Beasts of the Southern Wild Producer Josh Penn travels with FILM FORWARD to Puerto Rico for its third year of the program there. In this interview, Josh, as well as a young film student, discuss how the film resonates with local audiences, and raises the question, "If a natural disaster was coming towards your community and you had the option of staying or leaving, what would you do?"   ...  more»

In 1521, the conquistador Ponce de León built his colonial residence in San Juan, naming it Casa Blanca. Today, almost 500 years later, the house is a museum where I had the privilege of screening my film Valley of Saints. In Puerto Rico, it’s hard not to see that the dialogue we’re having isn’t just between people, but between the past and the present. The screening at Casa Blanca brought this home in a number of ways. Our amazing organizers invited activists from Ca&nt...  more»

It’s June, y’all – which means the LGBT and their friends, families, and allies are putting on their tank tops, taking to the streets, and waving their rainbow flags.  And though the “do we still need Pride?” debate rages on (read here and rebuttal here), it’s hard for a young-ish person like me to believe that not so long ago – and still in some parts of our country and the world – it’s NOT ok to be who you are, 365 days a year.  W...  more»

In showing Beasts of the Southern Wild across San Juan this week, a really interesting conversation emerged.  The conversation was not so much a discussion about the movie but rather a conversation around an idea that the film explores which is a very real question for Puerto Ricans.  The question is: if a natural disaster was coming towards your community and you had the option of staying or leaving, what would you do? The protagonists of Beasts deal with this with question when a sto...  more»

It may be true that the most memorable fathers in film are those who brazenly renounce their parental duties—or fail in their attempts at patriarchy altogether. Think Jeff Daniels as Bernard Berkman in The Squid and the Whale, a pompous intellectual and the out-of-touch father of a dysfunctional family traversing the treacherous landscape of divorce. Even still, cinema has also provided more than a few samples of admirable parenting, some of which we’ve selected for our Father’...  more»

*Update*: Yung Jake's E.m-bed.de/d is nominated for an MTV O Music Award for Best Interactive Music Video. Vote for the award here. The New Frontier program empowers artists creating work for the new digital-age paradigm of story. We encourage storytellers grounded in traditional mediums to expand their practice by collaborating with technologists and experimenting with platforms in order to find innovative ways of making story. However, we are also cultivating a totally new generation of artist...  more»

Read the live updates from the Awards Ceremony below or click here to jump to the full list of winners. Hi everyone, and welcome to the live blog for the 2013 Sundance Film Festival Awards Ceremony. We’re Eric Hynes and Jeremy Kinser, and we’ll be your eyes and ears for tonight’s festivities. Things kick off at 7pm Mountain Time, which means we’re less than an hour away from learning which films and filmmakers are going home as Sundance award winners. Everyone’s a w...  more»

Sundance.org is dispatching its writers to daily screenings and events to capture the 10 days of festivities during the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. Check back each morning for roundups from the previous day's events. C.O.G. By Eric Hynes “It think this is the largest crowd that’s ever watched anything I’ve ever done,” director Kyle Patrick Alvarez said to the 1,200 plus audience members at the Eccles Theater on Friday afternoon. It’s a sentiment...  more»

Sundance.org is dispatching its writers to daily screenings and events to capture the 10 days of festivities during the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. Check back each morning for roundups from the previous day's events. Blue Caprice By Eric Hynes “I’ve created a monster,” John Allen Muhammad (Isaiah Washington) says to his surrogate son Lee Boyd Malvo (Tequan Richmond) in this tense true crime thriller, and he doesn’t mean it figuratively. Based on the even...  more»

Sundance.org is dispatching its writers to daily screenings and events to capture the 10 days of festivities during the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. Check back each morning for roundups from the previous day's events. Music and Film: The Creative ProcessBy Jeremy Kinser Many of the most highly regarded filmmakers at this year’s festival crowded the Sundance House stage with their composers for “Music and Film: The Creative Process,” a panel discussion on the pr...  more»

Sundance.org is dispatching its writers to daily screenings and events to capture the 10 days of festivities during the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. Check back each morning for round-ups from the previous day's events. 2013 Sundance Film Festival Shorts Awards Ceremony By Eric Hynes It’s one of the Festival’s better traditions. While high-profile films are still premiering in town, and millions of dollars are being traded for the theatrical rights to the hotte...  more»

Sundance.org is dispatching its writers to daily screenings and events to capture the 10 days of festivities during the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. Check back each morning for round-ups from the previous day's events. Upstream Color By Eric Hynes “Wow.” That was how director Shane Carruth greeted each question from the audience after the world premiere of Upstream Color, and judging from the tenor of those questions, the feeling was mutual. Carruth’s sophom...  more»

Sundance.org is dispatching its writers to daily screenings and events to capture the 10 days of festivities during the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. Check back each morning for round-ups from the previous day's events. A Celebration of Music in Film By Jeremy Kinser The deafening crash you likely heard near Main Street last night was the sound of the roof being blown off the Kimball Art Center as a quintet of female vocalists (Darlene Love, Merry Clayton, Lisa Fischer, Tata Vega...  more»

Filmmakers Jeff Orlowski, Chasing Ice Patricia Riggen, Under The Same Moon (La Misma Luna) Los Angeles, CA — Sundance Institute and the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities announced today that FILM FORWARD: Advancing Cultural Dialogue concluded its third year hosting free screenings of seven films, panel discussions and artist roundtables in China.  Filmmakers Jeff Orlowski and Patricia Riggen traveled with the program and participated in film events at Beijing ...  more»

WHAT: Sundance Institute invites New York area filmmakers to attend a day-long filmmaking workshop. ShortsLab: New York offers filmmakers the opportunity to participate in an intensive one-day seminar of screenings and discussions with firsthand insight and access into the world of story development, production and exhibition of narrative short-form films. Sundance Institute and the Sundance Film Festival have long supported the creation and exhibition of short films. A record 8,102 short fi...  more»

Los Angeles, CA — Sundance Institute and TED, the nonprofit known for “ideas worth spreading," announced that filmmaker Jerry Rothwell has been selected to receive the first-ever Sundance Institute | TED Prize Filmmaker Award – the centerpiece of which is a grant of $125,000 to make a documentary film about the 2013 TED Prize winner Sugata Mitra and his wish, A School in the Cloud. The prize was awarded during the TEDGlobal 2013 Conference, taking place June 10 to 14, 2013 in E...  more»

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Sundance Institute and Americans for the Arts, the nation’s leading nonprofit organization for advancing the arts and arts education, released a report based on findings from the annual National Arts Policy Roundtable (NAPR) led by Robert Redford, Sundance Institute founder and president, and Robert L. Lynch, president and CEO of Americans for the Arts. Together with a group of leaders from government, business, and the arts they met for a weekend of roundtable dis...  more»

Los Angeles, CA — Last night, Wednesday, June 5, the third annual ‘Celebrate Sundance Institute’ benefit in Los Angeles honored the life and work of beloved journalist and film critic Roger Ebert with the Vanguard Leadership Award in Memoriam. The event also honored filmmaker Ryan Coogler – whose debut feature film, Fruitvale Station, was selected for Sundance Institute's Screenwriters Lab and went on to win both the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award at the 2013 Sun...  more»