Sin Nombre, Cary Joji Fukunaga’s harrowing first feature, is one of the most emotionally devastating films in the Festival lineup this year; it is also one of the most thrilling and emotionally redemptive. Sin Nombre, which was supported by the Sundance Institute Labs, is the story of two Central American immigrants, Sayra (Paulina Gaitan) and Casper (Edgar Flores), whose journey from Honduras, through Mexico, and into America is the same one an estimated 70,000 Central Americans take ev...
An affectionate spoof of Shaft, Dolemite, and just about every other blaxploitation film from the 1970’s, Black Dynamite fumigates the much-loved genre with a healthy dose of nitrous oxide.
Michael Jai White stars as the title vigilante – an Afro-sporting, shamelessly womanizing kung fu master who is investigating the death of his brother and discovers a nefarious plot involving the distribution of Anaconda Malt Liquor in seedy Los Angeles.
Directed by Scott Sanders, Black Dy...
When it comes to making your independent movie a hit, it’s not about what you know but who you know – on Facebook and Twitter.
Social networking has quickly emerged as a potent marketing tool for independent filmmakers, and industry insiders say that digital word-of-mouth could become the most important channel for first-time directors.
At a recent New Frontier panel titled “What's Next?: The Digital Distribution Imperative,” a group of digital media experts discu...
In Barking Water, the latest film from Sundance Institute Lab alum Sterlin Harjo, Irene (Casey Camp-Horinek) takes Frankie (Richard Ray Whitman) on one last road trip, driving him from the hospital across Oklahoma to see his daughter and grandchild. Along the way, they meet and spend time with friends, family, and random strangers, each encounter shedding a bit more light on the couple’s on-again, off-again relationship and the complicated nature of love and regret. After a recent screen...
John Cooper, the Festival’s Director of Programming, once said, “Sundance doesn’t change the path a filmmaker is on; it just makes the path go faster.” It is never the venue or a distribution system that is what makes a film good or a filmmaker talented; those traits have to be inherent. Film festivals— and the film industry—in general are vehicles to help films reach audiences. Or maybe the Festival is a little more. “Actually in my case, [the Festival]...
A winner of the Sundance/NHK International Filmmakers Award in 2006, Kanji Nakajima returns to the Festival this year with his completed film The Clone Returns Home, which is competing in the World Dramatic section.
The movie takes place in a vaguely futuristic world and tells the story of an astronaut named Kohei (Mitsuhiro Oikawa) who participates in a new cloning program. When the protagonist is accidentally killed on a space mission, the government clones his body and memory, but t...
The alarm blares at 6 a.m. and I blurrily turn on the television to help me ease into consciousness. Instantly I’m sucked into an infomercial for the Magic Bullet, an ingenious blender thing that somehow makes smoothies and also alfredo sauce? It’s being offered at the insane over-price of $99.99, and yet somehow I’m besieged by the urge to order one for myself. Or maybe two! I am officially sleep-deprived beyond all reason. September IssuesAfter typing, typing, typing for two ...
What makes a person want to reveal private family history to a wide public? What makes us want to watch a movie that accomplishes that act? Natalia Almada (El General) and Dana Perry’s Boy Interrupted) documentaries are unflinching, brooding, unapologetically dark, and personal. Almada, who won the Festival’s Directing Award: U.S. Documentary for El General, is the great-grandaughter of Plutarco Elías Calles, a controversial general during the Mexican Revolution and presiden...
You don’t want to mess with the women in charge in Rough Aunties, the new documentary that tells the story of Operation Bobbi Bear, the South African aid group dedicated to rescuing and helping abused children.
Taking life’s blows with a thick-skinned matter-of-factness, the five “aunties” who run the organization are a fascinating quintent of protagonists whose tough-love (at times confrontational) approach to their work unnerves and inspires in equal measure.
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I’m awake, and it’s … 10 a.m.? I don’t know. Where am I? What day is it? All I know for sure is that Utah has the strangest television offerings I’ve ever encountered. Apparently they have a channel here that plays nothing but Golden Girls and Fresh Prince of Bel Air?
If the Glove Fits
First order of the day: an interview and photo opportunity with the button-cute Maggie Willis, Information Booth Coordinator and overseer of all things lost and found a...
Last night, the 25th Sundance Film Festival culminated with a celebration recognizing the films that Festival juries and audiences selected for awards. Festivalgoers packed into the Park City Racquet Club for this special evening highlighting some of the 2009 Festival’s most original voices. Jane Lynch, the ceremony's host, followed in the spirit of this year's storytime theme and opened with a windy mad-lib pieced together by this year's film titles.” In fact, at the risk of sound...
The war in Iraq has spawned many documentaries, but few are as intensely focused on a single individual as Sergio. The film tells the story of Sergio Vieira de Mello, the U.N.’s special envoy to Iraq who on Aug. 19, 2003 was one of numerous diplomats caught in a terrorist bombing at Baghdad’s Canal Hotel.
What follows is an in-depth, sometimes claustrophobic account of that horrific day. The movie is based on Samantha Power’s biography Chasing the Flame: One Man’...
A simple teenage girl is forced into preparing for a prom she doesn't want to go to. That's the setup of Boutonniere, a short film by director Coley Sohn that is funny, stylish, and uncovers a world in which an overbearing mother (who in the real world would not come across as funny) can generate laughs while presenting an almost deranged, not-so-traditional familial relationship. It's uncomfortable yet funny, dark, and quite satirical.
Boutonniere was originally penned as part of an app...
When two lifelong buddies decide to take their friendship into unchartered sexual territory, homo awkwardness gives way to a philosophical gabfest in Lynn Shelton’s Humpday. As the shlubbier half of the pair, Festival regular Mark Duplass helped devise the film’s treatment, improvised much of his own dialogue and gamely swapped spit with his male co-star, Joshua Leonard. In a series of conversations with the Daily Insider, Duplass discussed Humpday as well as his role as one of the...
Sophie Barthes' haunting comedy Cold Souls takes a literal cognitive journey into filmmaking. Paul Giamatti stars as himself, an actor in the midst of a Chekhovian breakdown; he suffers from an indefinable throb, a pressure, a pain. He turns to the new technology of a glossy white soul-extraction machine to escape his spiritual crisis. It takes a few borrowed souls, some awkward play rehearsals, and a mission to Russia for the actor to find his way back to the value of his own soul. After a Fe...
Intelligent, confident, protective against mood swings and other melodramatic moments in life, therapists represent pillars of society, helping those who can’t fully help themselves. So when you hear about the things therapists are doing in films in this year’s Festival, you may be surprised how far depictions of therapists have come.
A shrink in trouble is portrayed by Chazz Palminteri in director Jeff Lipsky’s Once More with Feeling. Palminteri is a successful therapi...
Tom DiCillo, director of the hilarious, almost-too-true 1995 film Living in Oblivion, represents both a generation and an era of narrative filmmakers who helped redefine American independent film. DiCillo’s other features, made over the last 15 years or so, include Johnny Suede, Box of Moon Light, The Real Blonde, Double Whammy, and Delirious, each of which tells a slightly strange, often humorous story with idiosyncratic characters. This year, however, DiCillo returns to the Festival wi...
Robert Stone’s Earth Days is an enlightening but sobering journey through the history of the environmental movement from the perspective of its earliest pioneers and activists. Filled with rare footage that gives careful historical perspective and insightful commentary by the self-proclaimed “environmental radicals” of the 60’s and 70’s, Earth Days reminds us all how human activity (and inactivity) defines our tenuous relationship with the world. The film premiere...
When I visited the Oblong Industries laboratory in downtown Los Angeles recently to see TAMPER: Gestural Interface for Cinematic Design, I expected to see a newfangled movie editing system. I knew Oblong’s innovation wasn’t some new kind of mouse or keyboard, but that it involved working with gloves and giant screens to manipulate frames of film. But I got a shock to the system – TAMPER not only redefines working with a moving image in a completely physical way but provides u...
Congratulations to James Marsh's Man on Wire, winner of the Academy Award for Best Documentary.
Congratulations to the following Sundance artists for receiving Spirit Awards:
• James Marsh, Best Documentary for Man on Wire
• Tom McCarthy, Best Director, The Visitor
• Melissa Leo, Best Female Lead, Frozen River
• Heather Rae, Piaget Producer of The Year
Congratulations to the following Sundance a...
The editorial team 
