Fight for public lands: Public Trust documentary to be screened by Utah Film Center, featuring director David Byars in talkback with KUER-FM RadioWest’s Doug Fabrizio

The absorbing, intricately structured documentary Public Trust opens with a majestic, joyous montage of America’s public lands, accompanied by stirring orchestral music and narrated by journalist Hal Herring. However, the film quickly segues into the public land debates, which are anything but majestic or joyous. These lands, Herring says, are as quintessential to the American … Read more

Utah Film Center sets livestream event featuring BOSS: The Black Experience in Business documentary; panel with Utah Juneteenth Freedom and Heritage

A significant epiphany in the exceptional documentary BOSS: The Black Experience in Business is how director Stanley Nelson chronicles everything that Black entrepreneurship has come up against through more than three centuries of history, yet still achieving many of American business’ greatest innovations. Absorbing, lucid and never overwhelming, this exquisitely synthesized case of history, which … Read more

Utah Film Center’s livestream of What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael will feature talkback with director Rob Garver, Time film critic Stephanie Zacharek

Film critic Pauline Kael emerged during one of Hollywood’s most significant transitional periods of The New Hollywood, followed almost immediately by the first wave of modern blockbusters. Of Jaws, she called it “the most cheerfully perverse scare movie ever made… [with] more zest than an early Woody Allen picture, a lot more electricity, [and] it’s … Read more

Utah Arts Festival launches virtual platform of Festival Vibes Fridays today for the month of June

Normally for four days in June, Library Square and the surrounding civic campus in downtown Salt Lake City are transformed into a village of arts and culture for the Utah Arts Festival (UAF), the state’s largest multi-disciplinary gathering of its kind, drawing between 70,000 and 80,000 visitors annually. Despite the inevitable decision in March to … Read more

Revisiting the Malheur occupation: Utah Film Center sets livestream event with No Man’s Land documentary

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article was originally published June 1 but as the Utah Film Center has rescheduled the livestream event of this documentary to June 23 at 7 p.m., The Utah Review is republishing this feature review today. Viewers also should take note that another film by the same director (David Garrett Byars), the 2020 … Read more

Utah Film Center sets livestream event of Motherload documentary celebrating mothers, cargo bikes, cycling culture; talkback featuring Bike Utah, Bicycle Collective

If there is at least one good metric coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s the trend of bicycle trips. BikeUtah.org, citing data from the Utah Department of Transportation and Strava Metro, reported that the number of bicycle trips in April more than doubled those in March in the state. While the data represents a … Read more

Utah Film Center sets livestream screening of Mossville environmental justice documentary; Oscars Academy grant, new Cinema on Demand titles available

“Environmental injustice is about [the state] creating sacrifice zones where we place everything which no one else wants,” Mustafa Ali, the former head of the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) environmental justice program, says. “The justification is always an economic one, that it makes sense to build chemical plants on so-called cheap lands where poor people … Read more

Utah Film Center opens May with livestream screening events including The Dog Doc, Miss Hokusai, I’m Leaving Now

The Utah Film Center continues its series of live streaming events, which are free and open to the public, during May. The next three films are, respectively, about integrative care in veterinary medicine; a historical manga series adapted for an anime film about the life of Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai, as seen from the eyes … Read more

Utah Film Center sets Rat Film documentary for free, public live stream, featuring director Theo Anthony

Even if the sight of a Norway rat trying to jump out of a garbage can might trigger musophobia in some individuals, Rat Film is a worthwhile documentary that cleverly uses the subject of rodent eradication as a springboard for becoming more aware of the problems of institutional racism. And, this award-winning 2016 documentary has … Read more

Utah Film Center to present live stream of documentary Waging Change, launches Tumbleweeds on Demand platform

The Utah Film Center continues to expand its live stream programming options, including a free, public event featuring the 2019 documentary Waging Change and the launch of the Tumbleweeds on Demand streaming site, in which films for kids and family audiences can be rented at a nominal price. Directed by Abby Ginzberg, Waging Change is … Read more