Sundance 2018: Audience-pleasing Hereditary, Damsel highlight Utah connections, locations

Utahns will recognize a good sampling of their state’s unparalleled scenery in two films – both containing unconventional elements to represent their respective genres — that premiered during this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Hereditary, directed and written by Ari Aster, an unusual horror film that has attracted much attention in Sundance’s Midnight program slate, and … Read more

Sundance 2018: Christina Choe’s Nancy subtle, satisfying psychological thriller

Seven years ago, online audiences drew close to the experiences of Amina Arraf, who described herself as a Syrian-American lesbian. Web traffic exploded on her blog A Gay Girl in Damascus and Arraf engaged in cyber relationships with political activists who identified as lesbian. Then Arraf disappeared, leading her readers and online friends to believe … Read more

Sundance 2018: Bisbee ’17 documentary reenacts one of most bizarre, humiliating responses to labor unrest

To some, the events of July 12, 1917 that culminated in one of the most bizarre and humiliating responses to labor unrest in U.S. history made the once thriving copper-mining town of Bisbee, Arizona, just seven miles from the Mexican border an “American tragedy”, “an ethnic cleansing” or a “corporate gulag.” Others saw the dramatic … Read more

Sundance 2018: Talal Derki’s Of Fathers and Sons an emotional look at radicalism’s impact on Syria’s children

In Of Fathers and Sons, director Talal Derki picks up where he ended Return to Homs, the 2014 winner of the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize for Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival. Derki, who was born in Damascus but now lives in Berlin, offered a small yet still visible glimmer of hope in the … Read more

Sundance 2018: Utah Film Center, Sundance Institute mark 5-year anniversary for Sundance Kids program

Two feature-length animation films – both stunning in their visualizations of classic stories and thematic interpretation – and a documentary about the trials and successes of competing in an international science fair comprise this year’s Kids section of the Sundance Film Festival. The 2018 edition of the Kids program is a five-year milestone for its … Read more

Sundance 2018: Believer documentary captures inception of Utah’s LoveLoud movement, led by Imagine Dragons’ Dan Reynolds

Dan Reynolds. Photo Credit- LoveLoud Foundation.

The new documentary film Believer, which premieres today at the Sundance Film Festival, is a much different film from what Don Argott, director and a guitarist who plays in a proto-metal band, intended. The film is presented by Live Nation Productions that will soon be part of HBO Documentary Films. The original intent was a … Read more

Sundance 2018: Quiet Heroes emerges as Utah testament to compassion, love, inclusion in extraordinary circumstances

For most of the 1980s, “officials in the state of Utah did nothing but sit back and watch people die of AIDS. That is not a hyperbole,” Ben Williams, one of Utah’s best known gay historians, wrote in a QSaltLake magazine several years back. Unfortunately, Utah was no exception at the time. Few people across … Read more

Sundance 2018: Our New President film is ‘fake enough to be frighteningly true’

Fake realities will create fake humans. Or, fake humans will generate fake realities and then sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves. So we wind up with fake humans inventing fake realities and then peddling them to other fake humans. – Philip K. Dick, I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon … Read more

Sundance 2018: Utah film industry’s connections strengthen as model for independent film community

Sundance 2018

Utah’s connections to the Sundance Film Festival (Jan. 18-28 in Park City and Salt Lake City) run deeper than what many people likely will see in the press coverage. Not only has the international festival been established as one of the most significant cultural events every year in the state, it has fostered film literacy … Read more

The rededication of spirit: Top 10 moments of the Utah Enlightenment in 2017

It is not an artifice that the mind has added to human nature. The mind has added nothing to human nature. It is a violence from within that protects us from a violence without. It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality. It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to … Read more