My Publicist Note Book

Park City, UT  — Offering a first look at the year ahead in independent film, culture and new ideas, Sundance Institute announced today the 65 films selected for the U.S. Competition, World Competition and out-of-competition NEXT category set to premiere at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival, January 21-31 in Park City, Salt Lake City, Ogden and Sundance, Utah. Films that have premiered in these sections include  Beasts of the Southern Wild ,  Fruitvale Station , Whiplash ,  Blackfish ,  The September Issue ,  The Cove ,  An Education ,  Animal Kingdom ,  Precious ,  A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night ,  Obvious Child ,  Tangerine  and  Escape from Tomorrow .     (L-R)  Morris from America , Credit: Sean McElwee;  The Lure , Credit: Robert Palka;  The Fits , Credit: Paul Yee. The Festival is the centerpiece of the year-round public programs for the Institute, which also hosts 24 residency La...

The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution Stanley Nelson's rousing documentary on the era-defining civil rights group When you think of the Black Panthers, the image that likely comes to mind is one of a group of black men, wearing afros and turtlenecks, berets and leather jackets, fists aloft, many arms of a single organism, presenting a stoic, united front. According to Stanley Nelson, director of the captivating new documentary The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, we should actually be thinking of an elephant. In the opening scene of Nelson’s film, Ericka Huggins, an early Panther who’s now a professor of sociology, tells a story: Three blind men try to describe an elephant. One touches the animal’s side, another the tusk, another the trunk. They each call the elephant something different, based on three unique impressions. That’s the Black Panthers in a nutshell, Huggins concludes. “We know the Party that we were in, and not the entire thing,” sh...

In 1978, Robert Redford's company, Wildwood, founded the Sundance Film Festival, which begins today in Park City, Utah. Redford is pictured here in Utah in 1969, the same year he purchased the land now known as Sundance. Sundance   isn’t just about looking for celebrities, watching new films and guessing which will get picked up by the big distributors, there are also great seminars and panels with filmmakers that dive into the art and craft of making movies.  It’s no surprise that Sundance is one of the most talked about film festivals given the talent that submits work and the films premiered. This year’s lineup is getting a lot of buzz. The Sundance Film Festival®  has introduced global audiences to some of the most groundbreaking films of the past three decades, including   Whiplash ,   Boyhood ,   Rich Hill ,   Beasts of the Southern Wild ,   Fruitvale Station ,   Little Miss Sunshine ,   sex, lies, and videotape ,   R...