Mohamed Kordofani’s Goodbye Julia and Kaouther Ben Hania’s Four Daughters lead the nominations for the 8th Critics Awards for Arab Films, which will be held during the upcoming Cannes Film Festival.
Both features picked up seven nominations apiece for the awards, focused on Arab films that were produced and premiered outside of the Arab world in 2023. Overseen and run by the Cairo-based Arab Cinema Centre (Acc), it was voted on by 209 critics from 72 countries and the winners will be announced during Cannes on May 18.
Scroll down for full list of nominations
This year’s nominees range from Sudan,...
Both features picked up seven nominations apiece for the awards, focused on Arab films that were produced and premiered outside of the Arab world in 2023. Overseen and run by the Cairo-based Arab Cinema Centre (Acc), it was voted on by 209 critics from 72 countries and the winners will be announced during Cannes on May 18.
Scroll down for full list of nominations
This year’s nominees range from Sudan,...
- 4/25/2024
- ScreenDaily
‘Four Daughters’ & ‘Goodbye Julia’ Lead Nominations For 8th Edition Of Critics Awards For Arab Films
Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania’s Oscar-nominated documentary Four Daughters and Sudanese director Mohamed Kordofani’s Lupita Nyong’o-EPed drama Goodbye Julia lead the nominations in the eighth edition of the Critics Awards for Arab Films.
Hybrid work Four Daughters, exploring the story of a real-life Tunisian mother who lost two of her daughters to Isis after they were radicalized by a local preacher, world premiered in Competition in Cannes last year.
The film won Cannes’ Golden Eye for Best Documentary and also went on to be nominated for Best Documentary at the 2024 Academy Awards.
Kordofani’s Khartoum-set drama Goodbye Julia was also at Cannes in 2023, making history as the first Sudanese film to play in the festival across its 76 editions, with a debut in Un Certain Regard. It represented Sudan at in the 2023-24 Oscar race but was not nominated.
Set against the backdrop of the 2011 South Sudan Independence referendum,...
Hybrid work Four Daughters, exploring the story of a real-life Tunisian mother who lost two of her daughters to Isis after they were radicalized by a local preacher, world premiered in Competition in Cannes last year.
The film won Cannes’ Golden Eye for Best Documentary and also went on to be nominated for Best Documentary at the 2024 Academy Awards.
Kordofani’s Khartoum-set drama Goodbye Julia was also at Cannes in 2023, making history as the first Sudanese film to play in the festival across its 76 editions, with a debut in Un Certain Regard. It represented Sudan at in the 2023-24 Oscar race but was not nominated.
Set against the backdrop of the 2011 South Sudan Independence referendum,...
- 4/25/2024
- by Melanie Goodfellow
- Deadline Film + TV
The urge to dazzle can be its own straitjacket, and it’s one that weighs heavily on Meshal Aljaser’s feature debut “Naga.” He aims for a hurtling virtuosity, à la “Run Lola Run,” in depicting a disobedient young Saudi woman’s extreme travails in trying to get home before her strict curfew. But that quarter-century-old German thriller’s simplicity of plot supported its hyperbolic style, while here the writer-director is so preoccupied with camera and editorial calisthenics, nothing else has a chance to come into focus. The flamboyant but hollow results feel like too conscious a calling card for a talent that next time out should embrace some restraint, not to mention substance.
A 1970 prologue of murky relevance starts things off at peak melodramatic and cinematic hysteria, as a man enters a hospital with an automatic weapon while Dp Ibraheem Alshangeeti does upside-down 360’s for no obvious reason. In the present day,...
A 1970 prologue of murky relevance starts things off at peak melodramatic and cinematic hysteria, as a man enters a hospital with an automatic weapon while Dp Ibraheem Alshangeeti does upside-down 360’s for no obvious reason. In the present day,...
- 12/7/2023
- by Dennis Harvey
- Variety Film + TV
‘Gurrumul’.
Director Paul Williams and producer Shannon Swan’s portrait of the late blind Indigenous musician Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu, Gurrumul, won Best Documentary Feature Film at the Asia Pacific Screen Awards (Apsa) in Brisbane last night.
It was the first time an Australian film has won in the category, with Gurrumul beating out Amal, Of Fathers and Sons (Syrian Arab Republic, Lebanon, Qatar, Germany), Of Love & Law (Japan, UK, France) and Up Down & Sideways
Accepting the award together with Williams, Swan described the moment as bittersweet knowing that Gurrumul wasn’t there to share in it.
“To G, thank you so much for inviting us into your life and trusting us with your story,” he said.
Gurrumul also won Feature Documentary of the Year at last week’s Screen Producers Australia Awards, and is also nominated for five awards at next week’s AACTAs, including for Best Feature Documentary alongside Mountain,...
Director Paul Williams and producer Shannon Swan’s portrait of the late blind Indigenous musician Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu, Gurrumul, won Best Documentary Feature Film at the Asia Pacific Screen Awards (Apsa) in Brisbane last night.
It was the first time an Australian film has won in the category, with Gurrumul beating out Amal, Of Fathers and Sons (Syrian Arab Republic, Lebanon, Qatar, Germany), Of Love & Law (Japan, UK, France) and Up Down & Sideways
Accepting the award together with Williams, Swan described the moment as bittersweet knowing that Gurrumul wasn’t there to share in it.
“To G, thank you so much for inviting us into your life and trusting us with your story,” he said.
Gurrumul also won Feature Documentary of the Year at last week’s Screen Producers Australia Awards, and is also nominated for five awards at next week’s AACTAs, including for Best Feature Documentary alongside Mountain,...
- 11/30/2018
- by jkeast
- IF.com.au
Bruce Beresford, nominated for Achievement in Directing at the Apsa Awards, on the set of ‘Ladies in Black’. (Photo courtesy of Sony Pictures Releasing).
Four Australian films – Ladies in Black, Gurrumul, Breath and Mary Magdalene – have received nominations for the Asia Pacific Screen Awards, to be held in Brisbane in November.
Overall, 46 films from 22 countries have been nominated for the awards, which celebrate films from the region.
The Palme d’Or winning Shoplifters, from Japanese auteur Kore-eda Hirokazu, is the only film to receive three nominations, including Best Feature Film, Best Screenplay and Achievement in Directing. It will compete for Best Feature Film against Burning (Korea), The Gentle Indifference of the World, Balangiga: Howling Wilderness (Philippines) and Manta Ray.
Competing against Kore-eda for the directing award is Australia’s Bruce Beresford, nominated for his work on 1960s comedy drama Ladies in Black. Also up in the category are Nadine Labaki...
Four Australian films – Ladies in Black, Gurrumul, Breath and Mary Magdalene – have received nominations for the Asia Pacific Screen Awards, to be held in Brisbane in November.
Overall, 46 films from 22 countries have been nominated for the awards, which celebrate films from the region.
The Palme d’Or winning Shoplifters, from Japanese auteur Kore-eda Hirokazu, is the only film to receive three nominations, including Best Feature Film, Best Screenplay and Achievement in Directing. It will compete for Best Feature Film against Burning (Korea), The Gentle Indifference of the World, Balangiga: Howling Wilderness (Philippines) and Manta Ray.
Competing against Kore-eda for the directing award is Australia’s Bruce Beresford, nominated for his work on 1960s comedy drama Ladies in Black. Also up in the category are Nadine Labaki...
- 10/17/2018
- by jkeast
- IF.com.au
Ryuichi Sakamoto, the Japanese composer who will this week be honored as the Asian Filmmaker of the Year in Busan, will head the jury for the best original score prize at the Asia Pacific Screen Awards. It is the first time that the APSAs, now in their 12th edition, present a best original score prize.
Sakamoto was previously the 2012 recipient of the Apsa Fiapf award, and performed extracts from “Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence” at the Brisbane prize ceremony. Also on the jury are Indian composer and music director Sneha Khanwalkar (“Gangs of Wasseypur”) and Australian composer, conductor and musician Nigel Westlake (“Babe,” “Paper Planes”).
The five nominees are: Eleni Karaindrou for “Bomb, A Love Story” (aka “Bomb, Yek Asheghaneh”) (Iran); Harry Gregson-Williams for “Breath” (Australia); Hildur Guonadottir, Johann Johannsson for “Mary Magdalene” (Australia, U.K.); Ryan Cayabyab for “The Portrait” (aka “Ang Larawan”) (Philippines); and
Omar Fadel for “Yomeddine” (Egypt...
Sakamoto was previously the 2012 recipient of the Apsa Fiapf award, and performed extracts from “Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence” at the Brisbane prize ceremony. Also on the jury are Indian composer and music director Sneha Khanwalkar (“Gangs of Wasseypur”) and Australian composer, conductor and musician Nigel Westlake (“Babe,” “Paper Planes”).
The five nominees are: Eleni Karaindrou for “Bomb, A Love Story” (aka “Bomb, Yek Asheghaneh”) (Iran); Harry Gregson-Williams for “Breath” (Australia); Hildur Guonadottir, Johann Johannsson for “Mary Magdalene” (Australia, U.K.); Ryan Cayabyab for “The Portrait” (aka “Ang Larawan”) (Philippines); and
Omar Fadel for “Yomeddine” (Egypt...
- 10/3/2018
- by Patrick Frater
- Variety Film + TV
Sundance is always on the move. Skywalker and George Lucas himself are refocusing on the indies and choosing sound design as their point of entry.
Sundance Institute and Skywalker Sound recently announced that the Sundance Institute Music and Sound Design Labs at Skywalker Sound will take place at Skywalker Ranch in 2013 and 2014 and also listed the artists that will participate in the 2013 Labs. This is the first time the two organizations will collaborate to support independent filmmakers and film composers and marks a significant expansion of the Institute’s existing Composers Labs to include sound design.
The Institute has hosted its Composers Labs at Sundance Resort for fiction feature films since 1999 and documentaries since 2005, allowing composers and independent filmmakers to collaboratively explore the process of writing music for film. Fellows also participate in workshops and creative exercises under the guidance of leading film composers and film music professionals acting as Creative Advisors.
Keri Putnam, Executive Director of Sundance Institute, said, “Hosting the Composers Labs at Skywalker Ranch allows an expansion of the program to include sound design, giving further insight into the powerful ways that sound and music can impact independent films. We are deeply grateful to the Skywalker team for working with us to provide our Fellows with the tremendous benefit of accessing this legendary facility”
Josh Lowden, General Manager of Skywalker Sound, said, “We’re very excited to formalize this relationship. Sundance Institute is virtually synonymous with independent film, and Keri and her team have done an amazing job to honor the Institute’s legacy. Twenty-five years ago Skywalker was founded by a filmmaker for filmmakers, and we have never forgotten our roots. We continue to believe in independent filmmaking, and are thrilled to deepen our relationship with the Institute by hosting these Labs at Skywalker.”
The Composers Lab for fiction feature films is a joint initiative of the Institute’s Film Music Program and Feature Film Program, and the Composers Lab for documentaries is hosted by the Film Music Program and Documentary Film Program and Fund.
Peter Golub, Director of the Sundance Institute Film Music Program, said, “Skywalker Sound is a leader in the field of post-production and sound design, and their world-class facilities offer the ideal environment for our Composers Labs. Lab fellows will have access to Skywalker’s sound designers and mixers for ongoing collaboration, as well as the state-of-the-art facility during their stay.”
Artists and projects selected for the 2013 Sundance Music And Sound Design Lab – Documentary (June 3-10) are:
Filmmakers
Director: Kirsten Johnson
A Blind Eye (U.S.) — The voice of an American camerawoman explores the nature of cinematography and what she has failed to see while filming in Afghanistan through her encounters with two Afghan teenagers. Najeeb, a one-eyed boy, struggles to hide what really haunts him, while a bold teenage girl must decide how much she will risk to be visible. A U.S. Military surveillance blimp in the sky over Kabul tracks their every move.
Director: Judith Ehrlich
Open (U.S.) — The fight for free speech in the 21st century is being fought in cyberspace, and its most dramatic story may be unfolding in Iceland. Open follows trailblazing Internet revolutionary Birgitta Jónsdóttir and three generations of digital “hacktivists” as their stories converge in the tiny island nation now poised to become the world’s first haven for freedom of information and transparency online and off.
Director: Thomas Allen Harris
Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People (U.S.) — A 90-minute documentary film with an innovative companion transmedia project that explores the ways black communities have used the medium of photography to construct political, aesthetic and cultural representations of themselves and their world. This will be the first film to vividly bring to life the individual photographers, photographic collectives, and anonymous and celebrated subjects, whose work has transformed the lives of African Americans through the magic and power of the camera lens.
Director: Mark Grieco
Marmato (Canada/Colombia) — A peaceful gold-mining town in rural Colombia confronts destruction by a Canadian multinational mining company.
Composers
Kathryn Bostic
Kathryn Bostic is a prolific composer, pianist and singer-songwriter. She is a recipient of several awards and fellowships including the Sundance Fellowship for Feature Film Scoring, Bmi Conducting Fellowship and the Ascap Musical Theatre Workshop. She has written for both off-Broadway and Broadway productions. Currently her score can be heard in the Mark Taper production of August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.
Omar Fadel
Los Angeles-based composer Omar Fadel has carved out a niche fusing an eclectic palette of musical instruments and styles. He has scored numerous features films, documentaries and television shows, including Walt Disney Studios’ first ever Arabic language feature film, The United.
Miles Jay
Miles Jay is a composer, contrabassist, and multi-instrumentalist with many traditional and cross over artists around the world. Supporting himself as a musician around the Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa for much of the last decade, Miles has re-imagined the contrabass, adapting a wide range of melodic ornamentation to his own technique, as well as having invented and hand-built a new type of contrabass utilizing rawhide for a soundboard. Miles has performed in such venues as Carnegie Hall, the Emirates Palace Abu Dhabi, Ted, and the United Nations.
Todd Reynolds
Todd Reynolds is a long-time New York violinist for Bang on a Can, Steve Reich, Broadway, and founder of the string quartet known as Ethel. His double CD set, Outerborough, rose to "best in classical" on the Amazon classical charts of 2011. A classical violinist 'gone horribly wrong', his genre-defying and technologically savvy music and performances have been called "a charming, multi-mood extravaganza, playful like Milhaud, but hard-edged like Hendrix."
Artists and projects selected for the 2013 Sundance Music And Sound Design Lab – Feature Film (July 10-25) are:
Filmmakers
Writer/director: Miguel Calderón
Zeus (Mexico) — Sporadically employed and still living with his mother, Joel finds his only joy in falconry in the flatlands outside Mexico City, until an encounter with a down-to-earth secretary forces him to face reality.
Writer/director: Meredith Danluck
State Like Sleep (U.S.A.) — Under the surreal cloud cover of northern Europe, a young American widow reluctantly revisits her past when her mother is hospitalized in Brussels. While coping with the bleak reality of parental loss, Katherine explores her deceased husband's secret life of underground sex clubs and finds comfort in a relationship with a stranger as equally broken as she is.
Co-writer/co-director: Ian Hendrie
Co-writer/co-director: Jyson McLean
Mercy Road (U.S.A.) — Based on true events, Mercy Road traces the spiritual odyssey of a small town housewife and mother, as she becomes willing to commit violence and murder in the name of God.
Writer/director: K’naan
Maanokoobiyo (Somalia/U.S.A.) — In war-torn Somalia, an artistic orphan named Maano joins the mercenary killing squad of a notorious warlord, only to discover his adoptive father and gang leader is responsible for wiping out his family.
Writer/director: Pamela Romanowsky
The Adderall Diaries (U.S.A.) — Writer Stephen Elliott reaches a low point when his estranged father resurfaces, claiming that Stephen has fabricated much of the dark childhood that that fuels his work. Adrift in the precarious grey area of memory, Stephen has to navigate the unstable terrain of truth and identity, led by two sources of inspiration: a new romance, and a murder trial that reminds him more than a little of his own story. Based on the memoir by Stephen Elliott.
Co-writer/director: Eva Weber
Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name (UK/Germany/U.S.A.) — Twenty-eight-year-old Clarissa discovers on the day of her father's funeral that everything she believed about her life was a lie. She flees San Francisco and travels to the Arctic Circle to uncover the secrets of her mother, who mysteriously vanished when Clarissa was fourteen. Based on the novel by Vendela Vida.
Composers
Jongnic Bontemps
Jongnic Bontemps has had the pleasure to score numerous films, including award-winning Daughter of Fortune, A Different Tree, Soaring on Invisible Wings and Saudade. Jongnic's scores incorporate ethnic instruments with organic and synthetic textures to create a unique musical world for a film. This skill has been honed through his music education at Yale University, Berklee School of Music and the University of Southern California and his collaborations with some of the top film composers. Jongnic's scores have been heard at film festivals around the world including Cannes, The Pan African Film Festival, American Black Film Festival and Run & Shoot Martha's Vineyard
Larry Goldings
Larry Goldings is a Grammy-nominated pianist, organist, composer, and arranger, whose talents have been sought-after by an impressive range of artists including James Taylor, Norah Jones, John Mayer, Sia Furler, Madeleine Peyroux, Maceo Parker, Michael Brecker, and John Scofield.
Lucas Lechowski
Based in Los Angeles, Polish born Lucas Lechowski is a violinist/guitarist who creates music, experiments with sounds, improvises and performs. His recent film scoring credits include a 2013 Student Academy Award winner “Un mundo para Raúl” (dir. Mauro Mueller). Currently he is composing music for a two-hour NBC News television special commemorating the 50th anniversary of the death of President Kennedy, entitled "Where Were You?"
Heather McIntosh
Heather McIntosh is a cellist, bassist and composer who got her musical start playing with the Elephant 6 collective in Athens, Georgia and continued on to perform with artists such as Gnarls Barkley and Lil Wayne. Recently relocated to Los Angeles, her film credits include Compliance by Craig Zobel and The Rambler by Calvin Lee Reeder.
Vladimir Podgoretsky
Vladimir Podgoretsky started his professional career as a musical theater composer. His 2007 ballet Snow Maiden (Snegurochka) was a huge success and continues to be regularly performed in theaters throughout Moscow. Vladimir moved to the Us to become a film composer and after graduating from the UCLA film scoring program has been working with leading composers on films such as Rise of the Guardians, A Single Shot, The Eagle, Season Of the Witch and Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters. He has also worked on the acclaimed video game World of Warcraft and the ABC TV series Revenge.
Mac Quayle
A resident of Topanga Canyon, California, Mac Quayle has written music for over 20 films and television shows and accumulated a long list of credits as a music producer, dance remixer and multi-instrumentalist, including a Grammy nomination for producing Donna Summer. His music is heard in films such as the Indian documentary Beyond Grace and the Irish drama A Belfast Story and some of his collaborations as an additional composer appear in Drive, Spring Breakers and Only God Forgives.
The Sundance Institute Music and Sound Design Labs at Skywalker Sound are made possible by Bmi, Time Warner Foundation, and the Film Music Foundation.
Sundance Institute
Founded by Robert Redford in 1981, Sundance Institute is a global, nonprofit cultural organization dedicated to nurturing artistic expression in film and theater, and to supporting intercultural dialogue between artists and audiences. The Institute promotes independent storytelling to unite, inform and inspire, regardless of geo-political, social, religious or cultural differences. Internationally recognized for its annual Sundance Film Festival and its artistic development programs for directors, screenwriters, producers, film composers, playwrights and theatre artists, Sundance Institute has nurtured such projects as Born into Brothels, Trouble the Water, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Amreeka, An Inconvenient Truth, Spring Awakening, Light in the Piazza and Angels in America. Join Sundance Institute on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube.
Skywalker Sound
Skywalker Sound, a division of Lucasfilm Ltd, is one of the largest, most versatile full-service audio post-production companies in the industry. Skywalker Sound offers comprehensive post-production services and utilizes the talents of Academy Award®-winning sound professionals working on sound design, editorial, Foley and re-recording mixes as a team. This provides filmmakers the most efficient model available for the audio post-production process. More information is available at www.skysound.com.
Lucasfilm Ltd. is a wholly owned subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company. Skywalker Sound, the Skywalker Sound logo, Star Wars and related properties are trademarks in the United States and/or in other countries of Lucasfilm Ltd. and/or its affiliates. © 2013 Lucasfilm Entertainment Company Ltd. or Lucasfilm Ltd. All rights reserved.
Sundance Institute and Skywalker Sound recently announced that the Sundance Institute Music and Sound Design Labs at Skywalker Sound will take place at Skywalker Ranch in 2013 and 2014 and also listed the artists that will participate in the 2013 Labs. This is the first time the two organizations will collaborate to support independent filmmakers and film composers and marks a significant expansion of the Institute’s existing Composers Labs to include sound design.
The Institute has hosted its Composers Labs at Sundance Resort for fiction feature films since 1999 and documentaries since 2005, allowing composers and independent filmmakers to collaboratively explore the process of writing music for film. Fellows also participate in workshops and creative exercises under the guidance of leading film composers and film music professionals acting as Creative Advisors.
Keri Putnam, Executive Director of Sundance Institute, said, “Hosting the Composers Labs at Skywalker Ranch allows an expansion of the program to include sound design, giving further insight into the powerful ways that sound and music can impact independent films. We are deeply grateful to the Skywalker team for working with us to provide our Fellows with the tremendous benefit of accessing this legendary facility”
Josh Lowden, General Manager of Skywalker Sound, said, “We’re very excited to formalize this relationship. Sundance Institute is virtually synonymous with independent film, and Keri and her team have done an amazing job to honor the Institute’s legacy. Twenty-five years ago Skywalker was founded by a filmmaker for filmmakers, and we have never forgotten our roots. We continue to believe in independent filmmaking, and are thrilled to deepen our relationship with the Institute by hosting these Labs at Skywalker.”
The Composers Lab for fiction feature films is a joint initiative of the Institute’s Film Music Program and Feature Film Program, and the Composers Lab for documentaries is hosted by the Film Music Program and Documentary Film Program and Fund.
Peter Golub, Director of the Sundance Institute Film Music Program, said, “Skywalker Sound is a leader in the field of post-production and sound design, and their world-class facilities offer the ideal environment for our Composers Labs. Lab fellows will have access to Skywalker’s sound designers and mixers for ongoing collaboration, as well as the state-of-the-art facility during their stay.”
Artists and projects selected for the 2013 Sundance Music And Sound Design Lab – Documentary (June 3-10) are:
Filmmakers
Director: Kirsten Johnson
A Blind Eye (U.S.) — The voice of an American camerawoman explores the nature of cinematography and what she has failed to see while filming in Afghanistan through her encounters with two Afghan teenagers. Najeeb, a one-eyed boy, struggles to hide what really haunts him, while a bold teenage girl must decide how much she will risk to be visible. A U.S. Military surveillance blimp in the sky over Kabul tracks their every move.
Director: Judith Ehrlich
Open (U.S.) — The fight for free speech in the 21st century is being fought in cyberspace, and its most dramatic story may be unfolding in Iceland. Open follows trailblazing Internet revolutionary Birgitta Jónsdóttir and three generations of digital “hacktivists” as their stories converge in the tiny island nation now poised to become the world’s first haven for freedom of information and transparency online and off.
Director: Thomas Allen Harris
Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People (U.S.) — A 90-minute documentary film with an innovative companion transmedia project that explores the ways black communities have used the medium of photography to construct political, aesthetic and cultural representations of themselves and their world. This will be the first film to vividly bring to life the individual photographers, photographic collectives, and anonymous and celebrated subjects, whose work has transformed the lives of African Americans through the magic and power of the camera lens.
Director: Mark Grieco
Marmato (Canada/Colombia) — A peaceful gold-mining town in rural Colombia confronts destruction by a Canadian multinational mining company.
Composers
Kathryn Bostic
Kathryn Bostic is a prolific composer, pianist and singer-songwriter. She is a recipient of several awards and fellowships including the Sundance Fellowship for Feature Film Scoring, Bmi Conducting Fellowship and the Ascap Musical Theatre Workshop. She has written for both off-Broadway and Broadway productions. Currently her score can be heard in the Mark Taper production of August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.
Omar Fadel
Los Angeles-based composer Omar Fadel has carved out a niche fusing an eclectic palette of musical instruments and styles. He has scored numerous features films, documentaries and television shows, including Walt Disney Studios’ first ever Arabic language feature film, The United.
Miles Jay
Miles Jay is a composer, contrabassist, and multi-instrumentalist with many traditional and cross over artists around the world. Supporting himself as a musician around the Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa for much of the last decade, Miles has re-imagined the contrabass, adapting a wide range of melodic ornamentation to his own technique, as well as having invented and hand-built a new type of contrabass utilizing rawhide for a soundboard. Miles has performed in such venues as Carnegie Hall, the Emirates Palace Abu Dhabi, Ted, and the United Nations.
Todd Reynolds
Todd Reynolds is a long-time New York violinist for Bang on a Can, Steve Reich, Broadway, and founder of the string quartet known as Ethel. His double CD set, Outerborough, rose to "best in classical" on the Amazon classical charts of 2011. A classical violinist 'gone horribly wrong', his genre-defying and technologically savvy music and performances have been called "a charming, multi-mood extravaganza, playful like Milhaud, but hard-edged like Hendrix."
Artists and projects selected for the 2013 Sundance Music And Sound Design Lab – Feature Film (July 10-25) are:
Filmmakers
Writer/director: Miguel Calderón
Zeus (Mexico) — Sporadically employed and still living with his mother, Joel finds his only joy in falconry in the flatlands outside Mexico City, until an encounter with a down-to-earth secretary forces him to face reality.
Writer/director: Meredith Danluck
State Like Sleep (U.S.A.) — Under the surreal cloud cover of northern Europe, a young American widow reluctantly revisits her past when her mother is hospitalized in Brussels. While coping with the bleak reality of parental loss, Katherine explores her deceased husband's secret life of underground sex clubs and finds comfort in a relationship with a stranger as equally broken as she is.
Co-writer/co-director: Ian Hendrie
Co-writer/co-director: Jyson McLean
Mercy Road (U.S.A.) — Based on true events, Mercy Road traces the spiritual odyssey of a small town housewife and mother, as she becomes willing to commit violence and murder in the name of God.
Writer/director: K’naan
Maanokoobiyo (Somalia/U.S.A.) — In war-torn Somalia, an artistic orphan named Maano joins the mercenary killing squad of a notorious warlord, only to discover his adoptive father and gang leader is responsible for wiping out his family.
Writer/director: Pamela Romanowsky
The Adderall Diaries (U.S.A.) — Writer Stephen Elliott reaches a low point when his estranged father resurfaces, claiming that Stephen has fabricated much of the dark childhood that that fuels his work. Adrift in the precarious grey area of memory, Stephen has to navigate the unstable terrain of truth and identity, led by two sources of inspiration: a new romance, and a murder trial that reminds him more than a little of his own story. Based on the memoir by Stephen Elliott.
Co-writer/director: Eva Weber
Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name (UK/Germany/U.S.A.) — Twenty-eight-year-old Clarissa discovers on the day of her father's funeral that everything she believed about her life was a lie. She flees San Francisco and travels to the Arctic Circle to uncover the secrets of her mother, who mysteriously vanished when Clarissa was fourteen. Based on the novel by Vendela Vida.
Composers
Jongnic Bontemps
Jongnic Bontemps has had the pleasure to score numerous films, including award-winning Daughter of Fortune, A Different Tree, Soaring on Invisible Wings and Saudade. Jongnic's scores incorporate ethnic instruments with organic and synthetic textures to create a unique musical world for a film. This skill has been honed through his music education at Yale University, Berklee School of Music and the University of Southern California and his collaborations with some of the top film composers. Jongnic's scores have been heard at film festivals around the world including Cannes, The Pan African Film Festival, American Black Film Festival and Run & Shoot Martha's Vineyard
Larry Goldings
Larry Goldings is a Grammy-nominated pianist, organist, composer, and arranger, whose talents have been sought-after by an impressive range of artists including James Taylor, Norah Jones, John Mayer, Sia Furler, Madeleine Peyroux, Maceo Parker, Michael Brecker, and John Scofield.
Lucas Lechowski
Based in Los Angeles, Polish born Lucas Lechowski is a violinist/guitarist who creates music, experiments with sounds, improvises and performs. His recent film scoring credits include a 2013 Student Academy Award winner “Un mundo para Raúl” (dir. Mauro Mueller). Currently he is composing music for a two-hour NBC News television special commemorating the 50th anniversary of the death of President Kennedy, entitled "Where Were You?"
Heather McIntosh
Heather McIntosh is a cellist, bassist and composer who got her musical start playing with the Elephant 6 collective in Athens, Georgia and continued on to perform with artists such as Gnarls Barkley and Lil Wayne. Recently relocated to Los Angeles, her film credits include Compliance by Craig Zobel and The Rambler by Calvin Lee Reeder.
Vladimir Podgoretsky
Vladimir Podgoretsky started his professional career as a musical theater composer. His 2007 ballet Snow Maiden (Snegurochka) was a huge success and continues to be regularly performed in theaters throughout Moscow. Vladimir moved to the Us to become a film composer and after graduating from the UCLA film scoring program has been working with leading composers on films such as Rise of the Guardians, A Single Shot, The Eagle, Season Of the Witch and Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters. He has also worked on the acclaimed video game World of Warcraft and the ABC TV series Revenge.
Mac Quayle
A resident of Topanga Canyon, California, Mac Quayle has written music for over 20 films and television shows and accumulated a long list of credits as a music producer, dance remixer and multi-instrumentalist, including a Grammy nomination for producing Donna Summer. His music is heard in films such as the Indian documentary Beyond Grace and the Irish drama A Belfast Story and some of his collaborations as an additional composer appear in Drive, Spring Breakers and Only God Forgives.
The Sundance Institute Music and Sound Design Labs at Skywalker Sound are made possible by Bmi, Time Warner Foundation, and the Film Music Foundation.
Sundance Institute
Founded by Robert Redford in 1981, Sundance Institute is a global, nonprofit cultural organization dedicated to nurturing artistic expression in film and theater, and to supporting intercultural dialogue between artists and audiences. The Institute promotes independent storytelling to unite, inform and inspire, regardless of geo-political, social, religious or cultural differences. Internationally recognized for its annual Sundance Film Festival and its artistic development programs for directors, screenwriters, producers, film composers, playwrights and theatre artists, Sundance Institute has nurtured such projects as Born into Brothels, Trouble the Water, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Amreeka, An Inconvenient Truth, Spring Awakening, Light in the Piazza and Angels in America. Join Sundance Institute on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube.
Skywalker Sound
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- 6/6/2013
- by Sydney Levine
- Sydney's Buzz
North American rights to Eyad Zahra's Sundance premiere "The Taqwacores" have been been licensed to Strand Releasing by Visit Films. Ryan Kampe of Visit Films negotiated the deal with Jon Gerrans of Strand Releasing. The film, co-written by Zahra and Michael Muhammad Knight, stars Bobby Naderi, Noureen Dewulf and Dominic Rains and features music by Taqwacore band The Kominas with an original score by Omar Fadel. Bac Films, meanwhile, took all ...
- 3/22/2010
- Indiewire
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