Some news from

Sundance Film Festival

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Robert Redford

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Thursday Sundance opens and, Redford welcomed the crowd before filmmaker, Nicole Holofcener  introduced her latest flick, “Friends

 With Money.” Starring Jen Aniston, Frances McDormand, Catherine Keener and Joan Cusack, it revolves around a free-spirited pothead

(Aniston) who trades in her job as a teacher for cleaning houses. Although her married friends (McDormand, Keener and Cusack) offer

 advice on finding the right guy, the right job… blah, blah, blah, they simultaneously make messes of their own lives without knowing it.

Miramax Films made its biggest festival acquisition of the post-Weinstein era Monday night, shelling out $3 million for North American

rights to Patrick Stettner's mystery thriller "The Night Listener." While buyers continued to pick over a market dominated by directorial

debuts, a broader picture of the acquisitions trends at Sundance began to come into focus Tuesday.

 


Robert Redford and Craig Barrett of Intel at last years CES...

chips at Sundance and we ain't talking cow...

Well we wonder what could possibly bring chip heavyweight Intel to the Sundance Film Festival?

Intel was showing off its WiMAX-based broadband wireless network, built in collaboration with Alvarion and Mountain

Wireless. The network, covering 55 miles, reached an area from Salt Lake City to Park City. To showcase how the new

dual-core chipset powers the network, Intel streamed a live film premier to an audience at a remote ski lodge.


 

AtomFilms today unveiled the winners of the Intel Indies Film Contest

 (http://intel.atomfilms.com/ ) at an Intel-sponsored event at the Sundance Film Festival. An experienced panel of film industry judges culled through hundreds of entries from 40 different states to determine the winning films. The grand prize winner, Nicholas Worthey, received $25,000 in cash, $20,000 in Intel(R) Viiv(TM) technology-based digital home equipment, and an original content development deal with AtomFilms Studio.

"AtomFilms has a longstanding history of opening doors for today's most promising filmmakers and animators," said Scott Roesch, VP and GM of AtomFilms. "The Intel Indies Film Contest gave us a great new forum for discovering and rewarding talented and visionary artists."
 

 
Shorts move to the main stage online

Meanwhile, Sundance is forging ahead with several projects designed to give its activities greater reach. Org is placing increased importance on short films, spotlighting them and making them available online as soon as they're shown locally. "Like documentaries in the '80s, shorts are in that place where they have nowhere to be seen, but we're working to change that. Plus, they're perfect for the short attention-span viewers," Redford joked.

 

Sundance Film Festival takes more online

 

The Sundance Film Festival has long played host to innovators by tapping into the imagination. Now coordinators are tapping into the Internet to showcase video blogging, podcasts and short films.

As we saw at CES this change shows  a shift in how filmmakers view the Internet. In the past, many were nudged into having their work streamed on the Web. Today, few need persuasion. "Hollywood is changing and the Internet is becoming the great conduit and it no longer takes a theatrical to promote your movies," said Christopher Coppola, president at Ears XXI, an independent movie studio in Hollywood. "With the Internet I can gauge the budgets of my future films, depending on the number of people who purchase DVDs."

Coppola has tapped the Internet for more than four years to screen and promote his movies, and now streams live video and creates content for blogs, and podcasts. This year, Sundance Online hopes the additional content will serve as a virtual extension of the festival, said Joseph Beyer, associate programmer, Sundance Film Festival producer, Sundance Institute Online. "We're trying to reach an international audience. Last year we had people from all over the world on our site," he said.

For the first time at the festival more than half of the short films, known as "Shorts," will run online. In fact, about 50 of 73 are available for viewing. It's been rare for filmmakers to let the public view their original content on the Web

 
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