Sundance Institute announced today the first five grant recipients of the STORIES OF CHANGE: SOCIALENTREPRENEURSHIP IN FOCUS THROUGH DOCUMENTARY initiative, a $3 million, three-year partnership with the Skoll Foundation designed to explore the role of film in advancing knowledge about social entrepreneurship. This partnership creates new opportunities for leading social entrepreneurs and outstanding documentary filmmakers to collaborate and to create new projects about the innovative approaches found in both fields. The development and production grant awards announced today support the creation of feature-length independent documentary films that examine social entrepreneurship as an innovative approach to the central challenges of our time.

READ MORE >>

By the time Tia Lessin and Carl Deal got to Louisiana to start TROUBLE THE WATER, they had years of experience under their collective belts. Lessin had worked with documentary filmmakers Charles Guggenheim and Arthur Dong before joining forces with Michael Moore, for whom she served a producer on his two television shows. Her filmmaking partner Carl Deal had been a broadcast journalist before meeting Lessin on BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE.

READ MORE >>

While everyone talks about the Sundance Film Festival, anyone who has been here quickly realizes that there are many festivals, or, at least, many ways of looking at it.

Just as Wallace Stevens found “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird [www.writing.upenn.edu],” here are 13 perspectives on the festival.

READ MORE >>

UPDATE: James Greenberg from the Hollywood Reporter reviews NANKING: “Indispensable, beautifully crafted account of a little-known Japanese massacre.” It had its limited theatrical release in December 2007.

READ MORE >>