Sundance Film Festival - 'incubator' for Oscar films

The annual Sundance Film Festival is considered a mine of independent films, a place to sieve out excellent but easily overlooked works in theaters in the giant Hollywood film industry.

Sundance finds Oscar-worthy films

Boyhood and Whiplash, the two "Best Picture" candidates at the 87th Academy Awards, were both discovered at last year's Sundance Independent Film Festival. Boyhood surprised audiences when it premiered at Sundance in January 2014. The $4 million film was released in July, grossing $44 million and receiving positive reviews. It became a Golden Globe winner before receiving six 2015 Oscar nominations.

Meanwhile, Whiplash’s journey to five Oscar nominations this year has been nothing short of epic. It began life as an obscure short two years ago, premiered at Sundance last year, and attracted critics but was largely ignored by distributors. It eventually made it to the all-important Academy Awards.

"Boyhood" is one of the outstanding films of the 2015 Oscar season discovered at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival.

Boyhood and Whiplash show that the Sundance Film Festival is considered by American experts as a "nursery" that helps discover Oscar nominations and awards in recent years. In 2013, the Oscars recognized four nominations for the famous film Beasts of the Southern Wild from Sundance. In 2011, the works The Kids Are All Right and Winter's Bone made a splash at the Sundance Film Festival and then also won four important Oscar nominations each. In 2010, 9 works discovered at the Sundance Film Festival won 15 Oscar nominations. In the same year, the four Oscar nominations for documentary films were all previous Sundance films.

In the 30 years since its founding, Sundance has contributed at least one Oscar to the festival each year. The most notable in the history of the festival is Little Miss Sunshine, which premiered at Sundance in 2006. The comedy about a child beauty queen won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, in addition to being nominated for Best Picture. “Because filmmakers, studios, and producers see so many Oscar films coming out of Sundance, they are now seeing Sundance as an important premiere venue on par with Toronto and Telluride — other must-see North American film festivals,” said Erik Davis, film editor at Fandango.

Movie Party in the Snow

Started in 1978 but officially put into operation in 1984, the Sundance Film Festival takes place annually during the last 10 days of January in the lake and resort area of ​​Utah, USA. In recent years, Sundance has attracted American film lovers in mid-spring to both ski and enjoy independent silver screen works. The founder of Sundance is director and actor Robert Redford - star of the film Out Of Africa, which won 7 Oscars in 1986. He is also one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2014, according to Times magazine.

“In the 1980s, the American film market was very vibrant but dominated by major studios. Blockbusters were easily released to theaters, but I felt that humane stories about complex lives were also worth telling. But those works had no outlet. Therefore, my colleagues and I decided to establish a film studio to produce independent, small-budget works. After that, we established a film festival in the hope that potential filmmakers would have the opportunity to exchange and share ideas, creating a market for art films. That is how Sundance was born,” filmmaker Robert Redford recalled.

After 30 years, the American film industry has grown, Sundance has gone from screening less than 100 films, mostly B-grade Westerns, to a festival attracting 5,000 submissions and 50,000 attendees. Sundance is now one of the largest film events in the United States. Not only that, the film event in the snowy season of the American Midwest is considered by global filmmakers as a model for a film festival of modest but excellent projects.

People attending the Sundance Film Festival can both watch movies and go skiing.

According to the Financial Times, “Only at the Sundance Film Festival do audiences ignore superstars like Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise and focus on hunting for good films.” Only at Sundance do audiences have the opportunity to enjoy a series of realistic psychological films on many thorny topics - ethnic conflicts, minority rights, teenage memories.

The two most famous categories and the ones that introduce the most resounding works of Sundance are American-world feature films and documentaries. The works that were supported by Sundance and then became widely known in the film industry include the horror series Saw, 500 Days of Summer, Sex, Lies and Videotapes, Reservoir Dogs, and Thank You for Smoking. Quentin Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson, Darren Aronofsky, James Wan and Steven Soderbergh are all directors who grew up at Sundance.

In 1999, Three Seasons was the first film to win both of Sundance's biggest prizes - the "Grand Jury Award" and the "Audience Award". The film, directed by Vietnamese-American director Tony Bui and starring Don Duong and Harvey Keitel, was also entered into the Golden Bear competition at the Berlin Film Festival.

Early Oscar 2016 nominees

This year's Sundance took place from January 22 to February 2. Out of 5,000 films submitted from 29 countries and territories, leading film critics - under the direction of festival director John Cooper - selected 119 feature films to screen.

Image from the documentary "Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck".

Two feature films, Brooklyn and Grandma, were written by film critic Ramin Setoodeh in Variety as potential candidates for the 2016 Oscar season. Brooklyn tells the story of an Irish immigrant's fate in America, while Grandma tells the story of a lesbian poet's difficult journey after her partner dies.

The two documentaries Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck and Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief were highly praised by the New York Times. While the first documentary offers an honest and comprehensive look at the late singer Kurt Cobain, the second film focuses on the scandal that befell Tom Cruise's family because of the actor's Scientology.

According to critics David Fear and Phoebe Reilly, 10 art films that have just premiered at Sundance will be highly praised in theaters around the world and reap upcoming film awards, including Best of Enemies, Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, The End of the Tour, Mississippi Grind, Mistress America, The Overnight, Unexpected, Welcome to Leith, The Witch and Z for Zachariah.

According to VNE