Covering Slamdance has been a bit different for me because I didn?t actually attend the festival. Through filmmakers and publicists sharing screeners with me I?ve covered the film festival from the warmth of southern California. (As I write this it?s currently 33 F in...
?Some stories you can?t tell. Some stories don?t want to be told. Some stories will eat you alive.? TNT?s limited series I Am the Night is a large dose of noir for the small screen. It is moody and ominous, but with a certain moral light flickering amidst overwhelming...
Since most of the films (exceptions: Boni Bonita and This Teacher) I?m reporting on today are docs, I?d like to highlight some documentary filmmakers who have premiered work at Slamdance: Marilyn Agrelo (Mad Hot Ballroom), Seth Gordon, (King of Kong: A Fistful of...
Slamdance is designed to focus on new and emerging filmmakers. Over the last 25 years it has produced an impressive alumni list, including (with some of their more well known films): Christopher Nolan (Dunkirk, Batman Begins, Memento), Jared Hess (Napoleon Dynamiite),...
Welcome to Slamdance. While most of the world is familiar with the Sundance Film Festival, they may not have heard of Slamdance, a renegade festival also held in Park City, Utah, the same week. Slamdance?s mantra is ?By Filmmakers, For Filmmakers?. It is celebrating...
In Hamlet, Polonius tells his son Laertes, ?This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as day the night, thou canst not be false to any man.? In The Hate U Give, a young African-American girl must struggle not just with being true to herself, but...
An optimist sees a glass as half full; a pessimist sees it as half empty. A nihilist will dump the water from the glass and marvel at the emptiness. Bruce Thierry Cheung?s Don?t Come Back from the Moon is a study of such emptiness. In a small desert community, after...
Jacques Rivette?s La Religieuse (The Nun) was the center of controversy in France. Banned for over a year by the Minister of Information in 1965, the film was a battleground of the culture wars of the day. The restored version of the film, made from the original...
?Courts ought not be affected by the weather of the day, but will be by the climate of the era.? Before she became a Supreme Court Justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was one who fought against sex discrimination. One the Basis of Sex focuses on her life from the time she...