Sundance Institute announced today 19 members of five juries awarding prizes at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, January 17-27 in Park City, Salt Lake City, Ogden and Sundance, Utah. Short Film Awards will be announced at a ceremony on January 22 at Park City’s Jupiter Bowl, with feature film awards announced at a separate ceremony on January 26.   Members of the Alfred P. Sloan Jury will be announced in January. U.S. DOCUMENTARY JURY Liz Garbus Academy Award® nominated...

  IFP announced today the launch of their new partnership with Power to the Pixel, the pioneering UK-based cross-media organization. The alliance will kick-off with the launch of the first joint annual IFP/Power to the Pixel Cross-Media Forum in New York City on April 19th, 2011, with the cross-media projects presented at the Forum also being included this fall in IFP's Independent Film Week. "Power to the Pixel has created an amazing reputation for itself in Europe as the most cu...

Signaling the official kick-off to the film awards season, IFP announced today that director Darren Aronofsky, actors Hilary Swank and Robert Duvall, and Focus Features CEO, James Schamus, will each be presented with a career Tribute at the 20th Anniversary Gotham Independent Film Awards™ on Monday, November 29th at Cipriani Wall Street in New York City. This year’s Tribute selection represents a range of individuals who are all veterans well-versed in the journey between lower-budget indepe...

As the days lengthen, so the Nantucket Film Festival fires up for its 15th annual storytelling blowout, June 17 to 20, 2010. The Festival, which celebrates screenwriters, screenwriting and the art of the raconteur in today's cinema, boasts "The Writers are Coming" as its motto. Wordsmiths aren't the only ones to wash ashore. Once again, 4,000 screenwriters, producers, agents, development executives and lay cinephiles are due on the Massachusetts island -- along with some 6,000 l...

“The Whole World Fits in Lisbon” is the rallying cry of Doclisboa’s sixth annual blitz of international documentaries that rains down on the Portuguese capital October 16-26. Rousing words indeed for Lisbon audiences who, still hungover from Portugal’s Age of Discovery, crave global stories that the inward-looking media tends to eschew.And that’s the big seduction of the country’s sole festival dedicated to nonfiction films. In its short trackrecord, Doclisboa has cultivated a public...

Thursday, January 11-----One of the highlights of the upcoming Sundance Film Festival (at least for me) is the opportunity to see the latest film from Hal Hartley, who really put independent film on the map back in the day when it was still a small community of individual risktakers. With such films as THE UNBELIEVABLE TRUTH (1989), TRUST (1990), SIMPLE MEN (1992) and AMATEUR (1992), Hartley stood at the nexus of European film artistry and American independent virtuosity. His last few films h...

Saturday/Sunday, October 21/22-----THE ARCHITECT is a sophisticated urban drama about a Chicago architect (played by Anthony LaPaglia) confronted by an outspoken female activist (Viola Davis) living in a dangerous housing project of his design. LaPaglia plays Leo Waters, an idealistic architect and patriarch of an affluent, suburban Chicago family. Viola Davis is Tonya Neeley, a pragmatic activist who is trying to keep her family together while living in one of the city’s most drug and crime...

Friday, October 20----It is a rather unusual career move for a film distributor to transition from buying and selling films to actually making them, but that is exactly what Jeff Lipsky has done. After co-founding October Films (which was bought out by Universal Pictures and eventually morphed into Focus Features) and Lot 47 Films, releasing indie and international gems such as Lars Von Trier's BREAKING THE WAVES, Mike Leigh's SECRETS AND LIES, David Lynch's LOST HIGHWAY, Michael Cuesta's L.I....

A winner of 13 Australian “Oscars,” a French thriller that played in the prestigious closing night slot at the Toronto and New York Film Festivals, and the latest documentary from the woman who took the doc form into the mainstream are among the more than 50 narrative, documentary and short films to be screened at the 2005 HIGH FALLS FILM FESTIVAL, which takes place in Rochester, NY, November 9-13. High Falls is a festival with a difference – its mission. Susan B. Anthony lived in Roches...