Sundance Film Festival

The Sundance Film Festival, a program of the Sundance Institute, is an American film festival that takes place annually in Utah. With 46,731 attendees in 2012, it is the largest independent film festival in the United States. Held in January in Park City, Salt Lake City, and Ogden, as well as at the Sundance Resort, the festival is a showcase for new work from American and international independent filmmakers. The festival comprises competitive sections for American and international dramatic and documentary films, both feature-length films and short films, and a group of out-of-competition sections, including NEXT, New Frontier, Spotlight, and Park City At Midnight. The 2016 Sundance Film Festival took place January 21 to January 31, 2016.

History

Utah/US Film Festival

Sundance began in Salt Lake City in August 1978, as the Utah/US Film Festival in an effort to attract more filmmakers to Utah. It was founded by Sterling Van Wagenen (then head of Wildwood, Robert Redford's company), John Earle, and Cirina Hampton Catania (both serving on the Utah Film Commission at the time). The 1978 festival featured films such as Deliverance, A Streetcar Named Desire, Midnight Cowboy, Mean Streets, and The Sweet Smell of Success. With chairman Robert Redford, and the help of Utah Governor Scott M. Matheson, the goal of the festival was to showcase strictly American-made films, highlight the potential of independent film, and to increase visibility for filmmaking in Utah. At the time, the main focus of the event was to conduct a competition for independent American films, present a series of retrospective films and filmmaker panel discussions, and to celebrate the Frank Capra Award. The festival also highlighted the work of regional filmmakers who worked outside the Hollywood system.

2011 Sundance Film Festival

The 27th annual Sundance Film Festival took place from January 20, 2011 until January 30, 2011 in Park City, Utah, with screenings in Salt Lake City, Utah, Ogden, Utah, and Sundance, Utah.

The festival opened with five screenings, one from each category in competition: Sing Your Song, Pariah, The Guard, Project Nim, and Shorts Program I. The New Frontier category opened with All That Is Solid Melts into Air. The closing night film was The Son of No One.

There were 750 sponsors of the festival and 1,670 volunteers. Attendance was initially estimated at 60,000 people.

Films

10,279 films were submitted. 3,812 feature films were submitted, including 1,943 from the US and 1,869 internationally. From these, 118 feature films were selected and include 95 world premieres. 6,467 short films were submitted, 81 short films were selected to be screened and 12 shorts are viewable on YouTube. The festival had films from 40 first-time filmmakers (25 in competition), representing 29 countries.

2003 Sundance Film Festival

At the 2003 Sundance Film Festival, unseasonably warm weather attracted record numbers of attendees, among them singing artist Bob Dylan.American Splendor, a biopic of comic-book author Harvey Pekar, won the grand-jury prize.

2003

16 January - 26 January

The official announcement of the 2003 winners can be found here.

References

External links

$100 Film Festival

The $100 Film Festival is an independent film festival that runs for three days every March at the Globe Cinema in downtown Calgary, Alberta. The festival showcases films in all genres by local and international independent artists who enjoy working with traditional film.

Created in 1992 by the Calgary Society of Independent Filmmakers (CSIF), the $100 Film Festival started as a challenge for area filmmakers to a make a low-budget movie using Super8 film for less than $100. In later years, the CSIF changed the rules to allow filmmakers to work with 16 mm film and an increased budget. The $100 Film Festival still works to embody the spirit of low-budget film making and has become a popular event in Calgary.

External links

References

Sundance

A sun dance is a Native American ceremony. Sun dance or Sundance may also refer to:

Places

People

Art, entertainment, and media

Films

Sundance (activist)

Sundance is an American Indian civil rights activist. He is perhaps best known for being one of several prominent American Indians to spearhead the movement against the use of Native American imagery as sports mascots.

Early life

Sundance is a member of the Muscogee, a tribe of Native American people living in the southeastern woodlands.

Career

Sundance is the director of the Cleveland branch of the American Indian Movement (AIM).

Activism

Sundance (video game)

Sundance is a puzzle arcade game using vector graphics released by Cinematronics in 1979. The game consists of two grids floating in a pseudo-3D space with small suns bouncing between them. The player scored points by capturing the suns as they made contact with the grids. The player also had a limited-use "smart bomb" button which would eliminate all of the suns currently bouncing between the grids. As the suns bounced, the grids would move closer and closer, making gameplay more difficult. The game ended when the grids fully converged.

The game itself had only a small production run and was plagued with hardware failures due to its unconventional design. According to Tim Skelly, the game's designer, Sundance used an additional daughterboard that controlled the intensity of certain vectors. This board and its connections were rather fragile and prone to failure. Also, the monitor used a defective carbon coating spray which tended to cause the monitor's tube to arc if it was left in a certain position, destroying the monitor.