Nine MacDowell Fellows presented work over at The Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah in early 2015.
Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck (at left) share writing and directing credit for Mississippi Grind, a road film about compulsive gamblers that “flawlessly captures the seedy world of small-time losers and dreamers.”
Donald Margulies is the screenwriter for The End of the Tour, based on Rolling Stone reporter David Lipsky’s memoir about his five days spent interviewing David Foster Wallace.
Michael Almereyda wrote and directed Experimenter, a look inside the mind of social psychologist Stanley Milgram, known for the 1961 “obedience experiments” at Yale University.
Matthew Rankin’s Mynarski Death Plummet is a completely handmade eight-minute historical micro-epic combining wartime aviation melodrama with classical and avant-garde animation techniques. It has been described as a psychedelic photo-chemical war picture on the themes of self-sacrifice, immortality, and jellyfish.
Jennifer Reeves is the animator, editor, and director of the short Color Neutral, described as a color explosion of sparkles, bubbles, and fractures. Reeves works in handcrafted 16mm film and uses “an array of mediums and direct-on-film techniques to create this exuberant, psychedelic morsel of cinema.”
Jennie Livingstone’s Paris is Burning, her portrait of New York’s subterranean transsexual/transgender community and the parties at which they expressed themselves is trotted out from the archive. The film shared the documentary Grand Jury Prize at the 1991 Sundance Film Festival and won multiple other awards.
Dave Eggar will perform in The Way of the Rain, a live multidisciplinary performance inspired by the annual monsoon rains that sustain life on the fragile high desert plateaus of the southwest. Conceived by environmental artist Sibylle Szaggars Redford and world-renowned collaborators, this unique work comes to life through paintings, music, dance, film, light, and spoken word.
And finally, backed by Executive Producers Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner, Matt Wolf directed the short documentary It's Me, Hilary: The Man Who Drew Eloise. A portrait of Hilary Knight, the artist behind the Eloise books, takes a look at Hilary as he reflects on his life as an illustrator and his relationship to his most successful work. The film will also premiere on HBO on March 23.
Read about the entire Sundance program here.
