Fifteen awards were announced today in the 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 ‘memory’ categories around which the film festival was organized as well … Read more
Spy Hop Productions’ partnership with the Utah Arts Festival has evolved through the years, mainly because of the national youth media group’s penchant for adventurous projects that push the creative boundaries of festival visitors much in the same way the organization’s mentors encourage their students to be as bold as possible. This year, Spy Hop … Read more
For the 15th annual Fear No Film portion of the Utah Arts Festival, curator Topher Horman has crafted seven sequences of presentations in the most intriguing interpretations of the various ways in which memories are constructed, sustained, reshaped and anticipated. Each program is described below. ROLLING MEMORIES (June 22, 2 p.m.; June 24, 6 p.m.) … Read more
The Utah Short Film of the Year competition at the Utah Arts Festival has become more rigorous in recent years, as local filmmakers are making more adventurous films that especially show audiences outside of the state the high quality of independent film creativity. Four of this year’s seven entries already have established a national, if … Read more
The first book in Homer’s The Iliad, written more than 2,800 years ago, opens with, ‘Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles, son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans.’ With that line, Homer created the Western literary tradition. The Iliad also was the first work signifying the value and instruction of memory … Read more
The temporary miniature city of cosmopolitan art and culture that defines the Utah Arts Festival will open Thursday, June 22, with new stories and perspectives from artists of all stripes. The 41st annual festival will bring new faces and ideas from all venues. In the artist marketplace, 174 artists, including nine returning award winners, were … Read more
There were many fine moments this year for the Utah Enlightenment. In compiling the list of what I believe were the 10 best defining moments of Utah’s cultural awakening for 2016, the pool of choices was more than satisfying in breadth and depth. There has been a great deal of recent press, for example, about … Read more
As the impacts of climate change and threats to the planet’s sustainability become more urgent, discussions of colonizing and terraforming Mars have moved beyond idealistic fancies of science fiction writers. Some scientists have conceptualized short- and long-term scenarios of how Mars could be transformed into an inhabitable environment. The irony is that scientists also believe … Read more
Impressive as expected, the recent 14th annual PitchNic short film premieres by students at Spy Hop Productions engaged an audience of nearly 500 at the Rose Wagner Center for Performing Arts in many good questions following the screenings. More importantly, the quality of the films indicated that the student filmmakers are ready to submit their … Read more
In Life Animated, the magnificent documentary about a young man diagnosed with autism as a child who learns how to communicate with his family and express his emotions and thoughts by immersing himself in the world of Disney animation, Owen Suskind is unquestionably the leading man in this award-winning film. In Owen’s story, that plain … Read more