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
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
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
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
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
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
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
In 2013, four months before the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the Windsor case set the stage for courtroom challenges to bans against same-sex marriage in every state, the Mexican Supreme Court ruled in a case brought by three couples from the state of Oaxaca that denying the rights to marriage equality was unconstitutionally discriminatory. … Read more
NOTE: All four short films are available for viewing here. In its 15 years, the PitchNic film program at Spy Hop Productions has succeeded because student filmmakers first learn the rules of crafting a good narrative for a short film, whether it is fiction or a documentary piece, and then learn how to break them, … Read more
A dozen Utah teen filmmakers working on four short films for Spy Hop Productions’ 15th annual PitchNic program experienced many of the same barriers and problems professionals in the movie industry confront continuously in their projects. A group producing the program’s first murder mystery not only had to tell its story without representing violence on … Read more