Just when you thought you’d seen it all regarding America’s processed food horrors, filmmaker Human Rights Fellow Ana Joanes presents FRESH, a documentary about the rapid transformation of our food industry into an industrial model and what some people are doing about it.

Sponsored by the Park City Film Series, the Swaner Environmental Film Series and this year’s Leadership Park City’s Class, FRESH celebrates the farmers, thinkers and business people across America who are re-inventing our food system. Forging healthier, sustainable alternatives, they offer a practical vision for a future of our food sources and our planet. After the film, enjoy a brief presentation on high altitude vegetable gardening.

See FRESH next Tuesday, July 13 at the Park City Library. The free screening begins at 7 p.m.

Sundance might end in January for publicists, stars and event planners — but locals can benefit from the Sundance Institute year-round with events promoting independent film. Starting June 3, Park City and Salt Lake residents can step inside the world of independent filmmaking with the new Sundance Institute Film Series.

“Part screening, part discussion, we’ll showcase work supported by Sundance Institute, and give you an opportunity to meet the filmmakers and discuss the film,” the Institute promises in a recent press release. Films will screen in different locations throughout Park City and Salt Lake.

SUNDANCE FILM SERIES SCHEDULE: FREE. EVERY MONTH.

From the Collection: Unzipped

Directed by Douglas Keeve

Thursday, June 3

Tower Theatre, 7:00 p.m.

80 min.

Winner of the U.S. Documentary Audience Award at the 1995 Sundance Film Festival, Unzipped is part performance, part cinema verite, and all delight as we follow world-famous fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi as he creates his 1994 New York fall fashion show. The world of high fashion has rarely been depicted in such intimate detail, complete with all the excitement and anxiety that accompany any major artistic event. Featuring many of the world’s top models, including Kate Moss, Linda Evangelista, Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell, and Christy Turlington, Unzipped is a treat that fulfills the promise of its title to entertain, provoke, and unveil.

From the Collection:  Son of Rambow

Written and Directed by Garth Jennings

Thursday, July 1 @ 9:00 PM

Outdoors at City Park, Park City

95 min.

Set during a long English summer in the early 1980’s, Son of Rambow is a touching comedy about the tough business of growing up.  Will, a fatherless boy from a strict family that won’t let him watch television, finds himself caught up in the extraordinary world of Lee Carter, the school terror and maker of bizarre home movies.  Lee exposes Will to a pirated copy of the Rambo film, First Blood, which blows his mind wide open.

From the collection: Once

Written and Directed by John Carney

Wednesday, July 21 @ 9:00 PM

Outdoors at Red Butte Garden Amphitheatre, Salt Lake City

88 min.

It’s not often that a film like Once comes along.  Overwhelming Festival audiences in Park City and garnering an Audience Award, the film ultimately nabbed an Academy Award for Best Song (”Falling Slowly”).  Once stars Glen Hansard of The Frames and Czech singer/songwriter Marketa Irglova, as two broken hearted musicians; their musical bond at the heart of the film and of their love.

From the collection: Mary and Max

Directed by Adam Elliot

Friday, August 6 @ 9:00 PM

Outdoors at City Park, Park City

Opening Night of the 41st Park City Kimball Arts Festival

92 min.

Mary & Max, a claymation feature by the Academy Award-winning team behind Harvie Krumpet, is a simple friendship story about two very different pen-pals.  Mary and Max’s friendship take us on a journey that explores autism, taxidermy, psychiatry, alcoholism, agoraphobia, and obesity, to name a few topics, each penned with love and compassion.

From the collection: The Motorcycle Diaries

Directed by Walter Salles

Wednesday, August 25 @ 9:00 PM

Outdoors at Red Butte Garden Amphitheatre, Salt Lake City

128 min.

The Motorcycle Diaries is a beautifully wrought account of the awakening of one of the 20th century’s most romanticized revolutionaries.  The film recounts the odyssey undertaken by a young “Che” Guevara and his friend Granado in 1952, when Guevara was a 23-year-old medical student.  A summer road movie like no other, The Motorcycle Diaries transports you to a unique moment of time and place where myth is born.

Screening Date:    Monday, April 19, 2010

Location:     The Salt Lake City Library - 210 E. 400 S.

6:30 Photo Lecture by Lauren Greenfield
7:00 Screening of THIN (runtime 102 minutes)
8:42 Post film Q & A and book signing with Lauren Greenfield and one of the subjects of the film.

Eating disorders affect five million people in the U.S., and more than 10% of those diagnosed with anorexia nervosa will die from the disease. Seeking to put a human face on these sobering statistics, acclaimed photographer Lauren Greenfield went inside a Florida treatment center to tell the stories of four women who are literally dying to be thin.

Lauren Greenfield Author of the critically acclaimed Fast Forward, Girl Culture, and THIN, Lauren Greenfield was named by American Photo as one of the 25 most influential photographers working today. Her photographs have been widely exhibited and are in many museum collections, including the Getty, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Greenfield was one of eight photographers in the inaugural exhibit of The Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles (2009). This summer, Greenfield’s work will be featured in a major historical exhibition on the Photo Essay at the Getty Museum. THIN and Girl Culture are both traveling museum exhibitions curated by Trudy Wilner Stack that together have been seen by over half a million people in over 30 venues around the world.

THIN was also Greenfield’s directorial debut as a filmmaker. A feature-length documentary, it broadcast on HBO and earned her an Emmy nomination for Best Direction. THIN premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2006, and won the Grand Jury Prize at the London International Film Festival. The project was featured on the Today Show, Good Morning America, Nightline, and CNN, and was excerpted in People.

Sitawa Namwalie of Kenya will present her project, "Cut of My Tongue" at the Sundance Institute East Africa Lab.

Sundance Institute has unveiled the four projects chosen to participate in the Sundance Institute Theatre Lab in East Africa, taking place July 9 to 29 on the island of Manda off the coast of Kenya. This is the first time Manda will host a Sundance lab, although the Institute has held projects in East Africa since 2008.

Philip Himberg, Producing Artistic Director of the Sundance Institute Theatre Program, the Lab will provide these projects with guidance in their creative development toward final production. Modeled on the annual Sundance Institute Theatre Labs, Sundance Institute East Africa is an exchange and development program, and participants will receive training and mentorship from American and African Creative Advisors.

Selected projects:

Cut Off My Tongue (Kenya), a collection of dramatized texts by playwright Sitawa Namwalie and choreographer Lillian Amimo Olembo that incorporate poetry, spoken word, narrative, music, dance and movement. Cut Off My Tongue deals with interrelated stories about life in Kenya grouped around tribe and ethnicity, African womanhood, love and desire, political critique, tradition and genealogy.

The Book of Life (Rwanda), piece formed by a collection of widows’ letters from the 1994 Tutsi Genocide to their loved ones. The project transcends space and time as illustrates the living desire to reconnect with the dead so as to go past the pain. To find healing, to find joy, to find love and to celebrate life.

Africa Kills Her Sun (Tanzania), an adaptation of a letter by Ken Saro-Wiwa by Mrisho Mpoto with director Gilbert Lukalia. Ken Saro-Wiwa (1941-1995) was hanged by the Nigerian dictatorship in 1995 for his activism on behalf of his Nigerian Ogoni people. The original text is a condemned man’s last letter to his loved one. Mpoto will adapt this text and use his poetic style in Kiswahili to combine it with slam poetry and storytelling to talk about corruption and abuse of power in contemporary Africa.

Silent Voices (Uganda) by playwright Lucy Judith Adong and choreographer Grace Flavia Ibanda with director Jacob Otieno. Silent Voices mirrors the views and emotions of the real victims of the Northern Uganda war. The project explores how victims have been ignored in the constant calls to “forgive” and “reconcile” at the expense of justice. Through the protagonist, (Mother - a symbolic representation of life and death) Silent Voices examines what good citizens can be driven into by unhealthy policies.

The 2010 Sundance Institute Theatre Lab in East Africa is made possible through the generosity of Wayne MacGregor who has provided his personal residence, Akili, as rehearsal and performance space for the artists.

C

Mohammad Yunus in New York

The AFI-Discovery Channel Silverdocs Documentary Festival announced that “To Catch a Dollar: Muhammad Yunus Banks on America“, directed and produced by Gayle Ferraro, will have its East Coast Premiere as a special presentation on Monday, April 12 at the AFI Silver Theatre in Silver Spring, Maryland. “To Catch a Dollar,” which made its world premiere at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival, chronicles Grameen America, a not-for-profit microfinance organization founded by Nobel Laureate Mohammad Yunus, during its first year of operations in Queens, New York.  It focuses on several entrepreneurial women borrowers as they pursue their paths from poverty to success, whether opening a bakery, starting a hair salon, or selling ice cream.

Professor Yunus is known worldwide for his successful application of the concept of microcredit, the extension of small loans to entrepreneurs too poor to qualify for traditional bank loans.  He and Grameen Bank jointly won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006, and he was presented with a Presidential Medal of Honor in 2009.  With Grameen America, Yunus has replicated the microcredit model in the US.  Since opening in January 2008, Grameen America has disbursed more than $4.3 million in loans to more than 2,000 borrowers and maintains a repayment rate of 99%.  Additional branches are opening across the country, and Washington, DC is one of the ten cities slotted for a new branch.

Read Park City resident Chelsea Shapard’s review of a presentation by Yanus during Sundance.

Johnny Weir at the 2010 Olympics

Who can get enough of Olympic figure skating diva Johnny Weir?

Not us! Thankfully, the Sundance Channel has stockpiled enough Johnny for a delicious post-Olympic dose. The eight-part reality series, Be Good, Johnny Weir, which premiered in January, chronicles the life of Weir as an athlete and fashionista, sharing his shopping expeditions and fabulous free time extravaganzas between long days of practice with his slave-driving Russian coach. Admittedly, deciding what to make of someone so reminiscent of Sasha Baron Cohen’s Bruno takes a flamboyant minute to get used to, but Johnny Weir (good or bad) is as genuine as he is entertaining, making “Be Good, Johnny Weir” a must-see for any diva-loving gossip girl.

JURY AWARDS:

Grand Jury Prize, Dramatic: Winter’s Bone, directed by Debra Granik

Sundance Synopsis: “Deep in the Ozark Mountains, clans live by a code of conduct that no one dares defy—until an intrepid teenage girl has no other choice. When Ree Dolly’s crystal-meth-making father skips bail and goes missing, her family home is on the line. Unless she finds him, she and her young siblings and disabled mother face destitution. In a heroic quest, Ree traverses the county to confront her kin, break their silent collusion, and bring her father home.”

Grand Jury Prize, Documentary: Restrepo, directed by Tim Hetherington & Sebastian Junger

Sundance Synopsis: “In 2008 Sebastian Junger (The Perfect Storm) and Tim Hetherington dug in with the men of Second Platoon for a year. Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley, a stronghold of al Qaeda and the Taliban, has proven to be one of the U.S. Army’s deadliest challenges. It is here that the platoon lost their comrade, PFC Juan Restrepo, and erected an outpost in his honor. Up close and personal, Junger and Hetherington gain extraordinary insight into the surreal combination of backbreaking labor and deadly firefights that are a way of life at Outpost Restrepo.”

World Cinema Jury Prize, Dramatic: Animal Kingdom, directed by David Michôd

Sundance Synopsis: “Welcome to the jungle known as the Melbourne underworld. Animal Kingdom uses this edgy locale to unspool a gripping tale of survival and revenge. Pope Cody, an armed robber on the run from a gang of renegade detectives, is in hiding, surrounded by his roughneck friends and family. Soon, Pope’s nephew, Joshua “J” Cody, arrives and moves in with his hitherto-estranged relatives. When tensions between the family and the police reach a bloody peak, “J” finds himself at the center of a cold-blooded revenge plot that turns the family upside down.”

World Cinema Jury Prize, Documentary: The Red Chapel (Det Røde Kapel), directed by Mads Brügger

Sundance Synopsis: “A journalist with no scruples and two Danish/Korean comedians—one a self-proclaimed “spastic”—travel to North Korea under the guise of a cultural exchange. On the pretext of being a small Danish theatre group, named The Red Chapel, they are allowed into the country, but unbeknownst to the North Koreans, cultural exchange is not really what they have in mind. Mads Brügger, the journalist; Simon, the straight man; and Jacob, the spastic, use humor to challenge one of the world’s most notorious regimes. The troupe rehearse under the watchful eye of government officials brought in to “collaborate” on their performance and make it more palatable for the Korean regime. They are shown the important historical sights by a female government employee, who smothers poor Jacob with motherly affection.”

The Best of NEXT: Homewrecker, directed by Todd Barnes & Brad Barnes

Sundance Synopsis: “Mike is a locksmith. He’s also a prisoner on work release, but you wouldn’t know it. He’s just trying to focus on his house calls and reconcile with his ex-girlfriend—until Margo hijacks his day. A live-wire kook, who’s certain her boyfriend is cheating on her, Margo bulldozes Mike into spying on the alleged cad. The result: an all-day adventure with a (seemingly) stolen vehicle, a visit to an unlikely drug dealer, and a low blood-sugar attack. Potential trouble follows these two around—but maybe something good will come of it.”

Special Jury Prize, Documentary: GasLand, directed by Josh Fox

Sundance Synopsis: “It is happening all across America—rural landowners wake up one day to find a lucrative offer from an energy company wanting to lease their property. Reason? The company hopes to tap into a reservoir dubbed the “Saudi Arabia of natural gas.” Halliburton developed a way to get the gas out of the ground—a hydraulic drilling process called “fracking”—and suddenly America finds itself on the precipice of becoming an energy superpower.”

Special Jury Prize, Dramatic: Sympathy for Delicious, directed by Mark Ruffalo

Sundance Synopsis: “Recently paralyzed DJ “Delicious” Dean battles the mean streets of Los Angeles, struggling to survive in his wheelchair. Yearning to walk again, and fighting to spark the ashes that were once his career, Dean turns to the dubious world of faith healing and gets much more than he bargained for. Lured by easy money and the heat of fame, Dean sells out to an unstable rock band, stomping the dreams of so many who see him as their only hope. World-famous DJ “Delicious” must now tackle his own worst demon—himself—if he is ever to conquer his “handicap” and find true healing.”

World Cinema Special Jury Prize: Documentary: Enemies of the People, directed by Rob Lemkin & Thet Sambath

Sundance Synopsis: “The Khmer Rouge slaughtered nearly two million people in the late 1970s. Yet the Killing Fields of Cambodia remain unexplained. Until now. Enter Thet Sambath, an unassuming, yet cunning, investigative journalist who spends a decade of his life gaining the trust of the men and women who perpetrated the massacres. From the foot soldiers who slit throats to Pol Pot’s right-hand man, the notorious Brother Number Two, Sambath records shocking testimony never before seen or heard. Having neglected his own family for years, Sambath’s work comes at a price. But his is a personal mission. He lost his parents and his siblings in the Killing Fields. Amidst his journey to discover why his family died, we come to understand for the first time the real story of Cambodia’s tragedy.”

More Awards:

Excellence in Cinematography, Dramatic: Zak Mulligan for Obselidia

Excellence in Cinematography, Documentary: Kirsten Johnson & Laura Poitras for The Oath

Waldo Scott Screenwriting Award: Debra Granik & Anne Rosellini for Winter’s Bone

Excellence in Directing, Dramatic: Eric Mendelsohn for 3 Backyards

Excellence in Directing, Documentary: Leon Gast for Smash His Camera

Excellence in Editing, Documentary: Penelope Falk for Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work

The Alfred P. Sloan prize for a feature film with science as a theme, or featuring a scientist, engineer, or mathematician main character, was awarded to Obselidia, directed by Diane Bell, at this year’s Sundance.

AUDIENCE AWARDS:

Audience Award, Dramatic: HappyThankYouMorePlease, directed by Josh Radnor

Audience Award, Documentary: Waiting for Superman, directed by Davis Guggenheim

World Cinema Audience Award, Dramatic: Contracorriente (Undertow), directed by Javier Fuentes-Leõn

World Cinema Audience Award, Documentary: Wasteland, directed by Lucy Walker

Jennifer Lawrence Stars in Winter's Bone

Winter’s Bone, a touching thriller set in the Ozark mountains, won the Grand Jury Prize for U.S. Dramatic Film at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival on the same day that Roadside Attractions bought North American distribution rights in a mid-six figure deal. Roadside expressed enthusiasm for the film even before its accolades:

“With Winter’s Bone, Debra Granik has crafted a classic detective story, a nail-biting thriller and an unbelievably touching family drama, all in one film,” said Dustin Smith, head of Acquisitions and Business Affairs, in a press release. “It’s everything Sundance is about. It’s everything independent film is about. And it’s everything I go to the movies for. We cannot wait to help Debra and her team get this film in front of as many people as humanly possible.”

The story of “Winter’s Bone,” based on a novel by Daniel Woodrall, follows a teenage girl who must find her meth-making father after he puts her family home up for bail. Director Debra Granic, who co-wrote the script with Annie Rosellini, also won the Festival’s Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award. She spent three years researching the proud, hidden communities of Southern Missouri before filming, using locals to help craft the dialogue in the script.

Roadside plans to release the film this summer, and The Sundance Institute will show the film tomorrow at The Eccles Center as part of their free exhibition to locals.

Watch Film Clips:

Dallas filmmaker Clay Liford made the Sundance short, “My Mom Smokes Weed” as part of a personal exploration. His producer told him to do something about his own life — to make himself uncomfortable. So Liford, a screwball comedic writer by trade, wrote a semi-autobiographical screenplay about his mom’s weed habit.

“It was more or less something to face the embarrassment of my mom doing drugs,” he said in an interview during the Sundance Film Festival, where his short debuted to Park City.

Given Liford’s Texan background, he probably has more reason to be sheepish about his aging mother’s pot habit than he might in other parts of the country. Watching the movie from Park City, where even Realtors are known to indulge, it’s a little harder to feel shocked.

The plot revolves around a semi-fictional son goes with his geriatric mom “downtown” to replenish his mother’s weed supply. They visit a home filled with big black men in beanies, a half-naked weightlifter and a token white weirdo in a wife beater. These weed peddlers work at places like Starbucks and do bong hits all day. They urge him to smoke weed, saying things like, ”I don’t really remember asking you,” when he refuses their offer.

Given the film’s comical portrayal of pot as an underground “rap video” drug, it’s easy to see how it won Grand Jury Prizes in conservative Texas, but din’t resonate the same way to a more liberal Sundance crowd. Not that audiences didn’t love it anyway. There’s a reason this film was selected for Sundance — it’s cleverly written, well acted and smartly executed. But in an age where Natalie Portman, Brad Pitt and the last three presidents have openly admitted to indulging (and even magazines like Marie Claire have published features on executive women who prefer weed over booze), the era of urban drug deals with scary black guys seems passé. Even if deals like that still happen. Liford should have sent his mom to a college campus. Kids during finals would have gladly given her a deal for returning some of their loot as brownies.