Sundance 2011: From Director's Lab to Feature Film

The Sundance Institute is currently showcasing short films from festivals past and present on YouTube's Screening Room channel. But the shorts I found most interesting were those in the Director's Lab series, highlighting the projects of budding filmmakers in June of 2009. It's a very select few who get this opportunity: of the 3,000+ scripts that were submitted, that year, only 8 were chosen. If you've ever wondered what life is like at the Sundance Director's Lab, here's an inside look, from the first group introductions to the final script burning ceremony.

Filmmaker Andrew Okpeaha MacLean began his journey at the 2009 Director's Lab and is presenting his full-length feature, On the Ice at this year's festival:



Learn more about the film at ontheicemovie.com and browse through some fantastic production photos on MacLean's "On the Ice: Behind The Scenes..." blog. If you'd like to see the film at Sundance, here's more.

Sunny Escape: Palm Springs International Film Festival Starts Jan. 5th

Need a vacation from your vacation? If you're tired of rain and snow, or are looking for a post-holiday escape, the Palm Springs International Film Festival starts this Wednesday and should really hit its stride on Friday night. Billing itself as "the premier presenter of world cinema on the North American continent," PSIFF features films from Argentina to Ethiopia, from Vietnam to Uzbekistan. A number of the films being shown this year are award winners (the South Korean film, Shi, or "Poetry", won Best Screenplay honors for Lee Changdong at the Cannes Film Festival, this year). Son of Babylon, which plays this week, was one of my favorites from the 2010 Sundance Film Festival lineup (a Marine in the theater that night felt the film presented an accurate portrait of Iraq as he saw it, while stationed there; it certainly is a moving portrayal of the life of a Kurdish boy searching for his missing father in that war-torn country):



Many PSIFF films have already screened at other high-profile festivals around the world. PSIFF claims to show "a majority of the official international submissions to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for Best Foreign Language Film." In other words, this is a great place to watch for Oscar contenders.

In addition to films, this year's "Talking Pictures" series focuses on actors considered to be Academy Awards frontrunners: after a screening of their films, Colin Firth, Javier Bardem, and Michael Douglas will each appear on stage for a live, in-depth interview.

There are also a number of filmmaker tributes scheduled for Saturday's Black Tie Awards Gala at the Palm Springs Convention Center. The following stars can be expected to appear on the red carpet, that night:

Jennifer Lawrence (Rising Star Award)
Carey Mulligan (Breakthrough Performance Award)
Javier Bardem (International Star Award)
Diane Warren (Frederick Loewe Music Award)
David O. Russell (Director of the Year Award)
Colin Firth (Desert Palm Achievement Actor Award)
Danny Boyle (Sonny Bono Visionary Award)
Natalie Portman (Desert Palm Achievement Actress Award)
Robert Duvall (Career Achievement Award)
Ben Affleck (Chairman's Award)
The Social Network (Ensemble Performance Award)

If nothing else, it should be a celebrity-watcher's dream weekend. Do try to see a film or two, though, will you?

Whistler Film Festival Opens Tonight!

At the time of this posting, it appears that there are still tickets available to most films playing at the upcoming Whistler Film Festival. Although it's not on the original Film Fest Connect film fest destination list, Whistler is an excellent skiing destination, so you can hit twice as many great venues in the same tourist space.

You can see all of the film information at the festival's Films+Events Film Guide page. Here are a few trailers to get you started:

Two Frogs In The West
The closing night gala film, set in Whistler itself, is an emotional whirlwind, if the trailer is any indication:



The Bang Bang Club
A poor-quality trailer, but potentially an important, if disturbing, movie. An inside view of conflict-zone photographers based on the book of the same name, it chronicles the lives of several white South African photographers and the personal impacts of their quest for the perfect shot in the midst of South Africa's often violent transition from apartheid to democracy. (Joe Utichi wrote a piece on the film for Rotten Tomatoes when it played at Cannes, last May.)


Blue Valentine
Selling well across both the domestic and international festival circuit, Ryan Gosling's and Michelle Williams' portrayal of their idyllic love and dissolving marriage first gained traction at the Sundance Film Festival, where it sold out theaters, last January. Check out the movie's web site for the trailer: http://www.bluevalentinemovie.com/
The official site is spare, but the Facebook page is filled with recent news.

Matthew Thrift of Cinephile offered this review:
"This stunning portrait of a disintegrating relationship features career best performances from its two leads, which alongside Derek Cianfrance’s bravura direction serve to make Blue Valentine the strongest contender for the best film I’ve seen at the London Film Festival so far. Recalling Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes From A Marriage (1973) in its juxtaposition of couple Dean (Ryan Gosling) and Cindy‘s (Michelle Williams) courtship and marital breakdown, it’s an emotionally devastating picture full of wit, passion and heartbreak."
Read more...

Hævnen (In A Better World)
Denmark’s official entry for Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award®.

Here's a brief description from the Whistler Film Fest:
"The latest drama from Academy Award nominated director Susanne Bier (After The Wedding, Brothers) centres on Anton, a doctor who commutes between his home in an idyllic town in Denmark and his work at an African refugee camp. Within these two very different worlds, he and his family are faced with conflicts that lead to difficult choices between revenge and forgiveness."

Packing for the Sundance Film Festival: The Agony of Advance Planning

Article first published as "Packing for the Sundance Film Festival: The Agony of Advance Planning" on Blogcritics.org.

I’m just a wee bit excited about my third trip to the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, next January.

So I started packing in October.

This is always a bad idea; it gives me too much time (and too many holiday sales) to throw in extra gear, making the final consolidation that much more painful. When I came across Jason Cochran’s WalletPop.com article, Savings Experiment: Packing light and cheap, I thought I’d give it a try. I mean, it’s already Thanksgiving, for goodness sake--I need to get cracking. January 20th is right around the corner!

I pulled out my suitcase and laid everything out, using Cochran's helpful suggestions:

As It Happens: Filmmaking in Real Time

If you're unable to make it to the Adventure Film Fest in Boulder, then catch As It Happens, an intense, direct-experience mountaineering short by award-winning filmmaker Renan Ozturk and photographer Cory Richards, in its entirety online.

Shot and shared in real time, Ozturk and Richards posted their dispatches from their climb in the Nepalese Himalayas, to the delight of thousands of online viewers following their exploits as they happened. Ozturk and Richards' attention to lighting, focus, arresting camera angles and use of time lapse creates a high-quality movie experience, unexpected for the conditions under which much of the film is shot. The cinematography is laudable in its own right. To have carried the extra equipment necessary to edit and share their experiences, while navigating dangerous terrain at tens of thousands of feet--especially during the final legs of their two-man ascent--seems nuts. And brave. And hyper-real. If you've ever wondered...or ever been there...this is a film you'll want to chew on.

(Don't miss the rest of Ozturk's blog, filled with "dispatches" from other mountain adventures, large and small. The links to Ozturk and Richards, posted above, will take you to each man's own site.)

As It Happens screens at 8 p.m. tonight at Neptune Mountaineering, along with four additional short films. See the Adventure Film Festival page for schedule and ticket info.
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Get Off Your Seat: Adventure Film Festival in Boulder, CO

If you would rather frolic in the rapids of a torrential river than play World of Warcraft until 3 a.m., this film fest might inspire you sit still long enough to formulate your next daring plan. The Adventure Film Festival opens today at the Boulder Theater in Boulder, Colorado. This evening's program runs from 7-9 p.m. (Click here for a PDF of the full festival schedule.) Sponsored by Patagonia and a number of other forward-thinking, community-minded partners, Adventure Film also hosts screenings in Chamonix, France and Santiago, Chile, as well as a touring program that visits Seattle, San Francisco, New York, and Boston throughout the year.

The week's program begins on Thursday with the short, Skateistan, which examines how skateboarding is pushing the boundaries of change for two teens (one of them a young woman) in Afghanistan. On Skateistan's heels follows Ben Knight's thoughtful Eastern Rises, as a group of fly fisherman explore the pristine environments of the Kamchatka Peninsula of Pacific Russia in their search for "the most wild and beautiful trout in the world." Knight's deadpan narration is spot on. The trailer on the film fest site had me laughing out loud at his description of a fly hook that looks "like the half-eaten rodent your cat wheezed up on the kitchen floor." (It does.) This second trailer strikes a more awe-struck tone:


After intermission are two killer-looking ski flicks: the short, Desert River, and Australis: An Antarctic Ski Odyssey. In Australis, a group of experienced, daring (I'd venture "crazy") skiers take on the slopes of Antarctica--with no guidebook, no lift, and not much between the end of the slope and the near-freezing polar waters, below. I suppose, given the rate at which the planet's poles are melting, these folks might have discovered the next great ski resort destination--all they need is a hot tub and a bit more beach.

With Love, Dad: The Kids Grow Up

Doug Block's The Kids Grow Up isn't playing in the western states yet, but when I read this profile of the film, I had to share:
"Filmmaker Documents a Year of Saying Goodbye to His College-Bound Daughter"
by Ilyssa Panitz of Parent Dish