Pahokee group heading to Sundance Film Festival

Festivalgoers will also be able to use Samsung Pay – the official mobile payment of the 2016 Sundance Film Festival – at the Studio’s café, which will feature menu items from Salt Lake City’s own, “The Rose Establishment”.

“Im not focused on that part, ” the Oscar victor said Thursday at the film festivals opening day news conference.

Johnson returns to Utah with a considerably more ambitious project this time around, complete with “big auto chases and action sequences”, not to mention some grand lunar set pieces that drove the budget up. The film weaves together the lives of seven people on the day they are killed in a mass shooting at a multiplex cinema. “People aren’t aware of the pressures”.

The festival’s documentary slate continues to expand.

The Sundance Film Festival has been inclusive since its creation 30 years ago. But as disarming as it is to hear someone come clean about a lifelong lie, it has the more significant effect of casting everything he’s said previously into doubt. We look at some of this year’s films through the lens of the books that served as their source material.

But these days, wherever prominent filmmakers are, questions about diversity follow. If I go to Toronto’s festival, well, I have a pretty good idea that I need to see The Martian. “We think it’s important because it’s tied to the fundamental word of ‘independent.’ Diversity speaks for itself in terms of the topics. All the stuff that NASA sent to the moon we had to build, so we had to build a lunar escape module, we had to build all of the spacesuits”, he says. “We just put the spotlight on the artists who bring them up”.

The team from Funny Or Die joins Samsung to debut the world premiere of the first-ever virtual reality comedy short, “Interrogation” featuring comedians Paul Scheer and Rob Huebel. “It also means that there’s a lot more talented filmmakers out there with product, and so places like Sundance have become even more competitive”. Like Middle East war documentaries and other sprawling areas, the 2016 crop of gun movies may be less a moment than the beginning of a wave. “The technology may be driving us to smaller and smaller things, but you can’t replace the value of gathering in community space in the dark on a big screen and being transported if you are”.

Kenneth Lonergan, whose 2000 film “You Can Count on Me” won the grand jury Prize and was nominated for two Oscars, is already attracting attention for “Manchester by the Sea”, starring Casey Affleck as a Boston handyman suddenly in charge of his teenage nephew. “I’m not into that”.

“I can see the headline: ‘I don’t like Oscars, ‘” Redford joked. That’s for Donald Trump to say!

He added, “I didn’t want to explain or judge (gun usage); i just wanted to observe”. The founder of People For The American Way also offered his take on the rise of Donald Trump to the front of the GOP Presidential contenders, “I think it is the American people saying screw you to leadership everywhere”, said Lear, echoing past statements he’s made of the poll topping Trump – again to great laughter from the Sundance crowd.

The film drops at a time of continued racial tension in the U.S, and against the backdrop of accusations that the movie industry is not diverse enough.

Sundance was born to be weird.. I drove 9 hours from Colorado across the Wyoming plains, down through the Wasatch Mountains into Park City.

Largely because Spike Lee loves bringing it up, most know that Barack and Michelle Obama went to see Do the Right Thing on their first date.

The film has multiple screenings starting January 25 at the famous Utah film festival. And just make it weird, and different? Maybe some people would like to ski – wouldn’t that be fun? That’s why I came here.

“It’s always been tough for indie film…it’s tough for film in general cause there’s threats in distribution that take away from what used to be a simple equation”. Check back with the Herald, online and in print, for festival updates. Film is not in a good place. Money is at the core, changing times is at the core, and other threats that didn’t exist before. “The game is always changing”.