Sundance Film Festival Awards Winners (Updating Live)

Daughters is Natalie Rae and Angela Patton’s odyssey documenting Patton’s program that empowers girls of incarcerated Men yields insight through the subjects themselves – carefree tweens enjoying their chance to just be kids.

In Black Box Diaries, director Shiori Ito confronts abuse but also a deeply flawed legal system. Her quest for justice begins in spring 2015. Then a young intern at Thomson Reuters, Ito found herself in a nightmarish situation with Noriyuki Yamaguchi, a prominent media figure with political connections in Japan. At the time, he worked at the Tokyo Broadcasting System Television, and was the personal biographer for Shinzo Abe, the former prime minister of Japan. 

Filmmakers Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie deliver a multilayered film that invites audiences to confront questions about morality and justice, and to bear witness to the lasting intergenerational trauma of the Williams Lake First Nations (Secwepemc or Shuswap Nation) people from the residential school system which included forced family separation, physical and sexual abuse, and the destruction of First Nation culture and language. Drawing on their backgrounds in activism and journalism — as well as NoiseCat’s own personal connection to the story and community — the filmmakers deftly weave together multiple strands to form this compelling, heartbreaking narrative. 

Kieran Culkin is opening up about what was happening with Jesse Eisenberg at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival!

The 2024 Sundance Film Festival is almost at an end, but there are still films to screen in the online portion of the festival and, almost as importantly, awards to hand out to happy independent filmmakers. The big winners at this year’s awards ceremony were Alessandra Lacorazza’s “In the Summers” which won the Grand Jury Prize U.S.

The 2024 Sundance Film Festival is almost at an end, but there are still films to screen in the online portion of the festival and, almost as importantly, awards to hand out to happy independent filmmakers. The big winners at this year’s awards ceremony were Alessandra Lacorazza’s “In the Summers” which won the Grand Jury Prize U.S.

Being (The Digital Griot) audience members were encouraged to discuss various issues with an AI bot, including patriarchy and racism. One audience member reportedly shouted, “Fuck this AI.”The film’s creator, Rashaad Newsome responded: “I’m not here to be cursed out and I’m not going to have my AI child be cursed out either.”Newsome also reportedly refused to take part in the post-screening Q&A session until action was taken against the audience member.The incident led staff to remove the audience member from the auditorium.

At the height of their failure, every day was Altamont for the Brian Jonestown Massacre, the San Francisco outfit founded in 1990 by Anton Newcombe, the Klaus Kinski of psychedelic rock. Just in time for this 20th anniversary overhaul of Ondi Timoner’s breakthrough documentary, the BJM were back in the news as recently as November 2023, when the first night of an Australian tour ended in a riot. That the riot was confined to the stage, and played out in front of a dumbfounded audience, is DIG! XX in a nutshell, a welcome return for a film that no less an authority than Dave Grohl calls, in a specially filmed new intro, “the greatest rock’n’roll documentary of all time”.

In 2019, Rose Glass announced herself to the world with the phenomenal Saint Maud. The film was an immersive character study of one lonely woman clinging to sanity in the wake of a personal trauma. Audiences loved Saint Maud with a common thread across all reviews being how hard it was to believe that it was only Glass’ feature debut. This year Glass returns with her second film, Love Lies Bleeding, which just debuted at Sundance. Whereas Saint Maud made a star out of lead Morfydd Clark, Love Lies Bleeding is set to do the same for Katy O’Brian.

The Sundance Institute and Alfred P. Sloan Foundation today named the recipients of three artist grants aimed at supporting projects currently in development, as they officially bestowed their Feature Film Prize on Sam and Andy Zuchero’s Love Me, all through their joint Science-In-Film Initiative.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Kristen Stewart‘s domination of the 2024 Sundance Film Festival continued at the Variety Sundance Cover Party presented by United Airlines, where Stewart was honored for her starring roles in two big festival premieres: “Love Me,” a post-apocalyptic romance film in which she stars opposite Steven Yeun, and “Loves Lies Bleeding,” an A24-backed crime thriller in which she played a reclusive gym manager who falls for a local bodybuilder. “It’s hard to get here,” Stewart told Variety at the party about returning to Sundance, where she has premiered more than a dozen movies throughout her career. “Not because it’s an established and elite film festival, but because it supports marginalized voices.

Reality Winner is probably better known in Europe than the U.S., thanks in part to Tina Satter’s extraordinary arthouse film Reality (2023), which dramatized the 25-year-old Texan translator’s arrest in 2017 using the verbatim transcripts of her interactions with the FBI. Winner, a funny and surprisingly powerful biopic directed and co-written by Susanna Fogel, will go quite a long way towards raising her profile back home.

In the realm of zombie-themed films, a genre often filled with clichés and predictable plot lines, Handling the Undead aims to stand out as something different.

Sundance has a long history of screening films that tackle issues of race in the U.S. from every possible angle. Some are angry (Birth of a Nation, 2016), some satirical (Dear White People, 2014), and some quite gonzo (Sorry to Bother You, 2018).

Saoirse Ronan is stepping out to promote her new movie.

Directed by Steven Soderbergh and penned by David Koepp, the haunting psychological thriller Presence follows a fractured family as a mysterious supernatural force infiltrates their new home that has taken interest in their daughter Chloe. The film is written by David Koepp and stars Lucy Liu, Chris Sullivan, Callina Liang, Eddy Maday, West Mulholland, and Julia Fox.An unsettling presence permeates the home of Chris (Sullivan) and Ruth (Liu)  before they even move in. This supernatural entity is a witness to the family’s most vulnerable moments. It has a particular focus on the couple’s young daughter Chloe (Liang), who is always at odds with her mother and Brother Tyler (Maday). However, the young girl is in mourning because of her two girls, one of them her best friend Nadia, died recently.  

PARK CITY – Whatever your thoughts on Sam and Andy Zuchero’s “Love Me” few will dispute that for an independently financed film it’s a unique and creative achievement. At least a third of the movie is CG animation, another third is motion capture animation, and the final portion is live action.

Set in a post-human world, Love Me, directed and written by Sam and Amy Zuchero and starring Steven Yeun and Kristen Stewart, unfolds as an unconventional love story between two inanimate objects. These entities stumble upon each other in the digital realm and, through the remnants of human knowledge, adopt new identities in hopes of evolving their relationship.

Kristen Stewart is keeping busy at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival.

Rebecca Rubin Film and Media Reporter Netflix has acquired “Ibelin,” a documentary that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Benjamin Ree (“The Painter and the Thief”) directed the film, which centers on a Norwegian gamer named Mats Steen, who died of a degenerative muscle disease at the age of 25. According to the official logline, “his parents mourned what they thought had been a lonely and isolated life, when they started receiving messages from online friends around the world.” “Many of my favorite documentary films and series of all time have been distributed by Netflix,” Ree said in a statement.