Director Laura Poitras and crew at the Sundance screening of The Oath.

The Sundance Film Festival, held annually in Park City, Utah, is one of the largest and most prominent festivals for independent filmmakers.

Thirty-four films were awarded prizes in 29 categories, honoring both veteran and first-time filmmakers from around the world. Taking home the Excellence in Cinematography Award for U.S. Documentary was The Oath, by Laura Poitras. The film will have its television premiere later this year on P.O.V. on PBS (check local listings).

Filmed in Yemen, The Oath is a family drama about Al Qaeda and Guantanamo Bay Prison. This documentary is the second in a trilogy about America post 9/11. The first film, My Country, My Country, documented the U.S. occupation of Iraq from the perspective of an Iraqi family. The third film will focus on domestic surveillance.

Get the full list of winners at Sundance >>

In the video below, Laura Poitras sits down and gives an in depth look at her film, which she hopes will help people gain a better understanding of Al Qaeda and Guantanamo.

Between screenings, Lois discovers Banksy art behind the Egyptian Theater in Park City, Utah.

Marquee at the Egyptian Theatre

Arriving in Park City, Utah at 8:00 AM on Friday morning, January 22, a couple of things were clear: it was doubtful that I would get caught up on sleep here. The list of documentaries I needed to screen in the next five and a half days was growing faster than the snowdrift that lay between me and our condo front door –– and this was going to be a snowy Sundance.

Three ITVS funded films were featured at 2010 Sundance: Last Train Home by Lixin Fan, The Oath by Laura Poitras, and My Perestroika by Robin Hessman. My colleagues Claire Aguilar and Cynthia Kane attended their screenings and I headed out to find new shows for Independent Lens acquisition consideration.

Seventeen films, countless shuttle rides, bad sandwiches on the run, and many snowstorms later, here’s what I remember now that I’m back in sunny San Francisco.

• Discovering Banksy street art on Main Street at 8:00 AM, Monday morning, en route to an early morning screening. I know there has to be more so I’m in hot pursuit…
• The Impact Partners party on Saturday night. Jennifer Siebel Newsom, the wife of San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, is in the house. We end up talking about the now-canceled TV show Life, and the joys of working with Adam Arkin with whom she starred.
• Unique offerings at Sundance 2010: Utopia in Four Movements by Sam Green; Double Take by Johan Grimonprez; and Saint Louis Blues by Dyana Gaye, a 48-minute musical documentary from Senegal. Too long but totally unexpected.
• Finding out when the next special screening of Exit Through the Gift Shop will take place. Banksy pursuit continues…

• Hanging with Lisa Heller at the HBO party. Real food while sitting down.
• Discover another Banksy behind the Egyptian Theater. A rat with 3-D glasses. He obviously knows more about the film industry than one might think.
• Lunch with Cooper, Cort, David, Saundra, and Cinda – the Sundance old timers. I realize we’ve known each other more than 20 years, since I was hired for the 1990 Sundance Film Festival. Cooper is still the funniest person at the table.
• Catfish is getting the buzz, buzz, buzz.
• Not as much swag as past festivals — landfills across the country sigh in relief.
• Great one-on-one meetings with filmmakers at Miner’s Hospital. Many great projects-in-progress including: An American Promise by Michele Stephenson and Joe Brewster, Regarding Susan Sontag by Nancy Kates, 25 to Life by Michael Brown and Yvonne Shirley, Rose and Nangabire by Beth Davenport, Elizabeth Mandel, and Kathy Chevigny to name just a few.
• Joan Rivers. (Yes, that Joan Rivers). Work alcoholic? Who knew. Too much plastic surgery? Definitely. But she ain’t afraid to speak her mind and after 14 films about the troubles in the world its good to laugh out loud.
• Tuesday morning: three hours at the Commissioning Editors Round Table Meetings. Can’t help but wonder how so many independent filmmakers persist, but they do.
• More snow… stuck on a shuttle bus. Get to the theater in time for the screening but only front row seats still open. Will need a neck brace if this happens again.
• Exit Through the Gift Shop.
• This would be a great film to leave Sundance on but I have three more films to see before I leave in 20 hours.
• Someone painted over Banksy’s art on the barn outside Park City. (Feels like the Grey Ghost in New Orleans all over again).

If all goes well, three of the films that unspooled at Sundance 2010 will have their television premiere 12 to16 months from now on Independent Lens.

Leaving the festival last night it was obvious I hadn’t done anything to erase my sleep deficit. Documentary filmmakers (especially those working with international themes and sometimes with less money) were thriving, and sloshing through the snow to make it to four or five screenings a day requires commitment, warm gloves and the willingness to occasionally hitch hike in Park City if you just cannot get a taxi.

- Lois
Vice president and Independent Lens series producer

The three ITVS films in competition include:

MY PERESTROIKA
By Robin Hessman
World Premiere
When the USSR broke apart in 1991, a generation of young people faced a new realm of possibilities. Filmmaker Robin Hessman follows this last generation of Soviet children brought up behind the Iron Curtain. Using a wealth of rare Russian footage, MY PERESTROIKA interweaves an intimate view of the past with the contemporary lives of a married couple and their childhood friends–telling the story of a nation still very much in transition.
A co-production of Red Square Productions/Bungalow Town Productions and ITVS International in association with American Documentary | P.O.V.

THE OATH
By Laura Poitras
World Premiere
Filmed in Yemen, THE OATH is a family drama about Al Qaeda and Guantanamo Bay Prison. This documentary is the second in a trilogy about America post 9/11. The first film, MY COUNTRY, MY COUNTRY, documented the U.S. occupation of Iraq from the perspective of an Iraqi family. The third film will focus on domestic surveillance.
This film is a co-production of ITVS.

LAST TRAIN HOME
By Lixin Fan
U.S. Premiere
China experiences the largest internal migration in the world as rural workers travel to cities looking for employment. In LAST TRAIN HOME, filmmaker Lixin Fan follows the Zhang family who save all year to travel home for Chinese New Year, along with over 100 million other migrant workers, hoping to salvage the relationship with their teenage daughter.
An EyeSteelFilm production in association with ITVS International.

The festival will be held in Park City, Utah, Jan. 21-31. Screening dates and times are still pending.

Learn more on the Sundance Web site >>

Natalia Almada

The jury and audience award-winners of the 2009 Sundance Film Festival were announced over the weekend at the Festival’s closing Awards Ceremony. Winning this year’s Directing Award for U.S. Documentary was Natalia Almada for the ITVS film EL GENERAL, which will air this year on P.O.V. on PBS.

Through the legacy of filmmaker Natalia Almada, great-granddaughter of Mexican President Plutarco Elias Calles, EL GENERAL is a portrait of a family and explores a country living under the shadow of its past.

Visit the Sundance Web site for a complete list of winners >>

Andy Bilchlbaum and Mike Bonnano travel the world posing as representatives of Halliburton, HUD and the WTO as the Yes Men in their film at Sundance.

So many movies, so little time. Posters plaster the walls at Sundance in an attempt to attract a large crowd--the trick is to be the last one to put your poster up.

I was there for the second wave of the festival that started after Obama’s inauguration. Exhilaration was in the air along with hope and warm and fuzzy feelings that made the Sundance experience really special this year. And maybe less than the normal challenge, because “working” Sundance is fun but hard. Because of trying to shoehorn everything into a 24 hour day (midnight screenings, early morning meetings, bus trips, slogging through snow and black ice), basic human needs such as food, water and sleep are often at a minimum. Everyone is watching, promoting, developing, networking, organizing and discussing films so you tend to forget about lunch. But anyway, as a wimpy Californian it wasn’t too snowy this year and I had fewer waves of panic at the sight of black ice. The Sundance survival kit this year included cute green Nalgene water bottles and hand warmers.

Caroline Libresco from Sundance organized industry meetings with filmmakers and industry professionals where I got to meet with international filmmakers and talk about projects in development. I had great conversations with filmmakers Hubert Sauper (Darwin’s Nightmare), Havana Marking (Afghan Star), Christo Hird and Rupert Murray (End of the Line), NC Heikin (Kimjongilia), John Dower (Thrilla in Manila) and Ngawang Choephel (Tibet in Song). Thanks to Sundance for connecting industry documentary people with these filmmakers––it’s a good thing.

Since I’m at the festival mostly looking for projects in development and to talk with producers, watching films is more of a treat than a priority. But I got to see some wonderful features, such as the heart-warming Amreeka (a project in development by ITVS-funded filmmaker Cherin Dabis) and the odd and funny Brief Encounters with Hideous Men, based on the book by the late David Foster Wallace.

As for docs, I went to a screening of the premiere of The Yes Men Fix the World. The Yes Men are two guys who plan and execute hilarious hoaxes aimed at the corporate world. Andy Bilchlbaum and Mike Bonnano travel the world posing as representatives of Halliburton, HUD and the WTO. In their most famous hoax, Andy posed as a Dow Chemical spokesperson (“Jude Finisterra”). On the anniversary of the Bhopal disaster––an industrial disaster that took place at a Union Carbide, a chemical plant in the city of Bhopal, India––Andy promises that Dow will dissolve their company Union Carbide. With the 12 billion dollars from the sale, they’ll clean up the site and provide medical care for the thousands of victims of the Bhopal chemical spill. The news reaches millions of viewers before the BBC discovers it was all a hoax and the Yes Men are exposed. Dow suffered a great plunge in their stock and felt an enormous backlash from the stunt. The film is filled with other pranks but also has fun sequences of the Yes Men in their power suits strategizing in a barn/office, lovely shots of them synchronized swimming and creating and crafting their props. The young and energetic audience gave the Yes Men a standing ovation after the film, relishing their latest “hoax of hope,” a fake edition of The New York Times (dated July 4, 2009) with the headline “War in Iraq Ends.” A total of 1.2 million copies of the fake paper were distributed, including at the screening, where we read about “Maximum Wage Law Passes Congress” and “All Public Universities To Be Free.” A fitting sign that the Yes Men are the social issue tricksters in the Era of Obama.

-Claire Aguilar, ITVS vice president of Programming

Lois Vossen, vice president and series producer, catches up with colleagues and friends while at the Sundance Film Festival, including Lauren Prestileo of WGBH-Boston.

After six days in Park City it is time to head home. This year marked my 18th consecutive Sundance and in many ways it was my best Sundance experience in years. The warm weather certainly helped––I only wore my gloves twice, my hat once and never even used my scarf!

The smaller crowds made catching the endless round of shuttle buses more enjoyable. As a proponent of mass-transit, I kind of enjoyed riding the shuttles and eavesdropping on all the conversations. While some of the comments were pretty wild, I also (over)heard some of the most intelligent discussions about film as the shuttles lumbered from the Transit Center and Main Street to the library, to the Yarrow/Holiday Cinemas and onto the Eccles.

But appropriately, the best thing about this year’s Sundance was the films. I saw 15 films and really liked many of them and loved a few of them. The bounty of environmental films could have made for a very depressing Sundance––especially since I screened The Cove, The End of the Line, Crude, No Impact Man and Dirt! The Movie within three days. But even the most dire of these films tried to offer the audience a ray of hope if we are willing to change our ways. Like the call from President Obama, we’ll have to make some sacrifices like giving up blue fin tuna so it doesn’t go extinct. But before I can taste some dirt in my own Oakland backyard like they did in Dirt! The Movie, I’ll have to remove the lead.

One of the fun things about Sundance are the chance encounters: running into former colleagues I see once a year or every few years at Sundance, meeting filmmakers whose work I’ve admired and being able to tell them that in person, going to a pub for lunch and getting seated down the table from the five documentary competition jurors so you can say hi to all of them at once, and of course meeting new filmmakers.

On Tuesday morning I participated in the “Meet the Commissioning Editors” pitch meetings at the Sundance House. One person who joined my table is a Sundance Fellow this year. His earlier short was featured as part of the Independent Lens Shorts Festival. He pitched his new project along with about 30 other filmmakers looking for funding, broadcast and other support.

A notable difference from earlier years at Sundance is whose sitting in the theater with me watching documentaries. This year I sat behind, next to, in front of or across the aisle from Sting, Trudie Styler, Chris Rock, Pierce Brosnan, Kevin Bacon, Ben Affleck, Nia Long, etc. And of course Mr. Redford, but he’s been doing it for 25 years.

- Lois Vossen, vice president and Independent Lens series producer

Producer Paco de Onis and Director Pamela Yates, The Reckoning

Lisa Heller, vice president of Original Programming, HBO

Catherine Olsen from the CBC and Iikka Vehkelahti, commissioning editor of Finland’s YLE, art critic and documentary producer

This is both a remarkable and strange year to be at Sundance, during the inauguration of President-Elect Obama and the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. People say that the crowds are thinner this year, but it still seems crowded and screenings are full. It’s unseasonably warm––in the high 30’s during the day––and that makes people kind of happy not having to deal with the cold and snow. Yet there is something surreal about it.

We had a great ITVS party on Friday evening honoring two films at the festival: EL GENERAL, by Natalia Almada, and WILLIAM KUNSTLER: Disturbing the Universe, by Emily and Sarah Kunstler, which are scheduled for broadcast on PBS’s P.O.V. Also featured at Sundance was the film Wounded Knee by Stanley Nelson as one of the episodes of American Experience’s Native American series And We Shall Remain, which is scheduled for April 2009 on PBS.

Yesterday was my fourth day at Sundance and it was marked by a screening of the world premiere of The Reckoning, a film directed by Pamela Yates, produced by Paco de Onis and Peter Kinoy, about the International Criminal Court (ICC)––a powerful account of the establishment of the ICC and its pursuit of justice against crimes of genocide and war crimes. Pam and Paco have been working on The Reckoning for three years, and have told many stories chronicling the ICC and its head prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo. I spoke with Paco and Pam at the Filmmakers Lodge about their work on this film and others about international justice and human rights in Guatemala, Peru and many other countries. They are so intelligent, dedicated and terrific filmmakers. The screening was packed, and full of enthusiastic response from the audience, including Chris Rock. The Reckoning is in competition for the Sundance U.S. Documentary Competition.

Over the weekend, I went to a screening of When You’re Strange about Jim Morrison and the Doors––an amazing archival film that chronicles the history of the Doors with mesmerizing footage of sexy Jim and the late ‘60s music scene. I could sit for hours watching footage of Jim Morrison reciting, singing, prancing and leaping on stage. It was a real treat.

Before the screening, I attended the HBO-hosted dinner at the Canyons Resort, which turned out to be an oasis of calm amid the Sundance hustle and bustle and a cool watering-hole for the world documentary community. HBO has lots of documentaries at this festival, many shepherded by Lisa Heller, vice president of Original Programming. This was a great opportunity to meet with not only filmmakers, producers, distributors and sales agents, but international commissioning editors who are looking for development and acquisition. I dined with Catherine Olsen from the CBC who was thrilled to connect with Marina Zenovich, producer of Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired to get on CBC in Canada. Iikka Vehkelahti, commissioning editor of Finland’s YLE, art critic and documentary producer, had a full day of screenings and was already writing about them on his own blog for YLE.

More to come!

The filmmakers of EL GENERAL at the ITVS/PBS reception.

Scott Chaffin, broadcasting director, KUED, and Mary Dickson, director of Creative Services, KUED

An example of beautiful footwear you should NOT wear to Sundance. This was the first Sundance Festival for Poonam Kumar, the outreach manager from KUED, and she didn't realize that navigating the streets of Park City during the festival is like trekking the Himalayas. You need boots. Still, she was the most stylish attendee at the PBS/ITVS reception.

Every day at the Sundance Film Festival feels like three days. The day starts at 6 AM in our ITVS condo. I arrived after dark and the driver couldn’t find the condo, tucked somewhere in the hills of lower Deer Valley. Then I saw a handmade ITVS sign in the window.

My first screening was No Impact Man by Laura Gabbert and Justin Schein. Laura’s earlier film SUNSET STORY was on Independent Lens in 2005. This is a wonderful film to start this year’s festival: an environmental film that is funny, inspiring and ultimately hopeful.

Afterward I made my way to the festival headquarters to get my credentials and caught a shuttle to the PBS/ITVS cocktail reception. On the way there, the shuttle got pulled over by the Park City Police––with sirens blaring and the whole nine yards! The police claim the shuttle driver tore off the rearview mirror on someone’s SUV an hour earlier on Park Avenue, the city’s main drag.

Everyone on the shuttle rushed off, eager to get on to our next event while the police tried to find someone who witnessed the incident. I huffed it up to the Riverhorse restaurant to the PBS/ITVS cocktail party, which was a major success, with more than 200 attendees including a great mix of filmmakers (including five filmmakers who had produced programs specifically for PBS), distributors, publicists, sales agents and colleagues from PBS, WGBH and series like Independent Lens, P.O.V. and American Masters. At the end of the reception my colleagues Jim Sommers, ITVS senior vice president of Content; Voleine Amilcar, IL publicity manager; and Claire Aguilar, vice president of Programming and I handed out ITVS T-shirts.

After the reception, a small group of us headed to the new Temple Theater outside Park City. There was a reception with Robert Redford to introduce the theater as the new center for documentary film at Sundance. My friend invited me to attend the VIP party for the film Reporter, which was screening simultaneously and we literally walked into Ben Affleck at the top of the stairs.

I stayed to see Reporter and the Q&A afterward and several shuttle transfers later arrived at the ITVS condos at 12:30 AM. Thankfully, the weather is still warmer than normal. Two films, two receptions and met up with about 40 colleagues at the events or on the shuttles––a typical day at Sundance. Well, minus the cops pulling over our shuttle!

The Sundance Film Festival, held annually in Park City, Utah, is one of the largest and most prominent festivals for independent filmmakers. ITVS has screened a total of 66 films at Sundance since 1994. This year, two ITVS films will make their world premiere at the festival, which will be held from January 15-25.

EL GENERAL

WILLIAM KUNSTLER: Disturbing the Universe

In honor of the Festival’s 25th Anniversary, PBS and ITVS will host a joint celebration on Friday, January 16, for independent filmmakers who have shown their work on public media and at the festival. The event is open to any filmmaker whose work is screening at Sundance. Accredited members of the press should contact ITVS for more details.

Both films will compete in the Documentary category and will broadcast on this season of P.O.V.

WILLIAM KUNSTLER: Disturbing the Universe
By Sarah Kunstler and Emily Kunstler
WILLIAM KUNSTLER: Disturbing the Universe presents an intimate portrait of the late civil rights attorney William Kunstler who risked everything for his beliefs.

EL GENERAL
By Natalia Almada
EL GENERAL looks at Mexican President Plutarco Elias Calles through the eyes of his great-granddaughter and filmmaker Almada, and explores a country living under the shadow of its past.

Screening dates and times are still pending. Visit the Sundance website for up-to-date information on screenings >>

Can’t make it to Sundance? Be sure to visit Beyond the Box Blog for the latest news and updates from the festival.