The Slamdance Film Festival is an annual film festival focused on emerging artists. The annual week-long festival takes place in Park City, Utah, in late January and is the main event organized by the year-round Slamdance organization, which also hosts a screenplay competition, workshops, screenings throughout the year and events with an emphasis on independent films with budgets under US$1 million.
Society is a 1989 American body horror film directed by Brian Yuzna and starring Billy Warlock, Devin DeVasquez, Evan Richards, and Ben Meyerson. Its plot follows a Beverly Hills teenager who begins to suspect that his wealthy parents are part of a gruesome cult for the social elite.
The Sundance Film Festival is an annual film festival organized by the Sundance Institute. It is the largest independent film festival in the United States, with more than 46,660 attending in 2016. It takes place each January in Park City, Utah; Salt Lake City, Utah; and at the Sundance Resort, and acts as a showcase for new work from American and international independent filmmakers. The festival consists of competitive sections for American and international dramatic and documentary films, both feature films and short films, and a group of out-of-competition sections, including NEXT, New Frontier, Spotlight, Midnight, Sundance Kids, From the Collection, Premieres, and Documentary Premieres. Many films premiering at Sundance have gone on to be nominated and win Oscars such as Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor in a Leading Role.
Sujata Choudhury, credited professionally as Sujata Day, is an American actress, model and screenwriter. She is best known for her roles as CeeCee in the Issa Rae web series, The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl (2011-2013) and Sarah in Insecure. Day made her directorial debut with the 2020 comedy-drama, Definition Please.
Mike C. Manning is an American actor, producer, reality television personality and activist. Manning gained fame as a cast member on the MTV series The Real World: D.C. in 2009 at 22 years old. before subsequently embarking on an acting career, appearing in a number of films and television programs, such as the 2014 Disney Channel original movie Cloud 9, in which he played Nick Swift, Hawaii Five-0, Love Is All You Need? (2016), Teen Wolf, The Call, Son of the South and Days of Our Lives. As a producer, his work includes the documentary Kidnapped for Christ, and The Bay, which won the 2020 Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Digital Daytime Drama Series. He won the 2021 Daytime Emmy Award Outstanding Performance By a Supporting Actor in a Daytime Fiction Program for his performance as Caleb McKinnon.
Open is a 2010 American drama film, written and directed by Jake Yuzna. The story centers around two intertwined love stories starring real queer, trans, pandrogynous individuals as they explore new forms of love, sex, and gender emerging at the dawn of the new millennium.
Jug Face is a 2013 American horror film written and directed by Chad Crawford Kinkle and starring Sean Bridgers, Lauren Ashley Carter, Larry Fessenden, Sean Young and Daniel Manche. The story follows a teen (Carter), who is pregnant with her brother's child and tries to escape from a backwoods community, only to discover that she must sacrifice herself to a creature in a pit.
OK, Good is an American independent film directed by Daniel Martinico. The film stars Hugo Armstrong as Paul Kaplan, a struggling actor on the verge of a breakdown.
Kidnapped for Christ is a documentary film that details the experiences of several teenagers who were removed from their homes and sent to a behavior modification and ex-gay school in Jarabacoa, Dominican Republic. The film was directed by Kate Logan. Tom DeSanto, Lance Bass and Mike Manning are the executive producers.
Jake Yuzna is an American film director, screenwriter, and curator. His debut feature Open was the first American film to win the Teddy Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival and in 2005 Yuzna become the youngest recipient of funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Marjorie Conrad is a French-American filmmaker and model. She is known for being the eleventh eliminated America's Next Top Model , and for her narrative feature films Chemical Cut (2016) and Desire Path (2020).
Chemical Cut is an American independent film written and directed by Marjorie Conrad.
The Resurrection of Jake the Snake is a 2015 American documentary film directed by Steve Yu chronicling the life of professional wrestler Jake Roberts. In particular, the film focuses on Roberts' life from 2012 to 2014, during which time he undergoes a rehabilitation program led by his friend and former professional wrestler Diamond Dallas Page to break his alcoholism and improve his overall health. Numerous other wrestlers are interviewed about Roberts throughout the film, and Scott Hall joins the rehabilitation program several months after Roberts, having similarly struggled with alcoholism.
The Vast of Night is a 2019 American science fiction mystery film directed by Andrew Patterson. It was co-produced and written by Patterson and Craig W. Sanger. The story takes place in 1950s New Mexico and is loosely based on the Kecksburg UFO incident and Foss Lake disappearances. The film follows young switchboard operator Fay Crocker and radio disc jockey Everett Sloan as they discover a mysterious audio frequency that could be extraterrestrial in origin.
The George Floyd protests were a series of police brutality protests that began in Minneapolis in the United States on May 26, 2020. The civil unrest and protests began as part of international reactions to the murder of George Floyd, a 46-year-old African American man, during an arrest. Derek Chauvin, a Minneapolis Police Department officer, knelt on Floyd's neck for 9 minutes and 29 seconds as three other officers looked on and prevented passers-by from intervening. Chauvin and the other three officers involved were later arrested. In April 2021, Chauvin was found guilty of second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter. In June 2021 Chauvin was sentenced to 22.5 years in prison with possibility of supervised release after 15 years for second-degree murder.
Andrew Patterson is an American filmmaker. His debut feature The Vast of Night won the Best Narrative Feature Audience Award at the 2019 Slamdance Film Festival. Patterson was born in June 1982 and lives in Oklahoma.
A wave of civil unrest in the United States, initially triggered by the murder of George Floyd during his arrest by Minneapolis police officers on May 25, 2020, led to protests and riots against systemic racism in the United States, such as in the form of police violence and other forms of violence. Since then, numerous other incidents of police brutality have drawn continued attention and unrest in various parts of the country.
Aina Dumlao is a Filipino-American actress best known for her roles as Andie Lee in MacGyver (2016), Natalie in Ballers (2018), Gerlie Bernardo in Grey's Anatomy (2021), and Evie Dela Rosa in the limited series The Unusual Suspects (2021).
Honeycomb is a 2022 Canadian horror film directed and co-written by Avalon Fast in her feature directorial debut. It stars Rowan Wales, Sophie Bawks-Smith, Jillian Frank, Destini Stewart and Mari Geraghty.
Blake Robbins is an American actor and director of film and television. He appeared in the films Wind River, The Ugly Truth, Jayhawkers, and To Leslie. Robbins is also known for his guest-starring appearances as Officer Dave Brass on the HBO drama series Oz, Tom Halpert on the NBC sitcom The Office, and Mitch Glender on the FX crime drama series Sons of Anarchy, as well as supporting roles in Firefly, Law & Order, 24, Entourage, and The Bling Ring.
