Sundance 2023: Jonathan Majors’ Astonishing Transformation for “Magazine Dreams”
Jonathan Majors is turning heads and earning major buzz for his astonishing transformation in Magazine Dreams. Granted, Majors’ star has been rising for a while now, and the man was already in extremely good shape, but what he did to prepare for the role of amateur bodybuilder Killian Maddox is astonishing.
Majors revealed at the Variety Studio at the Sundance Film Festival that his training regimen to transform his already ripped physique into a bodybuilder’s hulking frame included eating more than 6,000 calories a day and working out three times daily.
How Sundance Award-Winning Feature I Carry You With Me Came Together
The film I Carry You With Me (Te Lloevo Conmigo) landed in the NEXT category at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival with buzz about its great potential, as it was the first narrative directed and co-written by documentarian and Academy-Award nominee Heidi Ewing. It found an audience and great success in Park City. By the end of the fest, it had a distribution deal through Sony Pictures Classics in partnership with Stage 6,
Inside the National Association of Latino Independent Producers Events at Sundance
As part of their mission to discover, promote, and inspire Latinx content creators and diverse voices across media platforms, the National Association of Latino Independent Producers (NALIP) hosted a series of events during Sundance 2020.
One of the most compelling panels was called ‘Inclusion in Action’, sponsored by Coca-Cola, Skullcandy, and Latino Reel. NALIP is also an MPA multicultural creative partner. The panel began with a mixer including industry leaders.
Enlightening Panels Highlight the Launch of The Latinx House at Sundance
One of the most successful, well-received experiences at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival was the official launch of The Latinx House. Their mission is to bring artists, organizers, thought leaders, and other supporters together to address issues that impact the Latinx community and create narratives that shift culture. A worthy aim, given the statistics. The Latinx population is the largest ethnic minority in the country, but erasure and misrepresentation onscreen continue to be a problem.
Celebrating the Sundance Film Festival’s 6th Annual Horizon Awards
The Sundance Film Festival shows many films, putting independent filmmakers front and center in a way that few other environments can. The audiences, the sponsors, potential collaborators, distributors, and film executives are all interacting and connecting with content creators. It makes sense, then, that young, talented filmmakers could benefit in a myriad of ways from being here, meeting people, and showing their work.
This year at Sundance, a record number of movies by female filmmakers are part of the program.
Sundance 2018: A Conversation with the Director and Cast of Daring Heist Film American Animals
Whether it’s the reluctant exploitation of a super skill in Baby Driver or the stylish and sophisticated execution of Ocean’s Eleven, heist movies are an American cinematic staple. The masterminded plans, daring escapes, and thrilling shootouts look easy on screen, but what would happen in a real life do-it-yourself caper? Enter Sundance selection, American Animals.
In 2004, Warren Lipka, Spencer Reinhard, Chas Allen, and Eric Borsuk fell headlong into a reckless amateur effort to break out of the mundanity of their lives.
Sundance 2018: American Animals Composer Captures Four Students’ Wild Alter Egos
A tribal orchestration sprinkled with sounds of the wild opens American Animals to the contrasting sight of establishing shots of Lexington, Kentucky. Composer Anne Nikitin immediately sets the tone for the rambunctious docudrama about a daydream gone too far. A group of college aged men concoct a movie style plan to steal valuables from a university, to initially hilarious result. As the events grow more sobering, Nikitin dials up the drama and brings us back to reality where the scheme collides with consequences.
Sundance 2018: The Tale Composer Delicately Threads a Fragile Story of Adolescent Abuse
For decades, documentarian Jennifer Fox had convinced herself that the sexual abuse she’d suffered as a child was consensual. In revisiting her memories and the events under the light of adulthood, Fox had a reckoning with the true nature of the events. Her memoir, starring Laura Dern as Jennifer, is laid bare in Sundance premiere The Tale. After decades of employing coping mechanisms to avoid the atrocities of sexual abuse she experienced as a child,
Sundance 2018: Keira Knightley Illuminates Lush Portrayal of French Literary Icon in Colette
In 2015, director Wash Westmoreland and his husband, Richard Glatzer, watched the Oscars from a hospital room at Cedars Sinai. Julianne Moore won Best Actress for her role in their film Still Alice. Glatzer passed away days later following a battle with ALS. The next project he wanted to pursue was Colette, and Westmoreland honored Glatzer’s wishes this week at Sundance.
Westmoreland, who won the U.S. Dramatic Audience Award and Grand Jury prize at Sundance in 2006,
Sundance 2018: The Tale Sheds Light on Adolescent #MeToo Victims
The combined courage and talent of Jennifer Fox displayed at the premiere of The Tale was overwhelming. The audience couldn’t stand and applaud long enough. Caroline Libresco, Senior Programmer and Director, Special Programs, introduced the film saying, “This movie is inventing a new cinematic language for an ineffable human experience.”
Fox, a celebrated documentarian, began doubting her recollection of an adolescent experience when she began interviewing women about their sexuality for Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman.
Sundance 2018: American Animals is a Gripping Heist with Real Consequence
American Animals premiered at Sundance and lived up to the pre-festival chatter. Seeing Danny Ocean mastermind a Las Vegas casino job is engrossing, but this film has a realism that drips with anxiety. In American Animals, four young men came up with a very bad idea that goes horribly wrong. And it worked.
The plan was to lift priceless books from a low security university library, purely for the thrill.
Sundance 2018: Blindspotting Captivates with a Powerful Message
The screenings at Sundance got underway with the premiere of Blindspotting, and what a way to start things off. The film, written by and starring Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal, had a lot to say and they chose their words with absolute precision. In a feat that seems mathematically impossible on paper, the film isolated race, gentrification, the justice system, and police brutality in merely 95 minutes. Casal’s masterful wordsmithing that pushes the dialogue with musicality deserves a great deal of the credit.
Sundance 2018: Robert Redford Addresses #MeToo and ‘Fake News’ in Kick Off Press Conference
Sundance 2018 has officially begun. Founder and President of Sundance Film Festival, Robert Redford, opened the festival from the historic Egyptian theater. Redford told reporters that the Egyptian was the only theater in Park City when he began the Sundance Film Festival in 1985. Inspired by the discovery of King Tut’s tomb in the 1920s, the location was almost like stepping onto a film set in itself.
Redford was joined at the press conference by Executive Director Keri Putnam and Director John Cooper.
Sundance 2018: 10 Films We’re Excited About
Call Me By Your Name rocketed off the Sundance Film Festival stage last January and is still soaring through awards season, likely to be a major player once the Oscar nominations are announced on January 24. Hot off receiving three Golden Globe nominations, Call Me By Your Name is just one very recent example of a film that began its life at Sundance, and has gone on to become a touchstone.
Sundance 2016: Complete Unknown, Morris From America & More are Sold
As the first major film festival of the year, and arguably one of the most important on the ever expanding festival circuit, the Sundance Film Festival is something of a taste maker. Studios small and large vie for the distribution rights of a number of films, while unknown talents can, in a single Park City night, become hot commodities. Here's a look at the news coming out of the 2016 Sundance Film Festival.
Before we get into what films have sold thus far,
Sundance 2015: The Horizon Award Reception for 20-year-old Verónica Ortiz-Calderón
Park City, Utah – Twenty-year-old Syracuse University Student Verónica Ortiz-Calderón was awarded the inaugural Horizon Award last night for her short film Y Ya No Te Gustas (And You Don’t Like Yourself Anymore), at a reception held at Sundance House.
Ortiz-Calderón’s thoughtful, arresting debut, which was selected from more than 400 submissions from up-and-coming female filmmakers, premiered to a room full of film industry heavyweights. Accepting the award, and a $10,000 scholarship check from Sharon Waxman,
Sundance 2015: Talking to Cassian Elwes, Co-Producer of Inaugural Horizon Awards
The Sundance Film Festival has made a few recent announcements that speak to a fresh commitment to help spread some of the festival’s opportunities around. The first was a new tool to help lesser-known filmmakers get their work seen by using a new service, Quiver Digital. As reported by Mashable, Quiver Digital is a distribution dashboard that allows users to push their films to Amazon, Netflix, iTunes, Google Play and Sony Entertainment Network,
How Matthu Placek Created the Single Take, 3D A Portrait of Marina Abramović
The synthesis of technology and art is at the very heart of cinema. Filmmakers are natural innovators. Whether they're working on a big budget film or a small independent, there has simply never been a film made in which the crew didn't have to surmount obstacles through ingenuity—be it with state of the art technology or a nuts and bolts solution.
The ingenuity, technical daring and beautiful beating heart Matthu Placek's 130919 •
Sonic Manipulation: Deborah Stratman on her Foley Artist Doc Hacked Circuit
Hearing is believing—this is one of the points Debroah Stratman makes with her fantastic short film about foley artists, Hacked Circuit. While we often associate our eyes as the prime mover in our emotions when we watch a film, it’s our ears, Stratman argues, that moves us to really feel.
Stratman has made some very intriguing documentaries in her career. Hacked Circuit is her 28th film, her third at Sundance Film Festival.
Sundance: Getting Low Down With John Hawkes & Elle Fanning
Elle Fanning is fantastic in Low Down, a film filled with superb actors. Fanning holds the center of a film as loose and atmospheric as the music it portrays, playing Amy-Jo Albany, the daughter of the brilliant, smack addicted jazz pianist Joe Albany (one of the best character actors in the business, John Hawkes.) It’s a beautifully shot film by experimental filmmaker and cinematographer Jeff Preiss about a perfectly ugly situation.
