. She could get hurt, physically, by others but also by herself, maintaining that position in the chair. Risk is an important part of it.

In the film Klaus says something to the effect that you’re never not performing. Is that accurate? Is that fair?

Marina Abramovic: If he perceives it that way, that’s for him. But I don’t think so. Whatever I do I’m really real. I always think performance is pretending you’re someone else, but I’m always me. So I don’t know that I perform.

Matthew Akers: Even when you’re not performing—and I think that’s what he means—you are so devoted to the work, that all of your energy, your private…

Marina Abramovic: Like having a mission. It’s a mission for me.

Matthew Akers: … and public life goes towards the work. You don’t have a normal life. You don’t have children, what people consider the normal trappings.

Marina Abramovic: Who wants to live with me? It’s insane. It’s an incredible feeling of duty, a commitment to the cause.

The word medium always comes to mind with your work. That you’re the medium through which things are happening.

Marina Abramovic: I feel like that.

And you feel that way beyond the work itself?

Marina Abramovic: At the beginning I was so afraid that the energy would not come back, or I would be absent. But now, I’m feeling really like a receiver and sender of energy. That I don’t need anything anymore—I don’t need the structure, the subject, the story to be told. I just need to be. That’s the most difficult, to get to that kind of simplicity. I don’t know where it’s going to go.

Were you haunted by the faces you confronted during The Artist is Present?

Marina Abramovic: No, this was the best time of my life, doing that. I was living 100%. Whatever I did.

Were they present afterwards, the faces?

Marina Abramovic: You know I still have them in my head, and I see them on the street. The eyes catch, and you just go to each other and kiss. Non-verbal communication is the strongest there is. Scientifically it’s proved that you create waves in your brain that sub-consciously go deeper than anything you can say with words.

There’s almost a religious quality to it that the film gets at—not to diminish it by putting it in that box—but in the sense that there’s a medium through which people come to some transcendent moment. And I think you’re capturing that on everybody’s faces.

Matthew Akers: I personally don’t subscribe to any spiritual or religious connotation, but I think it’s unavoidable to talk about it. For everyone it’s different. For some, it’s a spirituality, a transformation. But I’m not even sure what those words mean. For me, all I can say is it’s about what it means to be human, to be alive. I’m here, I’m existing in time. What does it mean to exist with others, what is my reality, what does time mean to me?

Marina Abramovic: In touch with yourself and another person. The present. (Holding out a chocolate) You have to eat this. I want to have your expression. Please. It’s our religious moment in Sundance.

Day Eight of #Sundance on Instagram takes you across the country for Sundance Film Festival U.S.A and back to Park City for Joseph Gordon-Levitt's "hitRECord at the Movies".

Don't forget to use #sundance when posting to Instagram so your photo has a chance of making our daily roundup. And also follow us on Instagram at username sundanceinstitute.

These activities, as well as a panel at the Festival, are part of the Sundance Institute Science-in-Film Initiative, which is made possible by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The Initiative supports the development and exhibition of new independent film projects that explore science and technology themes or that depict scientists, engineers and mathematicians in engaging and innovative ways.

“We are delighted to partner with the Sundance Institute for our tenth year of integrating science and technology themes and characters with the most adventurous new filmmakers and screenwriters,” said Doron Weber, Vice President, Programs at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. ”We are particularly pleased that for the first time ever, both of this year’s prize-winning features were developed with seed money from the foundation’s national film program which nurtures projects from its six participating film schools and four screenwriting development partners. These two remarkable but completely different films attest to the enormous range of possibility for filmmakers who tackle science and technollogy subjects and for audiences eager to enter new worlds.”

“Year after year, we are impressed with the innovative ways in which filmmakers explore themes and characters with a passion for math, science and technology,“ said Keri Putnam, Executive Director, Sundance Institute. “As the importance of these disciplines and teaching them continues to be discussed on a national level, these artists are using film to contribute to that dialogue.”

Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prizes

Robot & Frank, directed by Jake Schreier and written by Christopher Ford, and Valley of Saints, directed and written by Musa Syeed, have each been awarded the 2012 Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize and will split the $20,000 cash award by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Now in its tenth year, the Prize is selected by a jury of film and science professionals and presented to outstanding feature films focusing on science or technology as a theme, or depicting a scientist, engineer or mathematician as a major character.

In Robot & Frank, a curmudgeonly older dad’s grown kids install a robot as his caretaker. The film stars Frank Langella, Susan Sarandon, James Marsden and Liv Tyler. The jury presented the award to the film for its “humane and prescient portrait of the relationship between an aging father and his non-human caregiver, and for raising profound questions about the role of technology in our collective future.”

In Valley of Saints, Gulzar plans to run away from the war and poverty surrounding his village in Kashmir with his best friend, but a beautiful young woman researching the dying lake leads him to contemplate a different future. The film stars Gulzar Ahmad Bhat, Mohammed Afzal Sofi and Neelofar Hamid. The jury presented the award to the film for its “brave, poetic and visually arresting evocation of a beautiful but troubled region, and for it's moving, nuanced and accurate depiction of the relationship between a local boatman and a young woman scientist whose research challenges the status quo and offers hope for a restored eco-system.”

Previous Alfred P. Sloan Prize Winners include: Mike Cahill and Brit Marling, Another Earth (2011); Diane Bell, Obselidia (2010); Max Mayer, Adam (2009); Alex Rivera, Sleep Dealer (2008); Shi-Zheng Chen, Dark Matter (2007); Andrucha Waddington, The House of Sand (2006); Werner Herzog, Grizzly Man (2005), Shane Carruth, Primer (2004) and Marc Decena, Dopamine (2003). Several past winners have also been awarded Jury Awards at the Festival, including the Grand Jury Prize for Primer, the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award for Sleep Dealer and the Excellence in Cinematography Award for Obselidia.

As previously announced, this year’s Alfred P. Sloan jury members are:

Tracy Day
Tracy Day co-founded the World Science Festival in 2008 with world-renowned physicist and best-selling author Brian Greene. She serves as CEO and oversees the creative and programmatic offerings of the World Science Festival. She is a four-time National News Emmy® award-winning journalist and has produced live and documentary programming for the nation’s preeminent television news divisions for over two decades. At ABC News she was producer for This Week with David Brinkley, editorial and field producer for Nightline and story editor for the news magazine, Day One. Tracy has produced documentaries, specials and live town meeting broadcasts for PBS, The Discovery Channel, CNN, Lifetime and CNBC. In addition to Emmy® Awards, she won a Hugo Award, a 2004 Clarion Award and the CINE Golden Eagle for investigative journalism. She has been an adjunct professor in the Leadership and the Arts program at the Sanford Institute for Public Policy.

Helen Fisher
Helen Fisher, PhD, is a biological Anthropologist at Rutgers University. She studies the evolution, brain systems (fMRI) and cross-cultural patterns of romantic love, mate choice, marriage, adultery, divorce, gender differences in the brain, personality, temperament, and business personalities. She has written five internationally best selling books, including WHY HIM? WHY HER?; WHY WE LOVE; and ANATOMY OF LOVE. She lectures worldwide. Among her speeches are those at the World Economic Forum at Davos, TED, United Nations, Smithsonian, Salk Institute, Harvard Medical School and Aspen Institute. She publishes widely in academic and lay journals. For her work in the media, Helen received the American Anthropological Association's Distinguished Service Award.

Dr. Robert J. Full
Dr. Robert J. Full is a Chancellor’s and Goldman Professor of Integrative Biology and Director of the Poly-PEDAL Laboratory at the University of California Berkeley, where he has led a focused international effort to demonstrate the value of integrative biology and biological inspiration by the formation of interdisciplinary collaborations. Professor Full serves on the advisory boards of Harvard’s Bio-inspired Design Wyss Institute, Research Corporation for Science Advancement and the Science Education for New Civic Engagements and Responsibilities. Professor Full is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and received an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award. Professor Full has authored over 200 contributions and has delivered over 300 national and international presentations. He has presented his research at TED, Industrial Light and Magic, Blizzard Entertainment, Tippett Studios, Google, Yahoo Tech Pulse, and ACM SIGGRAPH. Professor Full has been featured in television shows on PBS, BBC, Discovery Channel, the History Channel, Animal Planet and National Geographic.

Gwyn Lurie
Writer and producer Gwyn Lurie adapted the Oliver Sacks story The Last Hippie into the film The Music Never Stopped, which starred J.K. Simmons and Julia Ormond and premiered at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival as the Salt Lake City Gala Film. Gwyn also produced the award-winning documentary Voices From the Attic about her mother's years in hiding during the holocaust. Before venturing onto the creative side of the film business, she worked as an executive at both 20th Century Fox and Interscope. Gwyn has written for Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston among others. She is currently adapting the Swedish film Simple Simon for Fox 2000 and also serving a four year term as a member on the Montecito Union School Board, to which she was elected in 2010.

Alex Rivera
Alex Rivera is a filmmaker and media artist. His work tells Latino stories through a highly stylized cinematic language and has been screened at the Museum of Modern Art, The Berlin International Film Festival, New Directors/New Films, The Guggenheim Museum, PBS, Telluride and other international venues. His first feature film, Sleep Dealer, premiered at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival where it won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award and Alfred P. Sloan Prize. Rivera is a Sundance Institute Fellow, USA Artist Fellow, Creative Capital Grantee and a Rockefeller Fellow.

Sundance Institute / Alfred P. Sloan Commissioning Grant

Flood (Writer/director: Katy Scoggin) — A daughter journeys to bring her creationist dad down to earth.

Katy Scoggin looks for humor in life’s most mundane and humiliating corners. Though a New Yorker, she was raised by evangelicals in a smoggy valley east of LA. She studied sculpture and German on scholarship at Washington University in St. Louis and filmmaking as a Fulbright scholar in Berlin. While in film school at NYU, she held a graduate assistantship in cinematography. Later, she was an associate producer on Laura Poitras’s award-winning documentary The Oath (2010). She still works as a producer and cinematographer at Praxis Films.

Sundance Institute / Alfred P. Sloan Lab Fellowship

Operator (Co-writer/director: Logan Kibens; Co-writer: Sharon Greene) — In this existential comedy, when a programmer is hired to create the ideal personality for an automated call center, his attempts to quantify what it means to be human throws his life into chaos.

Logan Kibens has written and directed over 50 short films. She was awarded the 2011 HBO/DGA Directing Fellowship and was selected as one of Film Independent’s 2011 Project:Involve fellows after completing her CalArts thesis film, Recessive. The short has screened nationally and internationally at film festivals including Outfest, Frameline, Reeling and Zinegoak, among others. Kibens worked as a commercial editor for eight years, and is an award-winning projections designer for theatre and dance.

Sharon Greene is a Chicago playwright turned screenwriter. Her play, Fake Lake, was on the
Best Plays of 2008 list of both Time Out Chicago and the Chicago Tribune, and was supported by a grant from the NEA. A recent graduate of USC's Writing for Screen and Television program, her original television pilot, “Cherryland,” was nominated for the Student Humanitas Prize for Drama.

Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
Founded in 1934, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation is a non-profit philanthropy that makes grants in science, technology and economic performance. This Sloan-Sundance partnership forms part of a broader national program by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to stimulate leading artists in film, television, and theater; to create more realistic and compelling stories about science and technology; and to challenge existing stereotypes about scientists, engineers, and mathematicians in the popular imagination. Over the past decade, the Foundation has partnered with some of the top film schools in the country – including AFI, Carnegie Mellon, Columbia, NYU, UCLA, and USC – and established annual awards in screenwriting and film production and an annual first-feature award for alumni. The Foundation has also started an annual Sloan Feature Film Prize at the Hamptons International Film Festival and initiated new screenwriting and film production workshops at the Hamptons and Tribeca Film Festival and with Film Independent. As more finished films emerge from this developmental pipeline—four features were completed this year, with half a dozen more on deck—the foundation has also partnered with the Coolidge Corner Theater and the Arthouse Convergence to screen science films in up to 40 theaters nationwide. The Foundation also has an active theater program and commissions over a dozen science plays each year from the Ensemble Studio Theater, Manhattan Theatre Club and Playwright Horizons.

The Sundance Film Festival
A program of the non-profit Sundance Institute, the Festival has introduced global audiences to some of the most ground-breaking films of the past two decades, including sex, lies, and videotape, Maria Full of Grace, The Cove, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, An Inconvenient Truth, Precious, Trouble the Water, and Napoleon Dynamite, and through its New Frontier initiative, has showcased the cinematic works of media artists including Isaac Julien, Doug Aitken, Pierre Huyghe, Jennifer Steinkamp, and Matthew Barney. The 2012 Sundance Film Festival sponsors include: Presenting Sponsors – Entertainment Weekly, HP, Acura, Sundance Channel and Chase SapphireSM; Leadership Sponsors – Adobe Systems Incorporated, Bing™, Canon, DIRECTV, Focus Forward, a partnership between GE and CINELAN, Southwest Airlines, Sprint and Yahoo!; Sustaining Sponsors – Bertolli® Frozen Meal Soups, FilterForGood®, a partnership between Brita® and Nalgene®, Grey Goose® Vodka, Hilton HHonors and Waldorf Astoria Hotels & Resorts, L'Oréal Paris, Stella Artois®, Timberland, Time Warner Inc. and YouTubeTM. Sundance Institute recognizes critical support from the Utah Governor's Office of Economic Development, and the State of Utah as Festival Host State. The support of these organizations will defray costs associated with the 10-day Festival and the nonprofit Sundance Institute's year-round programs for independent film and theatre artists. www.sundance.org/festival

Sundance Institute
Sundance Institute is a global nonprofit organization founded by Robert Redford in 1981. Through its artistic development programs for directors, screenwriters, producers, composers and playwrights, the Institute seeks to discover and support independent film and theatre artists from the United States and around the world, and to introduce audiences to their new work. The Institute promotes independent storytelling to inform, inspire, and unite diverse populations around the globe. Internationally recognized for its annual Sundance Film Festival, Sundance Institute has nurtured such projects as Born into Brothels, Trouble the Water, Son of Babylon, Amreeka, An Inconvenient Truth, Spring Awakening, I Am My Own Wife, Light in the Piazza and Angels in America. Join Sundance Institute on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

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For images go to http://press.sundance.org/press.

Those who came to see the world premiere of Price Check on Wednesday night at the Eccles Theater were treated to something like a double feature. First came the film, an entertaining and poignant office saga about an overeducated, 36 year-old supermarket executive (played by Eric Mabius) who gets swept up in the crazy charisma of his new boss (Parker Posey), and risks his marriage and wellbeing for the rush of attraction, affirmation, and sudden purpose. Then came an extended, hilariously bizarre Q&A that touched on horrible bosses, adultery, air castles and donkeys. Responsible were director Michael Walker along with cast members Posey, Mabius, Josh Pais, Victor Cruz and Cheyenne Jackson.

Q: I just want to know where the inspiration came for the story.

Michael Walker: Mostly from my friends who were going through things, turning 40 and struggling between work and family, and having to give up the dreams of what they wanted to do in their 20s. And Susan was a character that I had wanted to write for a while.

Q: I really enjoyed the film. I wanted to ask Parker Posey: how much did you have to ad-lib? And what did you bring to the role?

Parker Posey: Absolutely nothing. (Laughter) It was a great script. Mike and I talked about how what Susan wants, Susan gets. She’s so self-entitled, she thinks she deserves everything she wants. She’s just one of those monstrous crazy people. And I had a good time playing her. It was all on the page, really. I thought it was interesting, a woman’s ambition around having a baby. I never thought Susan would be a great mother. But she wants a baby. And she wants it now. There’s something really disturbing and I think darkly funny about that. It’s something that I’ve seen. Why are you laughing? (to Josh Pais)

Josh Pais: You’re funny to me. (Laughter)

Q: Eric, can you share with us what it was like for you to make this movie?

Eric Mabius: It was probably the tightest schedule I’ve ever had on a project. And I don’t think that translates on film: looking at it is seems like there was a lot more time. There was no time for rehearsal, so what Michael put into motion was on the page. Fortunately Parker was quite willing to play, as we all saw.

Parker Posey: Josh, do you want to talk about it?

Josh Pais: We had a lot of fun. That was the experience. 16 days, the whole thing. It was fast.

Parker Posey: Talk about how cheap it was.

Josh Pais: How cheap it was?

Parker Posey: I brought my own bed to set. I have a wheely cot, and I brought that to sleep. It was not glamorous. “Oh, you did a little indie.” Yeah, it was a really indie movie. Suffering and painful. It was hard. I know you’re laughing. But it’s really hard what I do. (Laughter)

Q: Parker Posey, you were phenomenal. We had a question about the budget. How much did it cost?

Michael Walker: It’s not really that interesting, how much it costs. I’ve seen films that cost less that look better, and I’ve seen films that cost a lot more that aren’t as good. You can look it up online if you really want to know.

Q: Were you going for any specific message about ambition, sacrifice or happiness in the ending?

Michael Walker: I was going for something where you would make up your own mind. Some people who read the script didn’t understand what the problem was—he was with his wife in the end and had a nice job and what’s the problem? There’s something to be said for that. I have different thoughts on it depending on the day you ask me.

Victor Cruz: It’s one of those situations where people make choices, and the truth is you can’t judge if you’re not in that position. So I say here’s a guy with a $5000 suit, a $300 haircut, and now his boss wants to sleep with him. I’m not saying that was the right thing. I’m just saying don’t judge. (Laughter)

Eric Mabius: It’s a lot like in life, when you adjust to whatever the new normal is because you don’t have a lot of choices, or better choices.

Parker Posey: What was the question? I was thinking about something else while you guys were talking.

Josh Pais: The question is what do you think of my work?

Parker Posey: I think that Josh Pais is the most highly underrated actor in New York City. Oh the question was about ambition? I’m like Victor, I don’t want to judge. For me it’s kind of a portrait of a really dark lady. She’s ambitious and she’s shallow. I don’t know, I’m talking about myself. Cheyenne, what do you think about the entire movie?

Cheyenne Jackson: I think it’s about happiness. What is your happiness? That’s deep.

Parker Posey: Everyone is different. You cannot measure someone’s experience on the other side. It can change day to day. That’s why judging people is useless. Because we’re all evolving.

Michael Walker: If my 20 year old self would definitely have a different opinion than my 40 year old self.

Q: From Party Girl to Price Check, Parker, how many Sundance films have you been in, and how do you choose such good films?

Parker Posey: I’ve been in 500 Sundance movies. Since 1915 I’ve been coming to the festival. I remember the prairie lands, the cows and the horses and donkeys. The chickens. And there’s a castle that I live in, it’s made of air. It’s a beautiful place. I have a Roman chair, there, in the air castle where I live with my donkey. You know. Is that what you wanted? (Laughter)

On the surface, films couldn’t be more different than Mark Webber’s The End of Love and Antonio Campos’s Simon Killer. Whereas Webber’s film is a warm, handmade portrait of a young single father struggling to make ends meet (both emotionally and financially) as he raises his 3 year-old son (played by Webber’s own son, Isaac). Campos’s film, on the other hand, is a stylishly composed, bone-chilling look at a young man’s slow descent into criminality and violence. Yet they have one major thing in common: both films were produced without a conventional script. In each case, dialogue was often improvised and many sequences only came together on set. Webber and Campos sat down with us during the Festival to compare notes, pick each other’s brains about how they balanced chaos and control on set, and confess how much they secretly identified with each other’s protagonists. 

Were the non-scripted aspects of your films essential to the projects from day one, or did they evolve through developing your ideas?

Mark Webber: For me it was essential. The whole movie was built around my son, who is not acting in the film. So it was the only way we could really do it. It was interesting because when I brought in the other actors they kind of had to match up to what my son was doing.

Antonio Campos: It’s a pretty tough act to follow, actually. It’s harder to do it when someone’s so seamless, because they don’t even know what a camera is, they’re being. So everyone else has to be. Was everything very outlined in terms of, ok, this is when I’m going to wake up in the morning and give him breakfast?

Mark Webber: The outline was very concrete. It was like, here’s the emotional beats we need to hit within our routine, and here’s the plot points that need to happen. It was concrete so that the stakes were right going in, and whatever Isaac and I did would be right.

Antonio Campos: We had an 8-page outline going in. I had an idea of what this was going to be—a guy moves to Paris, etc., a basic skeleton. And then I started talking to Brady [Corbet] about it, knowing he would play Simon, and we had a really tight structure before going in to shoot. So the outline was pretty straightforward. There was some very basic dialogue, and then the way it worked was that when I went to Paris I started writing scenes out that I had in my head. When more actors came along we started rehearsing and sometimes I’d say, ok, these are the emotional beats of the scene, and then figure out the dialogue, which I’d go and write down. There were a few scenes that were purely improvised. We’d do it once, then several times, then we started shooting, and by the time we got to the third or fourth take, though we’d started off improvised we ended up scripted.

Mark Webber: I love that, I love working like that.

Antonio Campos: It’s really satisfying. You have to be on your toes the whole time, though. One of the things I had to do was make sure to review the dailies every day in order to know what I’d gotten and what I needed to get.

Mark Webber: Yeah, that’s what I had to do. Every day we’d dump the footage off into the drive and sit with my DP and watch it, and make sure we got what we needed. And if we didn’t we’d attempt to get it the next day. It’s crucial when you’re making films the way we’re making them—you need to constantly be reviewing it.

Antonio Campos: You’re so much more sensitive. Because every day is going to be even more of a whirlwind than a film set already is. I don’t know if I could do it again right away, though, because it’s so exhausting.

Mark Webber: It’s crazy exhausting working like that, man. I have a question about the music. Did you know that that’s the music you were going to be using?

It’s interesting how each of you approach music in your films. Simon Killer has very important instances of source music as well as a subtle moody score, while The End of Love doesn’t have a score at all. Do you feel that with the organic way these films are put together that a traditional score makes less sense?

Antonio Campos: We added a score pretty late in the game. I was going with no score for a long time, and then Saunder [Jurriaans], who did the music for Martha Marcy May Marlene and another film of ours called Two Gates of Sleep, kept asking: let me do something, I can do something. I was like, ok, let’s try something that’s really minimal, and let’s try something that plays against the pop. We found that the music was organic, it had a kind of primal quality. In that case, I felt we found a reason for the music. But normally I wouldn’t have used music.

Mark Webber: I played around with trying to have a score, but then it became another movie. It started to feel like something else.

Antonio Campos: You don’t need it. The emotions of the scene are so strong the way they are, that you don’t need to augment it with music. And then playing against what’s going on in the scene wouldn’t be right for your movie.

Mark Webber: The reason I think the music and score in your movie works so well is aesthetically the way your film is shot and composed it lends itself to hearing a score. Visually, your movie is stunning. Whereas my movie is very stripped down. It feels almost at moments like a documentary in a way.

Your film looks more documentary-like and improvisational, but I’m sure that those were also conceived shots to some degree. Can you talk about how crucial that is, that considering how open things are in terms of action, actually capturing it needs to be controlled?

Mark Webber: My whole mantra was “Prepare to let go.” There’s so much preparation required in order to just let things be. My cinematographer kind of lived with me for a month. Almost like having a reality crew follow you around. We were able to see what works when you do that, and develop this telepathy about when to move the camera and how to make adjustments.

Antonio, I’m really fascinated by your referring to your film as a controlled, stylized improvisational film. The clash of those seemingly contradictory impulses really defines the film.

Antonio Campos: A lot of times there’s a documentary quality to my films, except I don’t necessarily move the camera to catch what’s going on. What I really like is giving the performers the freedom to move, but keeping the camera controlled. Saying: if they’re out of frame for this moment, then they’re out of frame. You set up a perfect frame to fuck it up a little. It’s the unpredictability, the sloppiness that sometimes makes it feel more alive.

Subject matter aside, did you feel, while watching Mark’s film, that you liked the idea of having a three-year-old running around on set?

Antonio Campos: Yeah, I did. It’s funny because I’ve been talking about what to do next, and I’ve been thinking about a story about a father and son. Because I saw a film recently that I had never seen before by a director I love named King Vidor, called The Champ. That film made me cry so much. About this boxer who used to be the heavyweight champion of the world, but now he’s down and out. He’s got a little kid who idolizes him, but the dad is such a drunk, keeps screwing up. And in both cases… not that you fuck up in your film, but the father’s kind of a fuck-up. He’s doing his best, and the kid loves him so much—that’s all he sees, his dad. I don’t think your film could be any other way. I had a question though about the end. It’s interesting when you do an improvised movie that you still have an idea of what the end’s going to be. Did you have that end, or did you find it along the way?

Mark Webber: We had that end. From the beginning I knew I wanted to make it that way. I always knew I wanted to have a guy in that situation, to try and address things and be messy. I needed that anchor with the beginning and the end specifically in order to feel that all the exploration was going to work. What about you?

Antonio Campos: We knew the beginning. That the film would open with this monologue that would set the stage for everything. That the film was going to open up with this story about his ex-girlfriend, where he’s coming from, and I knew that it would end the way it did.

These are very, very different films, but they’re both honest portraits of men, of aspects of manhood that we usually don’t get a chance to see on film. The challenges of struggling to get by as a single father in The End of Love, and in Simon Killer there’s this very revealing portrait of the deep neediness that can lead to violence and possession. Did you recognize these portraits in each other’s films?

Mark Webber: Totally. After his screening, I felt a little fucked up about how much I identified with Brady’s character. Seriously. Almost to the point that I didn’t want to share that information with the people I was around. And that’s what I think is so unbelievable about the film. It’s very honest about these big, broad issues of vulnerability and possession, and what it means to be a man in a certain respect. And obviously in my film I’m showing a certain version of that as well.

Antonio Campos: I tend to start at the dregs of where I could go, and then dig my way up and hopefully get to the humanity. Brady and I aren’t aggressive men in any way—we both have very good relationships with the women in our lives. But we both recognize something in all of us that’s questionable. There are certain things that Simon does that are very relatable, then he just goes to the extreme. But it’s a very gradual progression to the extreme, bit by bit, chipping away at all the things holding him back.

Your character is very flawed, but the flaws are what make a character human. It would be very boring to watch a film about the greatest dad in the world. I think that the way you went about it was very subtle—little screwups, little negligent things. Your film ends on a more hopeful note than Simon. I don’t know why I’m attracted to these dark bastards. But they’re fascinating to watch. With Simon, at the end you get this moment that’s sad, pathetic, but also very human. You see he’s just a boy. These are two characters that are supposed to be grownups, or mature, but they’re just…

Mark Webber: Boys. Little boys.

Marshall Lewy premiered more than his film, California Solo, at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. As he came out to welcome an enthusiastic crowd Wednesday night, he also revealed his one-month old daughter, Beatrice, who actually waved a tiny hand to the audience. It was a sign of good things to come.

Lewy’s film, which he wrote and directed, was carried onscreen by Robert Carlyle in arguably his best performance since Trainspotting. It tells the story of ex-rock legend Lachlan MacAldonich, the down-but-not-out guitarist from a band with an equally tragic past. Lachlan’s best days have long since past and his life finds him in the more obscure (and less groupie-filled) world of organic farm life in Southern California. As Lachlan tries to “podcast” himself away from his former life, he is picked up on a DUI charge and faces possible deportation back to the UK, unless he can prove that his absence would cause “extreme hardship” for someone––anyone––in his life, which opens up a whole new can of demons.

In the spirit of its protagonist, California Solo carries a songlike quality to it as well, with a rich soundtrack and fluid storytelling that fits snugly with its organically rich setting and falls right into Carlyle’s prodigious acting wheelhouse. After the screening, Lewy was joined for a Q&A by members of the cast and crew, which included A Martinez, Alexia Rasmussen, and Savannah Lathem.

Q: What inspired the story and where did it come from?

Lewy: In case you hadn’t noticed, there’s a lot of Robert Carlyle in there. The movie really started with the character. I had an idea for taking a renowned character actor from the UK and putting him in an American independent film. I wrote the part for Robert, and I had his voice in my head as I worked on the script.

Q: Was this something that Robert was into…or did you have to convince him?

Lewy: I read in an article that he met his wife at The Hacienda, the nightclub which is kind of the Studio 54 of the Manchester, England scene, so when I put that in the script I kinda’ knew he would do it. I sent it to him, and after he read it for a couple of days we got on the phone and he said, ‘I have one question. Do you do rehearsals?’ I said ‘no.’ He said, ‘Good, I’ll do it.’

Q: To the actors, what was your experience with the production?

Martinez: The experience of the audition was one of the most actor-friendly auditions in my very long career. I thought that was a really good sign. The generosity and respect that was afforded to me in the audition carried all the way through the film. It was a dream to work on this film. Marshall never allowed you to think you could do something that was wrong.

Q: Can you talk a little bit about the music in the film?

Lewy: It was music I loved listening to when I visited a couple of friends in Ireland during college. Then I came back with all this music and I listened to it while I wrote the script. As far as it relates to the character, the music also has a lot of heart and there was something there that seemed to fit with this character and what he was going through and what he was hiding from.

Q: Where did you get your legal advice on the DUI and immigration situation?

Lewy: I talked to an immigration lawyer I knew and that is really where the story came from. I started to understand more about the fact that people with a green card, who are permanent legal residents and who have been living here for 15-20 years and have families, can be removed for an offense. I learned about the bureaucracy of how it happened, and thought that was a thread, a spine for a movie.

Although he’s never been tested this way, David Gray could probably keep his audience hooked while singing the text of a John Deere tractor catalog. Gray performed on Thursday at the Sundance ASCAP Music Café on Lower Main Street to a packed house. The Café was more than packed, actually - there were people perched on steps, people pressing against the barriers set up to ensure the fire department wasn’t going to shut down the house. Judging from the beatific expressions on their faces, all those people showed up because Gray has a power to emotionally connect with them, past the noise of life.

David Gray performing at the Sundance ASCAP Music Café. Photo by Calvin Knight

Gray was the last performer on Thursday, following Ingrid Michaelson, who sang from her new album “Human Again,” and other musicians like Natasha Bedingfield and The All-American Rejects who sang this week after being invited by ASCAP.

Gray performed several of his major hits, including “Babylon,” which had the audience more than signing along - it was like a believer’s chant. There was a group of loud people briefly acting up in the back corner and the bartender shushed them. Gray inspires that kind of reverence. He sang “Nemesis,” “Draw the Line,” and an earlier song, “This Year’s Love,” which he said is “for the romantics.” Wistful, sad, honest, and a little raw, Gray’s songs hit people right in the heart, but there’s also something restrained about him, something existential that keeps his work from feeling sentimental. He sang “Morning of My Life,” an early Bee Gees song “before they started doing falsetto,” as Gray put it. He also sang “Snow in Vegas,” a new song that hasn’t been released yet. After about 45 minutes of listening to David Gray, even the Festival volunteer assigned to forbid access to the front of the stage with his stern, authoritative face looked a little emotional.

Every January, over 1,800 volunteers ascend to Park City, Utah, to work tirelessly for no pay. Last night, Sundance Institute offered its thanks by throwing them a party. It was just one event on Volunteer Appreciation Day, which also included a special film screening for volunteers and a vignette before every film that screened at the Festival thanking the volunteers for their service.

As is readily apparent to anyone who attends Sundance, volunteers make no small contribution to the festival. They run prints, empty trash, work at special events, run box offices and theaters, and perform a host of other services both in front of and behind the scenes.

Emily Aagaard, who herself began as a volunteer seven years ago, now manages the Sundance volunteer program full time. She explains the Festival’s impulse to give back: “People give so much of their time volunteering in just these two weeks that we can’t help but express appreciation.”

The relationship is mutually beneficial. Sundance gives its volunteers exclusive gear, provides many of them lodging during the festival and, best of all, offers them the opportunity to experience independent film and be part of a passionate community of indie film enthusiasts. In return, the festival receives an army of supporters who believe in what the festival represents and couldn’t be happier to give their time and energy to the festival and its patrons.

Ely Beers-Altman, a volunteer who, like many others, traveled to Sundance from out of state, says his favorite part of the festival is the moment just before a film begins. “In that five seconds, you are all being brought together by the story,” says Beers-Altman. “I always smile in the theater when that happens.” Beers-Altman enjoys volunteering for the festival, because it offers him a way to stay connected to a community of passionate learners: “Our discussions on buses and on breaks are about the involvement we feel in specific films, and that dialogue between volunteers is great. It’s like you’re in college again.”

Volunteers don’t just contribute through the work they perform. They also help shape the culture of Sundance. “Volunteers give the festival this unique personality, because we have such a mix of people from everywhere,” says Aagaard. “All of them love being able to see films, and I think that’s what the festival is about - all these people coming together to experience these stories.”

For the last five years, Sundance Institute’s Documentary Film Program and the Skoll Foundation have partnered to showcase global innovative game-changers through film. This ongoing project, titled Stories of Change, has spanned the globe—both in search of stories to support, and also to participate in international convenings that shed light on these important stories, the most recent of which occurred at the Sundance Film Festival on Tuesday, where audiences got a sneak peek at a new crop of projects. These projects feature social entrepreneurs who offer creative solutions to some of the world’s most challenging issues, from poverty to health. But what was uniquely prevalent at this recent gathering was the powerhouse of women behind both the partnership, and the stories at hand. 

Cara Mertes, director of the Documentary Film Program, kicked-off the Festival’s Stories of Change panel by describing the impact she hopes these films will have on society. “Ideas that today seem radical, tomorrow will seem like common sense” said Mertes.  “If you can change the narrative, you can change the outcome.” Sally Osberg, the president and CEO of the Skoll foundation, proceeded to moderate the discussion between the two featured projects—bringing both the directors and the entrepreneur subjects to the stage.

The first project showcased was by director Kief Davidson, the director of Kassim the Dream and The Devil’s Miner, whose Stories of Change project is the Untitled Global Health Documentary. When Davidson first began to consider making this film, he worried that a story on global health would be incredibly unappealing to audiences. But after learning more about the work of Dr. Paul Farmer’s Partners in Health, Davidson reconsidered. “Healthcare as a human right is very personal and character-driven,” said the filmmaker, who sees character as the driving force behind documentaries. “When you move people emotionally, it transcends people every time. So for me, it’s trying to find the most compelling characters possible.”

He found that character in Dr. Joia Mukherjee, a trained infectious disease physician and a single mother who works for PIH, an international medical non-profit that sets up clinics across the world in places that no other organization wants to go from Haiti to Rwanda. As Davidson began to follow Mukherhjee, her own narrative turned when her son was diagnosed with cancer, which just reinforced her passionate belief that healthcare needs to be treated as a basic human right. She was present to share her story of how she was influenced as a child by seeing Leprosy patients in India, and how this grueling suffering of the poor stayed with her throughout her life.

For a doctor not used to being in the spotlight, Mukherjee was cautious about the “social narrative” of the film and how it portrayed PIH’s work. “The real talent and strength and resilience come from the people living it, who don’t speak English and can’t communicate in the same way. I’m afraid of the narrative of the great white hope—the elite saving the poor.” Although Mukherhjee is an inspiring entrée into the story, Davidson’s film focuses on the PIH’s groundbreaking approach to practicing medicine. They employ mostly locals. Mukherhjee described the most impressive part of this Story of Change, “We have a large team of 15,000 employees - 80% are rural poor people who had never before had a paying job. They now get a paycheck for helping the suffering.”

The next project featured was Jehane Noujaim’s Solar Momas. Noujaim is the award-winning director of Control Room and Startup.com and as soon as she heard of the work of Bunker Roy she knew she wanted to tell his story. “You always want to make films that change the world, but as a filmmaker you also want to entertain,” said Noujaim and she realized she had both facets in the story of Roy’s Barefoot College in India, which trains women from rural villages across the world to become solar engineers.

Roy described his upbringing in India as a young man receiving the best education possible. He was well on his way to a lucrative career, but the passion to do something meaningful was missing from a path into government or academics. Instead, he went to live in a village to learn usable skills, like building a well, when he realized he could teach villagers engineering skills to help improve their quality of life. But he quickly learned that if he trained men, they would leave the village to find better jobs; whereas the women would stay to care after the children. “The best way to get something done is not the television, not the telephone, not the telegraph, but tell-a-woman,” joked Roy.

When Noujaim teamed up with Roy to make a film, he was adamant that it not be focused on him, but on the journey of the women. “The journey is very dramatic and compelling. We focused on the Jordanian woman Rafea and you fall in love with her,” said the director. “It’s very emotional as you watch her overcome fear and walk out like a tiger.” Rafea’s story, like others in the film, show how women courageously leave behind their homes for a few months and travel to a foreign place to learn how to engineer solar power, so that they can teach their fellow villagers this skill, and their village can benefit from the energy resource.

This positive lesson in the power of community and common cause is central to all of the Story of Change projects. “As long as you can find a human story,” Noujaim said, “everyone can relate to being presented with an opportunity that you can change your life.” Osberg agreed: “That’s the theme of these films. We’re all on this journey - we’re all part of this story.”

The buzz about Jamie Travis’ feature debut, For a Good Time, Call..., is that it’s a comedy starring raunchy women. That’s technically true - the movie is about two women who have good reason to strongly dislike one another a full 10 years after they first met, and who end up living together and starting a phone sex business - but to pass the film off as some imitative descendant of Bridesmaids would sell it short. For a Good Time, Call... is really about genuine friendship between women - how fragile it can be, and how hard it is to attain.

Focus Features snatched up the film shortly after its premiere on Sunday night. And it’s no mystery why they thought audiences would respond to the film. For a Good Time, Call... is fresh and hilarious, and its insights about friendship feel honest, never sentimental or maudlin. That it is also a comedy about women who aren’t dying to get married or desperate to find the right man will come as something of a relief to women longing to see the female experience more authentically reflected on screen. After the premiere at Eccles Theatre, Travis joined Lauren Anne Miller, the film’s co-writer and co-star, with her co-writer and co-producer Katie Anne Naylon and actors Ari Graynor and Justin Long, to answer the audience’s questions.

Q: The casting was so spot-on and I can’t picture anyone else in those roles. Did you all have these actors in mind to play these parts?

Lauren Anne Miller: Well, we wrote it for Ari, because after seeing her incredible work, we thought of no one else to play this part and then honestly, we just got so incredibly lucky to have everyone else come on board. It became a life of its own. And then around a year ago, I sort of thought, one day, we have this script and the character’s name is Lauren and I’m Lauren and we should just make this on our own and it’ll play Sundance next year! And here we are.

Q: I was just wondering how long you two girls spent together before you got on set and did all that. How did that chemistry work?

Ari Graynor: They sent me the script almost exactly a year ago and I fell in love with it. They wrote me an incredibly beautiful letter, I wrote them back and we were all crying and we were all in love and then we started spending some time together, but it was really when we got Jamie on board that the four of us ... spent a lot of time working on the script. But it was really once we started working it all out and getting it as tight as possible that we all fell in love. Sometimes you just meet people and you’re kindred spirits. The first thing that we shot was the phone sex call with Kevin Smith, the back it up on all fours, which is quite a way to start work when it’s a really quiet bedroom.

Q: How much freedom did Jamie give you all to go off-script and if you did, can you relate some story about what you contributed to the film?

Justin Long: He gave us a lot of freedom. We would do usually one take as close to script as we could. It depended on the scene, but some of it was right for expanding on. When you get some freedom, it’s nice.

Jamie Travis: I can tell you that Justin Long rarely stayed on-script. I had no idea he was a master improviser. This was shot very quick and dirty. We shot it in 15 days (gasp from the crowd). Okay, the total was 17. I will say that when I went into this movie, the script was in such a great place, and so funny, we were shooting it in 15, 16 days, I didn’t think we’d have as much time to improvise as we did. The actors really brought the characters to life with words that were not on the page.

Q: The writing was pretty raunchy and I was just wondering where you got all the vocabulary words.

Graynor: “Vagina” is a pretty standard word.

Katie Anne Naylon: We used a lot of Urban Dictionary. I had some phone sex in my checkered past and I just dredged that up with hypnotherapy. And Ari did a lot of improv. It was a little dirty.

Q: Could you talk about how the script was written?

Lauren Anne Miller: Katie and I sat down to write the script together, and we wanted to tell a story about female friendship, because that’s what we know about each other. However, Katie ran a phone sex line out of her college dorm freshman year and that was also a story we wanted to tell, so we decided to tell the story of female friendship based on Katie’s phone sex experience.

Naylon: Thank you. We wanted to explore how girls are different and judge each other - you know we do - and a lot of girls [like the two main characters] aren’t friends, and in this world, they are and we wanted people to take a beat and get to know each other. Opposites attract, just like Paula Abdul says.

Q: Jamie, your short films are impeccably art-directed and so is this one. Please talk about your art direction.

Travis: [Introduces production designer Sue Tebbutt]. This was my first feature film, and my short films tend to be very formal, very self-conscious and very art-direction driven, so this was a real shift for me. I wanted to maintain - and I think this was part of the reason I was hired to direct the film - that style, but I knew I really had to come down to reality, because my short films take place in a very alternate reality. I knew I wanted distinct color schemes in each room, which is something I tend to do, and Sue just really got it and had a great team. I needed someone who had very good instincts, and that was Sue.

Q: I was wondering as you were making this film whether you all were thinking about the dearth of female-driven comedies on the market in the past few years that aren’t about marriage.

Naylon: We just wanted to make a funny movie about girls that’s a good time, that you want to watch again and again. There’s so many bromances out now and we thought we could do that for girls, because we hadn’t seen that in a while.

Graynor: Katie likes to call it a momance and I told her she couldn’t say that all over Sundance, because it’s annoying. A lot of the movies that I grew up watching in the 80’s and 90’s like Big Business and Baby Boom and Hello Again - all these great movies with women - weren’t necessarily about a romantic relationship. Somehow that’s gotten lost a little bit. Whenever you see a movie now that’s focused on a female character, it’s often about their romance and that was the most exciting thing when I first read the script - it was not just about a girl looking for a guy.

Love is so difficult to attain, and so elusive to keep, that it seems warranted to ask whether filmmakers who pile all manner of obstacles into their characters’ awkward search for it have a little touch of sadism. Take Dennis, the gentle, insecure, and colossal weightlifter at the heart of Mads Matthiesen’s Teddy Bear. Played by weightlifting non-actor Kim Kold, Dennis is 38 years old and a real misfit when it comes to romance - the film opens as he’s uncomfortably failing at the small talk of a first date. He lives with his prying, needy mom and he is approximately 10 times bigger than anyone else in Denmark (not to mention Thailand, where he goes on a surreptitious quest for a mate). You want to coddle this vulnerable lug, even though, because of all his bodybuilding, there’s no one to blame but himself for standing out in his bulging way.

The dissonance of seeing a he-man like Dennis struggle to overcome his fraught anxieties about love is fascinating to watch. But Matthiesen, like several other filmmakers whose new work is screening in competition at this year’s Festival, is after something deeper than just creatively throwing Dennis to the lovelorn wolves. Like the characters in these other Festival films, Dennis isn’t the kind of person who comes to mind when we hear the term “coming-of-age.” For characters in Teddy Bear, The Surrogate, and Nobody Walks, the attempt to conquer love becomes nothing less than a struggle to determine their place in life.  

“The whole coming-of-age thing is a basic, basic element of love and growing to be yourself,” Matthiesen says. “And that interests me a lot. You want to push it to the edge, you want to make a statement that you can make your own life, and I think that’s hard for a lot of people.”

The search for love makes awkward teenagers of all of us, no matter our age, and sometimes forces us to learn the harsh lesson that growing up – a hurdle we thought we had long ago cleared - is something many of us have yet to figure out. The protagonist of Ben Lewin’s The Surrogate, based on the autobiography of poet and journalist Mark O’Brien, is continually coming-of-age despite having passed adolescence some time ago. In fact, The Surrogate is unlike any other film. Uniquely sexually frank, The Surrogate is about the attempt by O’Brien, who was paralyzed from the neck down by polio, to transcend his life confined to an iron lung. O’Brien, played by John Hawkes in the film, doesn’t really set out to fall in love; he’s really out to have sex for the first time.

The line between sex and love becomes blurred in the film. As Hawkes puts it, “You could almost argue that every scene is a love scene because he’s so dependent, and there’s a lot of trust and acceptance that’s required.” O’Brien’s therapist suggests he hire a sex surrogate, someone who, unlike a sex therapist, actually has sex with a client – often someone who may be physically challenged or needs help overcoming issues with intimacy. Cheryl Cohen Greene, the titular surrogate portrayed in the film by Helen Hunt, limits O’Brien to six sessions to underline the relationship’s clear therapeutic boundaries.

Lewin became intrigued by O’Brien’s story after he read O’Brien’s essay about his sex surrogate experience. “Somehow, the way that he described sex - his urge to embrace it and his fear of it - was a universal thing,” Lewin says. “It resonates in able-bodied people; it certainly reflects how I felt about it. It was a mountain to climb. It wasn’t necessarily going to be easy, but you felt compelled to do it.” As much as possible, Lewin worked to replicate O’Brien’s description of the experience. “The way he put it seemed so totally real, as opposed to so much of what one reads about sex, which seems so phony.”

The script for Ry Russo-Young’s Nobody Walks was also borne out of lived authenticity. Russo-Young and her co-writer Lena Dunham (Tiny Furniture), “were both young women dealing with how the personal bleeds into the professional,” Russo-Young says, although she didn’t experience the same events that occur in the film. Nobody Walks is awash in boundary-crossing, moral ambiguity, and furtive glances. Martine (Olivia Thirlby), a 23-year-old New York art film student, briefly moves to Los Angeles so that Peter (John Krasinski), a respected sound artist, can help her score her film. Peter is confident, kind, and married to a caring therapist (Rosemarie DeWitt). They have two children - one of whom, a precocious young poet still in high school (India Ennenga), falls for Peter’s good-looking assistant just as Martine does. But Martine also falls for Peter while Peter’s wife flirts with falling for one of her clients (Festival regular Justin Kirk).

With all the passion hovering in that household, Nobody Walks is remarkably measured and well-orchestrated. Martine is “very guilty and very responsible,” Russo-Young says, but so is everyone else in the house. Thirlby pulls off a coup with Martine - you feel the character’s lust, excitement, bewilderment, disillusion, and guilt. But Martine is a foil - you find yourself wondering why someone who seems as settled and accomplished as Peter, with a beautiful, loving wife - even considers allowing himself be dragged into an affair with Martine.

One of Russo-Young’s preoccupations while she was writing the script was “coming-of-age no matter what age you’re at,” and Nobody Walks is a thoughtful exploration of that tricky, awkward truth about life. “The more I grow up, the more I keep making choices,” Russo-Young says. “I think the movie really explores those boundaries, those moral moments of ambiguity, and the flirtation with those boundaries, which is something we all go through.”

The day started with the most inspiring morning at the Women in Film Brunch. There was a sobering speech by Catherine Hardwicke. It was amazing to hear how after Twilight (which made $69 million in its opening weekend) she still couldn't get meetings to direct after that. She couldn't even get a meeting for the film The Fighter.

Producer Catherine Hardwicke.

The president of WIF, Cathy Schulman, and Sundance Institute Executive Director, Keri Putnam, spoke about how women only direct 5% of the films in Hollywood and that number has not changed since 1998! This year, of the feature films and documentaries selected to Sundance, 27% of them were directed by women! What is so exciting is how Sundance and WIF are looking to change those numbers and create much better resources for all of us to draw from.

We also had the world premiere of Himalaya Song today. Dave Liang, Mridu Chandra and I created this multimedia/live performance piece for New Frontiers and the excitement has been building up for us to this day.

Himalaya Song is an experimental film with live narration and music. It was a big lesson for us in how art really does meet technology. New Frontiers' whole theme this year is about the future and technology and there is no way we could have made this project happen without it. For starters, we were able to record musicians from around the world while Dave and I were in LA and NY. On the visual side, we got really stunning footage and photographs from artists that have documented the Himalayas for years. They were so generous in wanting to help with this project and the issues we are covering. We also had the chance to work with some very gifted artists and painters in China, Turkey, London, India. We even had some paintings commissioned for our film by a Leeds born painter, Kamaljeet Ajimal.

We performed it at New Frontiers to a packed house and the audience was so incredibly responsive! To be able to bring a project like this, which deals with such important issues, to a live stage was always a question. So it was exciting when we finally we finally saw that it translated to audiences. We can't wait for the next one at UMOCA!

Mridu Chandra and Gingger Shankar, directors of Himalaya Song.

And now for a few highlights from my trip so far:

-Running into other Sundance Composers Lab Fellows at the Kimball Art Center. Peter Golub (our mentor and head of the Film Music Program at Sundance Institute) always seems to bring us all together!

-Sam Pollard and Mridu arguing at the Directors Brunch about whether Ryan Gosling is hot or handsome.

-Mridu and I learning how to make dumplings from scratch at Jennifer 8 Lee's dumpling party while Dave was just trying to break the frozen ones apart!

-Dave, Sean Hackett (Homecoming), and I getting unusually competitive and aggressive at the basketball arcade game during the Shorts Awards Party at Jupiter Bowling Alley. Once they shut off all the arcade games, it turned into a full fledged game of Horse (which subsequently turned into a game of Pig because there was not a lot of athletic talent in the bunch).

Gingger Shankar is a Sundance Institute Alumni Advisory Board Member and the director of the 2012 New Frontier installation Himalaya Song.

Day Seven of #Sundance on Instagram includes manic visions of a tin foiled topped Santa, an alien-like sun, and a mustached potato.

Don't forget to use #sundance when posting to Instagram so your photo has a chance of making our daily roundup. And also follow us on Instagram at username sundanceinstitute.

It’s not technically true that Marta, the meek but intent girl at the heart of Alice Rohrwacher’s Corpo Celeste, is in every frame of the film, but she might as well be. Rohrwacher has so fully and subtly imagined the struggles and triumphs of Marta’s life, that this inquisitive, brave girl, who doesn’t always understand the forces arrayed against her, hovers in your mind long after the film ends.

Played by Yle Vianello, Marta is just entering adolescence as her family moves from Switzerland back to Southern Italy. Rohrwacher makes perfectly clear the stranglehold the Catholic Church has on the lives of the characters in Corpo Celeste. They vote for the candidate the church tells them to. They pay rent to the church. They gossip about other people at the church. Soon after the family arrives in Italy, Marta is signed up for a catechism class, with the goal of making it through the rote and rehearsed confirmation process. Placid and bewildered, Marta is close to her mom, but has a demon of an 18-year-old sister who constantly belittles her. Marta isn’t a saint - her trickster side comes out as she defiantly chops her hair off, which turns out to be some kind of cardinal sin in her new town - but she reserves her harshest defiance for the local priest (Salvatore Cantalupo).

Who can blame her? Petty and embittered, the priest and the rest of the church hierarchy sells Marta, a truth-seeker, a bland bill of goods. In the eyes of this congregation, Jesus wasn’t furious about being crucified on the cross, true spiritual kindness doesn’t matter, and obedience to the church is the one true virtue. Marta eventually learns to see right through it, and the consequences are unsettling for her and everyone around her.

Despite the poetic detail with which she carefully imbues the film, Rohrwacher doesn’t get all the credit. Yle Vianello is new to acting, but pulls off a real coup in the role. Rohrwacher, whose sister is the actress Alba Rohrwacher, acknowledges she had a hard time casting the right actor, even going so far as saying that the search led her to believe the person playing the role might be an “extraterrestrial.” “We had been visiting all our friends and acquaintances outside of town,” Rohrwacher explains, when they finally found Vianello in “a self-sufficient community on the Appennine mountains, outside of the world.” Although Rohrwacher says Vianello is different from the character of Marta, she shares with Marta “a certain disorientation, a pure expression.”

Corpo Celeste played during the 2011 Cannes Director’s Fortnight. Rohrwacher says that the Catholic Church’s reaction after the film premiered was “rather tense.” The Church let it be known it “doesn’t need to be taught anything,” as Rohrwacher recalls. When the film hit theatres, however, a different reaction bubbled up. “We received hundreds of messages from believers, and even from priests, who appreciated our work, and found themselves represented in the feelings of loneliness and emptiness the film recounts,” Rohrwacher says. A group of catechism teachers even uses the film to teach new catechism teachers how not to teach. Eventually, an article appeared on the front page of L’osservatore Romano, the Vatican’s official daily newspaper. “It basically said ‘it's a very hard film against us,” Rohrwacher recalls. “But it says things that are true, which we should reflect upon and learn from.’”

Corpo Celeste doesn’t feel calculated to anger the Catholic Church. It feels focused on the soul of a girl who won’t settle the way everyone else does. “Marta is looking for a way through life,” Rohrwacher explains. “Everyone talks to her about a perfection she doesn't identify with - a blond and distant Jesus, who has nothing in common with her own anxieties. She finally discovers that miracles are not something distant and inaccessible, but can be anything that one can touch, anything that is born from the face-to-face connection with someone else.”

BMI, the music company that manages licensing fees for musicians, gathered no fewer than 17 Festival directors and film composers on stage at the BMI Roundtable Discussion: Music and Film, the Creative Process at the Sundance House on Wednesday. Aligning everyone’s schedules so they could participate and disclose some aspects of the director-composer relationship is difficult enough. But getting the many panelists to find the common ground necessary to converse among themselves, is an indication of the love of film the Festival engenders and the collegiality BMI encourages among its musicians.

Compser T. Griffin, BMI Vice President Doreen Ringer-Ross, and Marshall Lewy (California Solo). Photo by Randall Michelson.

BMI vice-president of film/TV relations Doreen Ringer-Ross is a seasoned veteran at moderating the event, which is an annual Festival tradition by now. She started off by asking the panelists how they came to work with one another and what their working relationship is like (most of the directors in attendance had their film composer sitting next to them). Black Rock director and actor Katie Aselton explained that she met Peter Golub, director of Sundance Institute’s Film Music Program, through her husband Mark Duplass and knew that he would be able to handle the challenges of scoring the innovative thriller that hearkens back to the 70s. “I was very specific about what I wanted with this score,” Asleton said. “I wanted it to be reminiscent of '70s thriller scores, but also wanted to put a modern spin on it.

“On one hand, it’s a genre film,” Golub said, “but it’s a different kind of acting and it’s more intelligent than your average genre film,” so his work on the score had to “match the intelligence of the film.” Aselton agreed, adding that she was “following the rules of the genre, but doing it on my terms and we carried that through in the score as well.”

Sundance Institute Film Music Program Director Peter Golub. Photo by Randall Michelson.

Musician Ryan Beveridge and director Aurora Guerrero worked together on Guerrero’s debut feature, Mosquita y Mari, the finely observed story of two teenage Chicanas growing up in one of Los Angeles’ immigrant neighborhoods. The two girls are initially hostile to one another but eventually discover a deep bond. “She didn’t want to hear any of the typical sounds - no Spanish guitars,” Beveridge explained about Guerrero’s direction. “It gave us a chance to create the right sound for this story as opposed to something that sounded clichéd. She also had already chosen a lot of great songs, and the songs captured the neighborhood and the immigrant story while I just got to focus on the relationship between the two girls.”

A director, in other words, doesn’t just need to know how to give insight to the story. A good filmmaker will also make sure to give a film composer the room to creatively contribute to and influence the story. Echoing what many of the other directors said at the panel, Guerrero confessed that she didn’t know the technical language of music, but used the language of emotion to describe how she wanted the score to contribute to the film at particular moments. Guerrero described the process as “giving him a blueprint of what I was feeling and hearing for the film” and letting him take it from there.

Few filmmakers have the kind of range that James Marsh has, alternating between crowd-pleasing, Oscar-winning documentaries (Man on Wire) and pitch-black neo-noir policiers (Red Riding Trilogy: 1980). One year after his Oscar shortlisted doc Project Nim premiered on opening night of the Festival, Marsh was back in Park City on Tuesday night for the world premiere of his latest dramatic film, Shadow Dancer. A gripping, masterfully spare tale of betrayal set in sectarian, Troubles-era Belfast, Shadow Dancer is about a young IRA operative faced with an impossible choice—to accept incarceration and abandon her son, or betray her family, and her cause, by turning informant.

It’s not a film about good guys or bad guys. Everyone, in his or her own way, is both. Rather, Shadow Dancer concerns itself with a maligned society in which such morality has been twisted beyond hope. After the screening, Marsh and actress Andrea Riseborough answered questions from the Eccles Theater audience.

Q: Andrea, how did you approach your performance in the film?

Andrea Riseborough: It’s very strange when you start to have an objective relationship with a project, because suddenly you’re forced to have all sorts of opinions that remove you from how you’re feeling inside the character—because it needs to be close to your heart if you want to explore a subject like this. [The characters] were so angry. There was so much anger and pain. And unemployment. It’s almost too much for words in a way. But doing this with James, we never had to dissect exactly what we needed to do. It was a feeling, and [screenwriter] Tom Bradby was the enabler of that, having created the story. There was something we needed to capture that had seeped into us. We researched it, but researching sounds like not a very emotional connection—truly, it was impossible to not have an emotional connection to the situation. Truly, it was just to feel it. Any preparation you do really has to be completely abandoned in order to live out what might have been. It’s almost like being in a constant state of anxiety when you watch. Great selling point. (Laughter) “Go see it.” And I think that’s exactly how it was. So many people have to have a drink or a pill to calm their nerves—can you imagine living in a constant state of anxiety? I mean, that’s all the preparation there is.

Q: What was the most difficult part of adapting Tom Bradby’s novel?

James Marsh: Tom did that for me. That was quite easy—I just read the screenplay and we shaped it a bit together. When we were preparing and shooting the film, we evolved with a few things that came to us from being on location and being with the actors. It was a brilliant screenplay, with a really great premise. It became about the people and the situation—it wasn’t about the politics. That’s background to the story. It’s really this terrible predicament that I think is very universal. What’s it like to betray everything you love and believe in? That became my way into it, the psychology.

Q: How long did it take to get the musical score right?

James Marsh: I think the music should support the drama. The score was quite a lengthy process. We put no score on it at first. I always think of a Noel Coward expression: “beware the potency of cheap music.” That’s particularly true in film. Dickon Hinchliffe and I had a lot of dialogue about it. The score evolved over the course of the post-production. In fact we started talking before the film was shot—Dickon and I had worked on two other films together, so we exploited him while he was still on the payroll.

Q: I thoroughly enjoyed the movie, but I got a little lost at the end. (He narrates the series of events.) Did the book explain how it all happened?

James Marsh: That description was pretty good, actually. So what didn’t you understand? (Laughter) I want people to make their own minds up. The circumstances are quite suggestive, shall we say. I think it’s one of those films, where there’s interesting speculation about what happened in the end. I think it’s all there, and you’re pretty close to it. So I’d like to let people have a different view, if they want it. I like films to be that way myself.

Q: I was curious if you talked to people who either lived through a similar situation or lived in that time, and what you discovered from that.

Andrea Riseborough: We were most ourselves as we possibly could be in those roles. We actually filmed in Dublin, which was extraordinarily unhelpful. Very helpful in the way that the people were totally wonderful—we had an incredibly crew. But unhelpful in that we may as well have been in the North Pole in terms of the social and political climate. It was a process of forgetting we were there, and imagining that were in Belfast. We had a set-up that was suggestive of that, and brilliant locations that James found that set the scene. Any moment we could, we were in that world.

James Marsh: Conversations were definitely had, discretely, with people who were close to those situations. I won’t go too far into that. But Andrea in particular did have certain conversations. Am I saying too much?

Andrea Riseborough: It’s happened. (Laughs)

James Marsh: And Tom is a very well known journalist who spent many years in Northern Ireland, and I think the story came from the truthfulness of his experience there. But ultimately I think it’s a universal human predicament that transcends some of the politics around it. 

On Monday, writer-director-actor Julie Delpy anxiously walked onto the stage of the Eccles Theatre to introduce her new film 2 Days in New York. "Sequels are sometimes better than originals. Like, 2010 was better than 2001," Delpy joked as she nervously premiered the second part of a series. In her new film, which is a follow-up to her 2007 2 Days in Paris, Delpy swaps in a new city and boyfriend.

2 Days in New York begins with a puppet show summarizing how Marion (played by Delpy) made the transformation—she grew apart from her boyfriend (played by Adam Goldberg in the first film) after they moved to New York and had a child. Post break-up Marion falls in love with a divorced single father, Mingus (Chris Rock), the sanest, most subdued character in the film. They live a happy life together until Marion’s family comes to visit from Paris. The sequel’s premise is the same as the original: spending concentrated time with family leads to mass chaos. However, the unexpected exchanges between rational Mingus and Marion’s crazy French family push the conceits of in-law humor and lost-in-translation mayhem into a hilariously new existential realm.

After the film played to an enthusiastic crowd, Delpy, Rock, principal cast members Albert Delpy (Delpy’s father, who doesn’t speak a word of English), Alexia Landeau, and Alex Nahon answered audience questions.

Q: As a big fan of Chris Rock, I’m wondering if there was a lot of collaboration in making this film?

Delpy: Chris didn’t write it. Alexia and I wrote it and we worked on the story all together the three of us (she also points to Alex Nahon). I wrote it with Chris in mind. Chris adlibbed a few lines, but he pretty much followed the script. I would channel my inner Chris Rock (audience laughs), which was a little weird at times. I wanted the character to be its own thing, and I think that’s why Chris wanted to do it.

Rock: They wrote the script. There was a little bullshit I wouldn’t say (he laughs), but no, I loved the script. I read it and I was like ‘Is Ethan Hawke dead? What’s going on?’ (audience laughs and applauds). After I found out in real life Ethan wasn’t dead, I agreed to do the movie. (Audience laughs.)

Q: Chris, do you understand French?

Rock: No. Not all. When I was confused in the movie I was really confused.

Q: What inspired the story?

Delpy: Relationships, JAWS (audience laughs) – the feeling of being surrounded by sharks and danger. I often think of JAWS when I write movies – it’s the weirdest thing. I don’t know what inspired me. Relationships. How do you make a relationship work? How do you rebuild a relationship when it can fall apart so quickly? How do you create a new family and include them with your old family? You know, relationship shit.

When I decided to write the sequel to 2 Days in Paris when my boyfriend in that film was Adam Goldberg, I realized I could not write a sequel to this film with the same boyfriend. I wanted Marion to be this person who keeps on trying to make it work with different men. I kept thinking ‘Who is my next boyfriend?’

Q: Julie, what characteristics do you think you inherited from your father? And can you ask your father to answer the same?

Delpy: I inherited his tendency to eat a lot. (She turns to her father and asks him the question in French and he responds by exaggeratingly pulling his beard. Audience laughs.) I think we like life.

Q: Chris, in the part of the film where you were adlibbing to the poster of Barack Obama, was that really adlibbing?

Rock: Julie wrote a lot of it, but some of it was adlibbing. I would actually talk to Barack. They cut out the whole thing where me and Barack smoke a joint. (Audience laughs.)

Q: I love the idea of selling your soul as a conceptual art piece (Marion’s character does this in the film at her art show). How did this come up?

Delpy: I was looking on Ebay for things to buy (audience laughs). I was like ‘wow that’s crazy.’ People sell their old underwear, and other really weird stuff. So I was like: ‘What if I sell my soul?’ I liked the concept, but then it brought up all these questions like does the soul exist? Maybe it does? And if the soul exists then it’s absurd if we would be able to sell it. Then I was thinking, ‘Who in the world would actually buy this piece of conceptual art?” And I’m friends with Vincent Gallo (he plays himself and the soul buyer in the film), and I was like ‘Vincent would buy it!’

Phoebe Joecks remembers the first day she volunteered for the Sundance Film Festival. Joecks is by profession a “freelance operations maven,” as she calls it. So when she volunteered at the 2008 Festival and was assigned to the Library Theatre, she already had a working background in festival logistics. But to be on the front lines, volunteering for the first time at one of the Festival venues, can be daunting. It’s at the theatres, after all, where Festival patrons most often come face-to-face with Festival volunteers and staff. And it’s not uncommon for a volunteer, on her first day of work, to be asked a question to which she does not know the answer. But “I was just welcomed into the family” of volunteers at the Library, Joecks recalls. “It wasn’t like going to a new school; they just instantly welcomed you.”

Joecks extends the warmth she felt her first day at the Festival to new, fellow volunteers. She’s volunteering at the Prospector Square Theatre this year. Joecks is part of the Festival’s “vagabond family reunion culture,” as fellow volunteer, Brenda Berliner, describes it. On the whole, it tends to be a group of hardy, experienced volunteers who’ve either worked at or volunteered at so many film festivals they’ve formed a culture of their own, picking up old friendships where they were left off and adding new recruits to the group.

The Festival is a “reunion of the tribes,” as Sandra Hodnett calls it. The 2012 Festival is Hodnett’s tenth year to volunteer for the Sundance Film Festival. This year, she’s assigned to theatre operations at the Library. “I go to Sundance because it has that certain glamour, that buzz,” Hodnett says. “We’re treated very well, not to mention the perks we receive on top of getting to see the films - the clothing and the housing. And it just happens to be in a resort town. But truthfully, I go because I get to see people I work with every year. I get to hang out with them and work at Sundance.”

Sundance Institute works to create a culture of volunteers that prizes friendship and warmth. Emily Aagaard, the Institute’s manager of Festival volunteers, acknowledges, “Festivals all have a unique personality.” She often hears the volunteers saying that the Festival is well organized. “But at the same time what sets us apart is the friendliness and the personalized nature of the Festival,” she explains. “We’re an interesting combination of being well organized as a whole while at the same time we maintain a casualness. There isn’t that rigid style to the way we interact with our patrons and that creates more of a fun, laid-back personal manner.”

There are benefits to the culture of roving volunteers beyond friendship, however. Once a team of volunteers, who know each another from having been together at both the Sundance Film Festival and other festivals, reunites, their work styles at the Festival become intuitive and efficient. “A number of the people I volunteer with at Sundance I work with at other festivals,” Joecks explains. “You get a good co-worker and you establish your routine, and ‘this person is good at this’ and ‘I’m not so good at that’ and you learn to complement each other. You can figure out how to take advantage of strengths and compensate for weaknesses.”

Festival volunteers, who either volunteer or work at other film festivals, describe friendships whose arcs unfurl in a 10-day festival span rather than the year-long spans of more traditional professional settings. They have to pack a lot of catching-up into those 10 days. “Especially at Sundance, it really does become like a vagabond family reunion,” says Berliner, who is semi-retired and volunteers in the press and media office at Festival Headquarters.

Berliner has also volunteered at the Tribeca Film Festival, AFI Fest, Imagine Science Film Festival, and the American Black Film Festival. The friendships she starts at one festival and reignites at another aren’t just about getting to know one another; they’re based in a mutual love of film. Berliner says she knows many Festival volunteers who return each year because doing so “is supporting the films,” she says. “We talk about the films we saw at the other festivals. It’s like this college reunion.”

Though it’s never been easy to make independent films—not by a long shot—the current economic climate has only made it harder to finance, produce, and distribute the kinds of films that Sundance was created to showcase. This reality makes community-building events like Sunday’s annual Producers Luncheon all the more vital. As attendees chatted over omelettes and mimosas at The Shop—a beautiful old warehouse that normally serves as a yoga studio—Sundance Institute leaders handed out grants, introduced Fellows, and praised the work of producers—the unsung heroes of independent film. 

“Today you have to be more entrepreneurial than ever, so it’s a testament to your tenacity, creativity and resourcefulness that you’re here in such a competitive year of the festival,” Keri Putnam, Executive Director the Sundance Institute, told the producers in attendance. “We really believe it is your vision, your creativity and tenacity that have made these films possible,” concurred Michelle Satter, Director of the Feature Film Program.

Keynote speaker Sarah Green, who produced two of 2011’s most acclaimed films, The Tree of Life and Take Shelter, spoke of the importance that apprenticeship played in her own career development, and exhorted her colleagues to make time for mentorship, for producers groups, for collaboration. “You’ve likely benefited from someone else’s generosity in getting where you are,” she said. “I encourage you to pass that on. To be as generous as you can be with each other. Working from your most generous place will feed your relationships and make them stronger, and being generous with your time and resources when it comes to others will likely result in that same generosity [returned] back to you.”

Green added that rather than feel competitive, filmmakers should think of any indie breakout as beneficial to the larger community. “Who hasn’t referenced Brokeback Mountain, Little Miss Sunshine, or Precious, when trying to explain that our ‘female driven,’ ‘coming-of-age,’ ‘Americana,’ and here’s the real eye-roller—‘drama’—is going to make pots of money,” she said. “A truly successful indie gives us all something to point to when pitching our own film. It makes it easier to get another independent film made.”

The luncheon afforded established producers to chat with up-and-comers, those who work in documentaries to compare notes with those who work in dramas, a shorts producer like Zak Kilberg (L Train) to talk about the new world order with transmedia wiz Dana Dansereau (Bear 71). Michael Jenson, producer of competition film LUV, talked about how in this economy, “more things have to be in place,” such as seed funds, script and cast, for a project to move forward. That’s how things came together for Jenson at Sundance last year, when enough pieces were in place for LUV to obtain the necessary financing to start filming.

“Yes, Sundance is known for its filmmakers,” said Mark Roybal President of Production at Indian Paintbrush, which has produced such films such as Fantastic Mr. Fox and 2011 Grand Jury Winner Like Crazy. “The lion’s share of the fellowships, grants and awards go to writers and directors, and even in the festival the grand jury prize is awarded to the director. We get a luncheon. The academy doesn’t even do this. But guess what? Producers are filmmakers too.” As a corrective, Roybal presented the inaugural Sundance Institute Indian Paintbrush Producers Award to Josh Penn and Dan Janvey, first-time producers of one the runaway hits of this year’s Festival, Beasts of the Southern Wild.  “Yes, you writer-directors bring ideas, and artistic vision, and method, unborn dreams to the table,” he continued, giving voice—jokey yet passionate—to what most people in the room silently know to be true. “But we producers, we use common sense and resourceful knowhow to make your craziness real.”