In Rams, the new elegant, harmonious biographical documentary about Dieter Rams, the great German product designer, there are scenes of him visiting the new factory headquarters for the U.K. furniture brand Vitsœ, located in Leamington Spa in Warwickshire. The new factory, indeed, epitomizes the 10 design principles that sit at the core of Rams’ philosophy … 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
The Utah Film Center will close its May schedule of free, public screenings with a trio of documentaries that explore variously the ideas of compassion in philanthropic communities, one of the world’s most controversial artists and an outstanding cinéma vérité piece about police violence and activism in Milwaukee. Summer in the Forest, May 22, 7 … Read more
Dina, a documentary film about a middle-aged woman with Asperger’s Syndrome who marries her boyfriend (Scott), is a perfectly timed selection for the 7th Peek Award for Disability in Film by the Utah Film Center. The film, which took the Grand Jury Prize in documentaries at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival, continues an evolving narrative … Read more
The seventh presentation of the Utah Film Center’s Tumbleweeds Film Festival for Children and Youth from March 2-4 promises to be the most ambitious for the Intermountain West region’s only children’s film festival. There are 15 feature-length films, 14 of which are receiving their Utah premieres. The slate represents 12 countries on four continents. There … Read more
In a scene from Morgan Neville’s documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, which premiered this year at the Sundance Film Festival, Fred Rogers testified at a U.S. Congressional hearing in which support seemed unlikely to approve a budget appropriation for public television. The late U.S. Senator John Pastore, a Democrat from Rhode Island, had rebuffed … Read more