Last year’s class of PitchNic short films, produced, filmed and directed by students in one of Spy Hop Productions’ signature programs, added nicely to the 15-year totals of film festival appearances and awards for these projects. Winning the Utah Short Film of The Year prize at the 2018 Utah Arts Festival, the short narrative feature … Read more
The Utah Review looks at two events from local museums: Site Lines, The University of Utah Art Faculty’s exhibition at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts (UMFA) and a recent video presentation at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art (UMOCA) that was held in connection with a national conference of funeral directors held in Salt … Read more
It has been nearly 30 years since Robert Mapplethorpe died of AIDS at the age of 42. In a career that blossomed rapidly within a decade, Mapplethorpe set new stakes as an artist-photographer. However, during his life, his work also was commingled with protests by politicians and the Christian right-wing, which gained huge political influence … Read more
In Lebanon, a country of six million that is a little smaller than the area of Colorado, only the oldest residents can remember a time when their country has not held refugee camps. In the country’s dozen refugee camps which house upwards of one million, at least 175,000 Palestinian refugees live in extreme poverty. Those … Read more
As much as the Utah Film Center has served as a major Intermountain West cultural institution of exhibition for independent cinema, especially in documentary storytelling, it also has cultivated its function as a strategic touchstone essential for augmenting the creative filmmaking sector of the state’s film industry. Today, the center announced a major new piece … Read more
Queer cinema has matured significantly within the last decade and, this year’s Utah Film Center’s Damn These Heels International Film Festival is a panoply of emancipating artistic expressions that break many taboos and boundaries. The 23 feature-length films, including 14 fictional narratives and nine documentaries from a dozen countries, introduce audiences to stories where different … Read more
The Utah Film Center’s Damn These Heels LGBTQ Film Festival offers 23 films and three programs of short films for its 15th anniversary. Utah filmgoers have a rare opportunity to see some of the best examples of LGBTQ cinema today, as 21 films are receiving their Utah premieres and two others are being their first … Read more
Every documentary filmmaker inevitably struggles with the question: Do we have a story here? Five years ago, when Holly Tuckett and Kendall Wilcox assembled a creative team that included other Utah filmmakers to document Utah’s same-sex marriage case, there were many uncertainties. The prospect of three couples, the small firm of Magleby and Greenwood and … Read more
Fifteen awards were announced today in the 16th annual Fear No Film portion of the Utah Arts Festival, including a Grand Jury Prize, Utah Short Film of The Year, Fear No Filmmaker Award, three honorable mentions and the best short film in each of the seven ‘band aids’ categories around which the film festival was … Read more
Of the 11 short films from Utah that are part of the 54 in this year’s Fear No Film international program of the Utah Arts Festival, three come from independent filmmakers, another sign of a strengthening film industry in the state. Tomorrow’s Shores, directed by Arthur Veenema, is one of the six short films in … Read more