Category Archives: Sundance

WarnerMedia Lounge at Sundance

WarnerMedia Lodge: Elevating Storytelling with AT&T programming includes:

  • Variety Studio presented by AT&T – January 24-27: WarnerMedia together with AT&T will host Variety Studio, featuring interviews and portraits with the festival’s top A-list actors and filmmakers.
  • Jon & Vinny’s Pop Up – January 24-27: AT&T and WarnerMedia will partner with Jon & Vinny’s Italian Restaurant for a pop-up culinary experience from the famed Los Angeles restaurant from James Beard Award-winning chefs Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo.

Adjacent to the main space is Lateral, a new chic, underground hotspot hosted by WarnerMedia featuring panel discussions, receptions, live entertainment and late-night programming. Activations at Lateral, located at 600 Main St., include:

  • TNT Presents Snowpiercer Featuring Sneak Peek Footage and a Conversation with Stars – January 25: A panel with Daveed Diggs, Lena Hall, and Showrunner Graeme Manson, moderated by JD Heyman (Editor-in-Chief, Entertainment Weekly).
  • TBS Presents Miracle Workers: Dark Ages Screening & Panel with Cast and Creators – January 25: Screening followed by a panel with Steve Buscemi, Geraldine Viswanathan, Karan Soni and the show’s creator Simon Rich, moderated by Rachel Handler (Vulture). 
  • Career Conversations hosted by WarnerMedia’s Talent Acquisition Diversity Outreach – January 25: As part of the company’s ongoing commitment to diversity and inclusion, WarnerMedia invites festival participants to stop by the lounge to view content, better understand our work culture and discuss current or future professional aspirations. View https://www.warnermediagroup.com/careers for a list of potential opportunities.
  • “The Impact of Innovation on Today’s Connected Consumer” Panel – January 25: from 5-7pm at LATERAL. Cross-industry leaders in content, technology and innovation will detail the ever-growing demand to connect on multiple platforms and devices, and how companies of any size can scale innovation efforts while measuring success, sentiment and smiles, during an era of ongoing change. Moderated by Jesse Redniss (EVP Data Strategy, WarnerMedia & GM, WarnerMedia Innovation Lab), panelists will include Tony Driscoll (SVP, Emerging Technology & Innovation Strategy at Warner Bros.), Jacee Scoular (Director, Brand Marketing Strategy at Hollister Co.) and Sarah Vick (Executive Producer, Intel Studios).
  • Particular Crowd Celebrates Latin America at Sundance Lunch – January 26: A few days after its official launch at NATPE, Particular Crowd, Turner Latin America’s film division, will participate for the first time at Sundance with a lunch to celebrate Latin America. This is following the premiere of one of its movies POSSESSOR the night before.
  • HBO Presents Welcome to Chechnya – A Conversation with Filmmaker David France and Film Subjects – January 27: In the present-day Russian republic of Chechnya, gay and transgender citizens are targeted as part of a deadly “cleansing” campaign. This searing documentary shadows a group of brave LGBTQ activists risking their lives to confront the ongoing persecution, working undercover to rescue the victims of this aggression. HBO will host a panel with Filmmaker David France, Alphonso David, President of the Human Rights Campaign, subjects featured in the film and moderated by Rashad Robinson, President of Color of Change.

 

Sundance Film Festival’s New Frontier Installations

Biodigital Theatre

All Kinds of Limbo
The National Theatre of Great Britain’s communal musical journey reflecting the influence of West Indian culture on the UK’s music scene across the genres of reggae, grime, classical, and calypso. Immersive technologies, the ceremony of live performance, and the craft of theatrical staging bring audiences into a VR performance space.

Anti-Gone
In a post-climate-change world, environmental catastrophe has become normalized. Cities are sunken, yet the vestiges of late-capitalist culture live on, clinging like barnacles to the ruins of civilization. Spyda and Lynxa are a couple navigating this world, gliding frictionlessly from shopping to movies to psychedelic drugs.

Atomu
Go inside the cyclical center of a Kikuyu tribal myth from Kenya, where man may become woman and woman may become man. Through virtual reality, dance, and music, a sacred space is created to explore many versions of yourself.

BLKNWS

Tickets are required; eWaitlist access is also available.

Kahlil Joseph’s mesmerizing news-creation machine is a soulful and rousing intervention into the current epidemic news addiction powered by the “news-industrial complex.” Rejuvenating what news can be, BLKNWS combines appropriated news and social media with originally produced anchored segments to create a continuously updated broadcast that is as much a news service as it is a portal to an elevated state of awareness. “A fugitive newscast,” BLKNWS is only accessible at specific terrestrial sites.

Ongoing broadcast installations can be seen at Filmmaker Lodge and the Festival Co-op.

New Frontier In The Wild

All the world’s a stage! Find these works woven into the digital landscape of the Festival campus.

Dance Trail
A dance piece in augmented reality enabling users to invite virtual dancers into our world. Site-specific and mobile, the app allows audiences to see dance sequences outdoors and indoors during the Festival. Users can place dancers anywhere in the world and share snapshots and videos.
Details on how to experience this exhibition will be announced soon.

Guisado on Sunset
Missed-connection regret at that one late-night spot—the kind you keep playing back in your head but not quite ever remembering right, until it starts to look like something else.
Details on how to experience this exhibition will be announced soon.

Spaced Out
An underwater VR experience transports you aboard a voyage from the Earth to the moon, as well as within, led by the audio conversations of the Apollo 11 mission. Using special underwater VR goggles and a snorkel, the experience becomes a space simulation immersing all of the senses.
Open to credential holders Sat. 1/25–Thu. 1/30, 10:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m. at Festival Headquarters (Sheraton Park City, 1895 Sidewinder Dr.)
Bring your swimsuit; towels available on-site.

VR Cinema Program 1

The Box at The Ray
1768 Park Ave., Park City

Tickets are required; eWaitlist access is also available.

Azibuye—The Occupation
When Masello and Evan, two homeless black artists/activists, break into an abandoned mansion in an affluent part of Johannesburg, they proclaim their occupation to be an artistic and political act in defiance of inequalities in land ownership in South Africa.

Bembé
Bembé is a Cuban tradition that encompasses elements of both Christianity and the African Yoruba, where the souls of dead slaves come to Earth and family, friends, and neighbors take part in a celebration lasting up to seven days.

After the Fallout
In March 2011, an earthquake caused a tsunami and a meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. The devastating consequences filled the communities in Fukushima with fear of the intangible and split Japan in a distinct before and after.

VR Free
Exploring the nature of incarceration spaces by portraying slices of life inside a prison in Turin, Italy. The film also captures the reactions of several inmates during brief encounters with immersive videos of life outside of prison.

CATEGORY New Frontier Exhibitions

RUN TIME 50 min

VR Cinema Program 2

About

The Box at The Ray
1768 Park Ave., Park City

Tickets are required; eWaitlist access is also available.

Flowers & a Switchblade
An everyday scene—a real-life conversation in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park—collaged together from hundreds of videos to form a fractured, hyperstimulating, 360-degree cubist world.

tx-reverse 360°
What is behind the cinema screen? What if the auditorium dissolves and with it the familiar laws of cinema itself? As reality and cinema collide, viewers are drawn into a vortex where the familiar order of space and time seems to be suspended.

Go
Searching for stability in his life, Peter Thaler sets out on a hike in the Swiss mountains from which he will never return. An unprecedented symbiosis of literature and virtual reality, telling a story of everyday and final farewells and opening the door to eternity a tiny crack.

Hominidae
Against a landscape of X-ray imagery and wild anatomical reimagination, a mother and her children struggle for survival. This experience follows an “arachnid hominid,” an intelligent creature with human and spider physiology, from the birth of her children to her premature death in the teeth of her prey.

CATEGORY New Frontier Exhibitions

RUN TIME 46 min

PERSUASION MACHINES

Artists Karim Amer and Güvenç Özel use a virtual smart living room, and an HTC VIVE headset, to allow the user to visually confront the invisible process of data collection and question the nature of the digital machines that are supposed to be making our lives better.

Audible Speakeasy at the Sundance Film Festival

 692 Main Street, Park City (at 7th Street)

Friday, January 24 – Sunday, January 26: 10:30am – 4:00pm & Monday, January 27: 10:00am – 3:00pm

*Speakeasy will close promptly at 4:00pm (Jan. 24-26) for RSVP-only private events

  

Daily Public Programming:

9:00 – 10:00am: Sound Bath with Sara Auster (RSVP required at audible.com/sundance2020)

Afternoon: Audible In Conversation and Los Angeles Times Panels (Jan. 24-26)

 

FRIDAY, JANUARY 24

 

2:30 – 3:30pm:               “How We Made It” Panel, hosted by the Los Angeles Times 

                                        Moderator: Alison Brower, Los Angeles Times Deputy Editor, Arts & Entertainment

Panelists: Heidi Ewing, filmmaker (I Carry You With Me, Love Fraud), Rebecca Hall, actor (The Night House), Ron Howard, filmmaker (Rebuilding Paradise), Sasheer Zamata, actor (Spree) and Amy Ziering, filmmaker (Untitled Russell Simmons documentary)

Los Angeles Times deputy editor Alison Brower will lead a conversation about practical and artistic challenges across genres, how documentary and narrative storytellers respond to character and production hurdles, and the themes that unite great stories.

 

SATURDAY, JANUARY 25

 

1:15 – 1:45pm:                In Conversation With Rufus Wainwright

                                        Moderator: Kate Navin, Audible Artistic Producer

Legendary Grammy-nominated singer, songwriter and composer Rufus Wainwright will join Audible’s Artistic Producer Kate Navin in a spirited conversation about the creative process in which powerful music and stories are born. Wainwright will explore his upcoming original project “Road Trip Elegies: Montreal to New York” which covers a journey he took many times with his beloved late mother, Canadian folk singer, Kate McGarrigle, from Montreal to New York City. The route represents both a physical and metaphorical life journey for him, one that oscillates between the emotional poles of his divorced mother and father living in Canada and New York, respectively.

 

2:00 – 3:00pm:               “Music and Storytelling” Panel, hosted by the Los Angeles Times

                                        Moderator: Amy Kaufman, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

Panelists: Eugene Ashe, writer-director (Sylvie’s Love), Alison Ellwood, filmmaker (The Go-Go’s), Belinda Carlisle, musician (The Go-Go’s), and additional participants to be announced

Los Angeles Times writer Amy Kaufman will lead a conversation about the intersection of music and storytelling — how to capture the magic of great performers and performances, how music drives narrative, and the art of creating songs that tell stories and stories that amplify musicians’ craft.

  

SUNDAY, JANUARY 26  

2:30 – 3:30pm:               “Transcendence of Narrative” Panel, hosted by the Los Angeles Times

Moderator: Mark Olsen, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

Participants: Tessa Thompson, actor (Sylvie’s Love), Nnamdi Asomugha, actor and producer (Sylvie’s Love), Colman Domingo, actor (Zola) and Justin Simien, writer-director (Bad Hair)

Los Angeles Times writer Mark Olsen will lead a conversation about how great narratives can be told and retold, exploring how different storytelling formats inspire and inflect creation and provide new opportunities and challenges.

 

SEED Us at Sundance

SEED Us Society is a concept of Being Investments, a global advisory board supporting impact funding initiatives. They believe each person plays a strategic role in developing ideas into action.

Located in the heart of historic Main Street, the SEED Us activation will be hosted in the  WELLHAUS Lounge at the brand-new Old Town Cellars (OTC, 408 Main Street) on January 25th 3:00 – 6:00pm during the festivals’ kick-off weekend.

SATURDAY, January 25:

3:00pm-4:00pm: SEED Mind/Body/Soul Empowered Storytelling– “Play is the New Currency!”

Be a part of the show with storyteller’s Master of Ceremony, Host, and Founder of SEED Brandi Veil and World Renown Vocologist Mister CoRey educating the audience on why “play is the new currency.”

4:00pm-4:30pm: Healing Sound Alchemy Sound Bath Activation : “Sound is Medicine” “Healing Sound Alchemy Is at the forefront of bridging the future of therapy music into the mainstream with Shamanic and Celestial Sounds.”

4:30pm-5:30pm: “Not Panel” Learn About Impact Funding and How Member Groups Can Support Your Projects

Amanda Manares Founder, MindAstronaut, Venture Partnerships, and SEED Advisory

5:30pm-6:00pm: muSIC House Live Music Performance & Networking Social. MusicHouse a Social Intelligent Collective presents performers Monique Benabou, NBC’s The Voice alum & Angus Wilson, Executive Producer & MH Co-founder.

For information on how to nominate your project, co-host to support the current project email: seedussociety@gmail.com

What’s the Big Deal About Sundance?

what's sundance

Nearly every day I see posts on the Utah Filmmakers’ page and various other casting spots-

CASTING- Short film to be submitted to film festivals. Unpaid. “Craft services” will be provided.

So you read between the lines. Someone’s passion project that maybe has enough $$ to pay for post production and some festival entry fees and probably won’t make it beyond the LDS or LA online film festivals. But, still, there is that carrot. Maybe my film will make it into Sundance.

The Sundance Film Festival is regarded as the largest American independent film festival in the land; attended by more than 120,000 people and 1,300 accredited press. Broadcast world wide on TV and Youtube. And every filmmaker seems to think they have a “Sundance film.”

This year, Sundance organizers sifted through a record-breaking 15,100 submissions including 3,853 feature-length films and 10,397 short film submissions. Guess how many are chosen to screen? 118 feature-length films and 74 shorts. I’m not a whiz at math but 74 out of 10k seems like nasty odds to me.

Don’t let that stop you. Why not strike out for the Holy Grail? Crazier things have been known to happen. I had an editor once tell me that I should write as if I’m going to enter the article into a competition. Translation: Give it your all even if you have a snowflake’s shot in hell.

Sundance on Main Street

In two weeks, the Sundance Film Festival will bombard little Park City, Utah, and those in the film industry, press and general public will have a chance to see what “giving it your all” looks like to Fest organizers. To be honest, I’ve seen a lot of terrible films at Sundance. One in particular involved seeing Dennis Hopper in full frontal. No one should ever have to see that. But I’ve also seen gems like High Tension, Marjorie Prime, Winter’s Bone, Garden State, Whiplash, Reservoir Dogs, Memento, Before Sunrise. Sorry, Napoleon Dynamite fans. Not my fave. See? Here’s the thing. One girl’s dog is another’s diamond.

Sundance Swag

Is Sundance Worth the Hype

People come to Sundance for a thousand different reasons.

Invited filmmakers obviously come for the accolades, to sell their babies and network with those who can further their career. They have the honor of walking a red carpet, seeing their film play out onscreen in front of a packed house of press, cinephiles and distributors and they get to party like they’re Prince in 1999.

Distributors come for that “first look” and set up frantic phone calls and meetings at all hours during the Fest, deciding whether to snag a film and have it announced to the world right then and there.

Festival Sponsors and Brands spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to get their name and message in front of those 120,000. Dell, Stella Artois, AT&T, Acura, Lyft, Chase Sapphire are some of the “official sponsors” but then there are the “unofficial ones” who save serious $$$ and piggy back on the parade by hosting their own lounges and parties along Main Street and off. Brands like Grey Goose, LegionM, Google, Sony, National Geographic, ICM work their magic for celeb and industry attention but more on the sly. Who could forget when Uber tried to have a private launch pad within city limits for a VIP helicopter. Their events are primarily “VIP only” while most of the official Sundance sponsors welcome the general public.

The circle completes with print and online media who not only benefit financially from the interviews, panels and red carpet walks by the filmmakers but also establish key relationships with brand sponsors who might shower them with swag to write about or endorse their future projects.

Where Do You Fit In

You’re not a brand, a journalist or invited filmmaker so what’s in it for you? The average Joe may attend Sundance to catch a peek of their favorite actor, see a film before anyone else, hear some of the best live music in Utah at various venues up and down Main, take a virtual test spin in an Acura, participate in giveaways, grab a free beer at the Canada Goose Basecamp happy hours and just take in the Hollywood scene. If you wind up talking to the right crowd you might even get invited to one of those late night VIP parties. My boyfriend was friends with bouncers all over town and they would let us in while others lined up for hours.

Or maybe you are a nascent actor, screenwriter or director looking to meet someone to further your career dreams?  Let me tell you an anecdote. Prior to the Fest, I was handed a brilliant script to peddle that would have been a killer vehicle for my daughter as the lead and, of course, a “Sundance film”. Despite meeting agents, producers, directors, and other writers, not a single one read that script. Ever. You don’t go to Sundance hoping to be discovered. These industry folk have better things to do with their limited Sundance time.

Why I Do Sundance

I often dream that one day either my daughter or I will have a film that premieres at Sundance, not because we’ll be “seen”, be handed larger roles, or walk through town laden with shopping bags teeming with swag. Because we would get to explore Sundance as a whole other dimension. It seems like such a brilliant world.

But that isn’t why I go. I grew up in Los Angeles and moved to Utah in 1990. Once a year, I get a little taste of home. The long lines for film premieres, the Q and As with filmmakers, paparazzi/celeb sightings, coffee with an old friend, the showcasing of latest trends, the sting of gridlock traffic and the joy of knowing the circus leaves at the end of the month. For two weeks out of the year, Park City turns into little Hollywood. It’s pretty f*^%ing cool.

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